Rodrigo Ferreira da Costa

Poet, musicologist, philologist, and mathematician. Graduated in Law (1800) and Mathematics (1804) from the University of Coimbra. A scholar of other subjects, he can be considered the first Portuguese musicologist, with profound philological and linguistic knowledge as well (he commanded several languages, including Greek and Latin). That said, and perhaps because he stood out for his knowledge and philosophical ideas, he only obtained a position in 1810: official in the secretariat of the Army General Command, in which capacity he accompanied the Adjutant-General until the end of the Peninsular War in 1814. In 1821 he was made a deputy to the Constituent Cortes, and in 1823 he was appointed to the position of Professor at the Royal Academy of Navy. It was perhaps the most suitable position for him, but it lasted briefly, as he died two years later. He was also a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, which in 1820 and 1824 published the two volumes of his Princípios de Música. He made his literary debut in 1814 with Lira Ingénua..., a book of verse published anonymously in Toulouse. The second edition, greatly expanded and already signed, was printed in Lisbon under the same title in 1818. In 1835, José Inácio de Andrade, a great friend of his, had Ferreira da Costa's translation of the poem A Ventura de Helvecio (Claude Adrien Helvetius, 1715–1771, one of the precursor ideologues of the French Revolution) printed, adding a bio-bibliographical note of the translator in which he affirms that he is also responsible for the Portuguese translation of Montesquieu's Temple of Gnidus, published in Paris in 1828 and signed «Uma Portuguesa». Rodrigo Ferreira da Costa likewise translated the second part of Condillac's Art of Thinking; the translation of the first part is by José Liberato Freire de Carvalho.