Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Europe went through changes in the cultural field, namely the shift of the intellectual and artistic careers as professionals (Charle, 1996). A small, poor and indebted country like Portugal experienced, at the end of the century, this transition in an arduous way, which in music, was felt as a constant cultural periphery and dependence on the great musical centers of Paris and Berlin to achieve a level of excellence (Vargas, 2011). In the absence of effective training structures or teachers in the country, talented youngsters were sent by the crown to study abroad, as scholarship holders, but without a clear public policy, neither bureaucratic nor dependent on institutional constraints. Their trajectories were apparently governed only by goodwill of the crown and the word of the royal family.

At the same time, the artistic success and material comfort these students sometimes achieved thereafter was attached to the privilege of being trained abroad at the expense of the public purse, a theme that the national press has explored to the limit (Paz, 2018). A morality of the duty to return to the community that allowed for their privileged education placed the artists in a delicate situation, which was overcome by the establishment of a new position that at the same time allowed them to pay this ethical debt, but protected them from a permanent return to the local culture, which would mean a setback.

I intend to focus on the case of one of the first royal protégées, the pianist José Viana da Mota, to explore how this ethics of return is created from a link between the artist and his community of origin, which here must be understood as the country, family and a small circle of intellectual friends, mostly musicians. Later in life he still feels like he owns a debt, as clearly stated in a letter to his friend Ferruccio Busoni in 1915, “they [my friends] pressure me to accept the direction of the Conservatory and next year I will be 50 years old, maybe it is time to make my country take advantage of what I received and learned abroad” (Mota, 2003, pp. 136-137); which he in fact did, settling in Lisbon in 1919.

My argument is that this relationship of interdependence with his country, that is not linear, and underwent through many phases, was never supported by any device of political or state inherence, but was rather produced from what Bourdieu (2008) calls habitus, or the disposition towards practice. Habitus is here nourished for the creation of a bond with the country of arrival, intertwined in the professional ethos that is itself deeply international by inherence (Igayara-Souza & Paz, 2018), but it seems to derive from a much deeper link with its origin. From a critical reading of biographical and autobiographical sources - unusually rich, spontaneous, detailed and in a series-, I intend to critically analyse the autobiographical narrative of Viana da Mota, questioning the way in which habitus was established, and how, in articulation with the artistic ethos, this link that cemented the ethics of return emerged.

This far-reaching question is operationalized in strategic objectives, which include: 1) defining a chronology of the main trips and social transitions associated with the connection with a specific ethos (e.g., turning Wagnerian in 1884); and, concomitantly, 2) to establish, within the documentary corpus, the main indicators of a constitution of habitus, and its changes in relation to the country of origin (hating Lisbon in 1886 and falling in love with the city in 1893).

Viana da Mota was a renowned international concert player, Liszt's last disciple, and later the director of the Portuguese National Conservatory. The safeguard and movements of his recognition allowed for the publication with critical apparatus of most of his autobiographical documentation. In fact, archive conditions were created by the artist himself, who, since 1883 up to 1893, wrote a diary assiduously, initially in Portuguese, then always in German (part in Sütterlin and part in shorthand). He also wrote regular letters to his family and friends, namely those to the pianist Ferruccio Busoni (Mota, 2003), to Margarethe Lemke who was practically his adoptive “mother” in Germany (Mota, 2018) and many other contacts and friends (see Branco, 1987, Lopes-Graça, 1949, Ramalho, 2015). The more important sources on the transfiguration of his habitus with an influence on his education come from his writings in the diary (Mota, 2015) and the letters to his protector Margarethe Lemke (Mota, 2018). It should be noted that above all in the diaries, Viana da Mota has been protected from an indiscreet gaze for a long time, as they were encrypted. Although the central biographers accessed and used these documents (Lopes-Graça, 1949, Branco, 1987; Caseirão, 2020), there are in fact few biographies of Viana da Mota and none bears a full problematization of this educative aspect of his will to return to the country, nor how it was nurtured and activated. Also, dealing with self-narrative documents brings raises problems, as the spontaneity of the text is not total, especially in the conservatoire period he underwent up to 1886. Critical editions demonstrate that Viana da Mota made interpolations, additions and erasures much later. Furthermore, it was common knowledge that the reading of letters at the time was not only for the sender, but also for the family. Da Mota often sent letters to deliver by hand, to save on postage. Therefore, a double configuration of a habitus emerges in this double acceptance of performativity and intimacy, of spontaneity and deliberation. In these circumstances, I propose to create two working instruments, according to the objectives stated above: on the one hand, a detailed chronology of the displacements and relationships with groups and aesthetic currents that it integrated; on the other hand, a thematic narrative of the topics that relate connection to the different communities of origin, reception and artistic identity.

The slow constitution of an ethics of return colliding with a transnational identity can be traced in the scenarios of Berlin, Paris and Geneva, being precipitated by the advent of the First World War. His narrative points to three major categories: 1) strangeness from their original culture (family, climate), reveling his status as converted (Bourdieu , 1996) to German culture; 2) progressive romanticization of Portugal as the artist also distances himself from his host community; 3) feeling a foreigner, which is unusual in the spheres of European musical elite but impelled by the 1914-18 War. Strangeness. After leaving Lisbon in 1882, he returned in 1886: “Then I saw a lady - there were my parents! It cut my heart deeply to see their misery and not be able to help them!” (Mota, 2018, p. 19). The young student felt strange in his homeland and above all the enormous lack of musical understanding pushed him to lament: “I miss Germany so much! Here is just envy and mistrust” (p. 22). Progressive romanticization of the homeland is evident a decade later, in 1893, when he was no longer a student and became a teacher himself. He continuously refers to his German family, but states the wonders of his native country. Foreign. He only feels a foreigner outside Berlin, and in 1917, he explains how tired is of Geneve where is a highly rated teacher, for “Reasons: a, b, c, d, we get bored and wither here, e) the owner forbade us to make music and teach in our home (…) [and] we put an end to it and retire to our land” (Mota, 2003, pp. 136-137). The ethics of return was completed here, drawing a completely new disposition. It is up to this research to understand what happened in between.

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