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★ Follow music ► Composer: Joseph de Torres () Work: Quien podrà tus disfrazes amore Performers: Mаría Luz Álvаrez (soprano); Gаbinеtе Armónico Painting: Jan van Kessel (1654-1708) - Familia en un jardín (1679) HD image: Engraving: Matthaus Seutter (1678-1757) - Madritum sive Mantua Carpetanorum celeberrima Castiliae Nova Civitas et Monarcharum Hispanicorum magnificentissima Regia seds sumtib, et cura () HD image: Further info: Listen free: --- Joseph (José) de Torres y Martínez Bravo (Madrid, - Madrid, 3 June 1738) Spanish composer, organist, theorist and publisher. He entered the royal chapel boys’ school in 1680, when he must have been between seven and ten years old. His training as an organist was almost certainly undertaken at the Daroca school by Pablo Bruna, and he was probably tutored in composition by the then master of the royal chapel, Cristóbal Galán. Torres was appointed organist of the royal chapel on 14 December 1686, and taught at the school there from 1689 to 1691. The forced exile of the maestro de capilla Sebastián Durón, because of his support for the Archduke of Austria in the War of the Spanish Succession, gave rise to a vacancy in the royal chapel which was filled temporarily by Torres from 1708 until his definitive appointment on 3 December 1718. A second chapel functioned from 1721 at La Granja, where the court had moved as a result of the king’s melancholy state of mind. It was dissolved in 1724, at the start of Felipe V’s second mandate, after the untimely death of his son Luis I, in whose favour he had abdicated. This resulted in the incorporation of the musicians of this chapel, and of their Italian director Felipe Falconi, into the royal chapel in Madrid, which was thereafter headed by two masters, Torres and Falconi, symbols of the musical aesthetics of the day which oscillated between the national style and the new italianizing tendencies. The fire of 1734 in the old Alcázar of Madrid forced Torres to become more active; along with Antonio Literes he was obliged to compose intensively in an effort to recover and replace the music archive, which had been destroyed. Falconi was not called upon to cooperate in this task. Torres’s first marriage was to Teresa de Eguiluz, with whom he had two sons, José and Manuel. He married his second wife, Agustina Enciso y Aguado, just four months before his own death. He was secretly buried in the convent of Carmen Calzado. Falconi had died the previous month.
