Cruz SuspendedVoiceAmlia 2013

Boydell & Brewer
University of Rochester Press
Chapter Title: The Suspended Voice of Amália Rodrigues

Chapter Author(s): Gabriela Cruz
Book Title: Music in Print and Beyond

Book Subtitle: Hildegard von Bingen to The Beatles
Book Editor(s): Craig A. Monson, Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Published by: Boydell & Brewer, University of Rochester Press. (2013)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt3fgnkd.12
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Chapter Eight
The Suspended Voice of

Amália Rodrigues
Gabriela Cruz
The search for authenticity, nearly everywhere we find it in modern
times, is bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are.
— Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity
For Portuguese music as for Portuguese politics, 1926 marked a historical

watershed. The military coup of May 28, 1926, led by General Manuel Gomes
da Costa, put an end to the First Republic and ushered in a conservative dicta-
torship that by 1933 had mutated into a full-fledged authoritarian regime, the
self-proclaimed Estado Novo. The year of the coup also saw the introduction
of electrically reproduced sound in Portugal, when Columbia Graphophone
Company and the Gramophone Company partnered with the local music deal-
ers Valentim de Carvalho and Bazar do Porto in Lisbon and Oporto, respec-
tively.1 Thus, Portuguese cultural modernity was double-layered from its
inception, pairing up conservative political aspirations with the installation of
sound in electric circuitry. It is now de rigueur to claim a determinant role for
new media technology in the cultural fashioning of the Estado Novo. But the
terms of the relationship between the political and the technological remain
undertheorized, routinely cast as one of mastermind and executor.2 In this
regard, today’s historiographic consensus pays lip-service to the old regime’s
stated policy, that which the first director of the national radio, Captain
Henrique Galvão, voiced in 1935 with expected military redundancy: “The
national broadcast, an effort of the Estado Novo, is today like one more volun-
teering soldier, a new force in the service of the Estado Novo.”3 Galvão claimed
for radio a central role in the development of a new national acoustic, one
cleansed of the anarchical movement that had characterized the earlier years
of free broadcasting and amateur radio under republican rule. But despite
the over-determined rigidity of his first pronouncement about broadcasting,
Galvão was media savvy and a less predictable servant of the state than his
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the suspended voice of amália rodrigues 181
initial radio address would have us believe. A loyalist in 1933, he grew increas-
ingly disillusioned with the Estado Novo during the 1940s and was forced into
political exile in 1959. In January 1961, in an attempt to initiate a movement
of military resistance from exile, Galvão commandeered the Portuguese pas-
senger ship Santa Maria in Venezuela. The hijacking was a spectacular act of
political protest, which grabbed the attention of the international media. An
embarrassed Portuguese government moved quickly to contain the damage
to the regime by seeking and nearly securing the military assistance of Great
Britain and the United States to end Galvão’s operation. However, both coun-
tries abstained from military action after Galvão produced a series of radio
broadcasts from the ship issuing a political condemnation of the dictatorship,
especially of its colonial policies. This first radio protest in Portuguese history
was devastating to the regime’s internal reputation and set off a crippling pro-
cess of international isolation.4 The protest could not have been more timely,
for the colonial war in Angola began almost simultaneously.
The importance of radio in Galvão’s career both as loyalist and as dissenter
highlights the new centrality of sound transmission technology in national
politics, a subject often rehearsed in histories of twentieth-century Portugal.
Yet attention to mass media has thus far been concerned primarily with the
messages — the “what” — conveyed by radio transmission and film, which
provide historians with seemingly faithful and readily accessible images and
sounds of the past.5 In histories of the Portuguese twentieth century, very
little attention has been dedicated to how images and narratives occupy the
space of transmission, existing as part of a modern, newly constructed senso-
rial experience. The new media technology that the Estado Novo promoted
so enthusiastically in the 1930s and 1940s — radio broadcasts and talking pic-
tures most notably, but also telephones, turntables, and a slew of other inven-
tions — drastically redrew the terms of the collective sensorial experience,
making way for the emergence of new modes of perception and enjoyment,
which were politically consequent.6
This essay addresses the role played by Portuguese cinema in the transfor-
mation of the culture of listening, of musical affect, and of the changing poli-
tics of fado in Portugal during the 1930s and 1940s. Fado (literally “destiny” or
“fate”) is a popular song genre, typically performed by a singer accompanied
by one or two Portuguese guitars and an acoustic guitar. It emerged in Lisbon
after the 1820s and is invested today with significant value as both a symbol and
a vehicle for the expression of Portuguese identity. The intersection between
sound film and fado has been considered in Portuguese studies, yet histories
of the period have focused overwhelmingly on the content of representation,
considering what film tells us about the role of fado in Portuguese culture dur-
ing those years.7 My purpose here is to explore the ways in which cinema oper-
ates as a channel of aesthetic delivery in Portuguese music, allowing for new
modes of listening, which, while proper to the experience of mass media, also
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182 gabriela cr uz
determine the song’s collective appeal today. A recognition that technology

has sustained the symbolic power of fado in modern Portugal runs counter to
the established historiography of the song, in which the idea of heritage is par-
amount. That idea grounds the two most recent public initiatives regarding the
genre : the creation of a Museum of Fado in the Lisbon old district of Alfama,
and the recent successful bid, sponsored by the Portuguese government and
the municipality of Lisbon, to include fado in UNESCO’s Representative List
of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Shaping this dominant per-
spective, histories of fado have addressed the song from the viewpoint of tradi-
tion, investigating compositional and performative lineages, style, social and
symbolic functions, thus charting a musical space of collective belonging that
naturalizes the expressive form.8
I have written my essay against this critical grain so as to insert fado in the
horizon of Portuguese modernity. By doing so, I do not mean merely to argue
that the song registers contemporary topics, intersects with political events, or
even that it responds to the authoritarian outlook of the Estado Novo, either
by aestheticizing or resisting its political and moral economy. I mean, more
profoundly, that fado becomes in the 1930s and 1940s a new space of experi-
ence shaped by the sensorial scheme proper to audiovisual transmission and
reproduction. After the 1930s, the rhetoric and the imagery of fado cling
increasingly to values of expressive transparency and immediacy, which assert
the autonomy of the genre and celebrate affective interiority.9 This rhetori-
cal emphasis on timeless interior pleasures forged within a nostalgic celebra-
tion of an idealized past coincides with a drastic change in the economy of the
genre, refashioned by the habit of audiovisual transmission. Thus, and despite
all claims put forth for the genre in historical and critical narratives today, fado
in transmission bears neither a transparent nor an immediate relationship to
reality. I consider this fact below in light of the genre’s acculturation to sound
film after 1931 and the figure of Amália Rodrigues, foremost interpreter of the
song after 1940 and since then a figure of monumental stature in Portuguese
culture. Rodrigues, whose musical career was inseparable from new media
of transmission and bound to the Portuguese film industry, is portrayed as a
cultural symptom of a novel Portuguese devotion, now hegemonic and signifi-
cantly unexamined, to the pleasures of mass culture.
Theodor Adorno remarked in Zu einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion

(1959) that “the closer the mechanical duplication strives to come to the liv-
ing, the more its untruth, not least as the ‘magnified,’ bloated, and therefore
unclear sound, becomes apparent.”10 Microphones, amplifiers, and pickups
ushered in the first culture of high fidelity and brought sound reproduction
to the state of untruth Adorno dreaded. The philosopher was not alone in
his preoccupation: the aesthetics of early radio, to us so peculiarly involved
with noise, speak to the same anxiety. Exemplary in this regard are the first
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broadcasted words of dictator António Salazar: “If this machine that appears to
tremble before the minimal vibrations of my voice does not fail, I will be speak-
ing at this moment to the largest group ever assembled in Portugal to hear
someone’s words.”11 Acknowledging the presence of the medium while claim-
ing a shared bewilderment was a clever strategy designed to safeguard the nat-
ural condition of the political utterance, and hence its legitimacy. In the same
vein, the early years of national broadcasting were marked by an obsession
with the genuine; thus, the preference for transmitting “live” anything from in-
house orchestras to direct broadcasts from fado houses. By 1937 the Emissora
Nacional had already created seven different in-house musical ensembles, all
of which performed regularly in the studio, as well as broadcasted from remote
locations. These ensembles did not just provide the means to fill the airwaves
with needed musical programming; they also endowed the listening experi-
ence at home with a needed sense of spontaneity and naturalness, allowing
listeners to fasten their aural experience to an identifiable human and insti-
tutional source. What is more, music was habitually delivered to the homes
with thumps, coughs, and noises, transmitting just enough acoustic roughage
to permit listeners to imagine a desirable degree of transparency.12
A preoccupation with the “truth” — the epistemological status of sound
recorded and transmitted — was not unique to the new radiophonic enter-
prise. In 1930, the year Lisbon audiences saw their first talkies, the topic of
sound became instantly important, central to local articulations of experience
brought under the influence of cinematic pleasure. The three leading intellec-
tuals who framed the terms of the debate on sound happened to be neighbors,
inhabitants of the same apartment building in the bourgeois Chiado district of
Lisbon. José Gomes Ferreira, former diplomat, poet, and neorealist-to-be, was
the first to write in praise of sonorous untruth. He described his first encoun-
ter with sound cinema on May 1, 1930, in the leading film journal Kino: “I have
heard the voice of those ghosts, a voice that was not real, but a transfiguration,
an image, also a shadow. . . . And all my fears disappeared. The dream (of film)
continues, even more fantastic, more implausible, more hallucinated. Images,
sounds, figures, landscapes, appear now to be projected as if from another
planet.”13 His chronicle celebrated the new phantasmagorical nature of sound,
laying the intellectual foundation for a radical appraisal of sound transmission
as sensorial illusion, and hence a new element of experience. Then, in 1931,
Gomes Ferreira’s neighbor António Ferro, former futurist, self-declared cine-
phile, and soon-to-be director of national propaganda, wrote at length about
the contrived nature of cinema, which he praised as a decisive contribution
to modernity. Having recently returned from a visit to Hollywood, Ferro cele-
brated the industrial deceit of cinema, describing the capital of moving images
as a factory of illusions, all-absorbing to the senses, and essentially transform-
ing of subjective experience. To Ferro (and as António Pita has noted), the
artist was not “an accomplice to reality” but a “producer of vibrations,” thus
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184 gabriela cr uz
the inventor of a phenomenon which in turn “initiated a novel emotion in

men, disquieting of the well-established and encouraging perceptions, greater
in number and more original.”14
Ferro’s notion of a disquieting vibration resonated with Walter Benjamin’s
contemporaneous observation that cinema provides for modernity an altered
sphere of experience, and was registered in a variety of ways in the local cin-
ematic experience.15 Bernardo Marques, Ferro’s neighbor and collaborator,
and the visual artist who most decisively inserted the trace of modernity in
Portuguese illustration, brought to bear his own sense of how cinema might
disquiet well-established expressive habits. In 1930, he produced a cartoon for
Kino (June 10) titled “On the influence of sound film on the national song” (Da
influência do sonoro na canção nacional).16 (See fig. 8.1.) The illustrated strip
presents a mutually exclusive before and after, each moment composed of a dou-
ble scene of private and social singing. Before the intervention of sound film, a
woman mops the floors of her home singing a popular ditty about washing while
a professional singer delivers known fado clichés on unhappy love and destiny,
accompanied by the traditional guitar ensemble. After the introduction of sound
cinema, the homemaker sings a love song in French and the singer takes on the
verbal, bodily, and musical idioms of the popular jazz band. Succinctly, Marques
imagines sound film as a medium prompting a radical alteration of taste and
feeling, opening the way to a new form of popular cosmopolitanism that other
contemporary critics found alarming. Thus, shortly after Gomes Ferreira’s and
Marques’s eloquent defenses of the revolutionary powers of technology, the jour-
nalist and critic Norberto Lopes published his own call for the preservation of
the purity of the Portuguese language through the microphone.17
The problem of voice haunted these and similar discussions around the
nature and import of the talkies and informed the first Portuguese effort in the
medium, A Severa (1931) by filmmaker José Leitão de Barros. The film was an
adaptation of a popular musical play by Júlio Dantas (A Severa, 1901) mytholo-
gizing the life of the “inaugural” fadista Maria Severa (who died in Lisbon in
1846). It was produced before the inauguration of studio and sound record-
ing facilities in Portugal (the Companhia Portuguesa de Filmes Sonoros Tobis
Klangfilm was not established in Lisbon until 1932) and it involved complex
logistical effort.18 The film’s outdoor scenes were filmed in Portugal, and the
indoor scenes and sound recorded in Paris. The work was an attempt to imprint
celluloid with the most familiar of Portuguese scripts — sounds, words, and
gestures that audiences knew by heart — but it resulted in a sense of estrange-
ment from the emblematic dramatic text. Following the film’s release, critics
generally lauded its cinematography and lamented its soundtrack. The prob-
lem, as Avelino de Almeida wrote in the national newspaper O Século and Alves
Costa confirmed in the Oporto magazine Invicta Cine, was partially technical,
the result of poor synchronization.19 Voice, in A Severa, has at times a peculiar
chimerical quality. Thus, Martin Barnier has called attention to the acoustic
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Figure 8.1. Bernardo Marques, “On the influence of sound film on the national song,”
Kino (June 10, 1930), 3. The captions read (left to right): first: Ó vai com geito, Ó com
sabão (It goes with skill, it goes with soap); second: Na vida duma mulher, ha sempre
um homem que passa (In the life of a woman, there is always a passing man); third: Ne
soit pas jaloux. Tais toi. Je n’ai qu’un amour. C’est toi! (Do not be jealous, be quiet, I
have only one love. It is you!); fourth: You’re the cream in my coffee! (Orthographic
inconsistencies in the original are preserved in the transcription.)
strangeness of the first dialogue between the Count of Marialva (António

Luís Lopes) filmed in Épinay-sur-Seine with sound recorded on the set and
Maria Severa (Dina Teresa) perched on a fig tree somewhere in Alentejo, her
voice recorded in a French studio.20 And in 1931 Lisbon audiences laughed
at the climactic moment when an intensely passionate Severa insults and then
falls into the arms of the Count crying: “Oh, my love, my love!” The outburst
seemed then hopelessly theatrical, fitting poorly the new medium of cinema.
Of course, such early instances of peculiar asynchrony in talking pictures were
not peculiar to Portuguese film; they were simply glitches in the development
of a new international art form. The difficulty of producing the right voice for
the screen was not a trivial one in the first few years of talking pictures ; it was
later addressed in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), a feature film that reflected back
on the early years of sound in cinema. The problem of the wrong voice — cen-
tral to that film — was moreover a critical theme addressed in 1930 in Kino,
which published a small series of articles on the horrifyingly low voice of the
great diva of silent film, Greta Garbo.
In various ways, A Severa addressed the issue of Portuguese voice for modernity,
engaging fado as a song powerfully symbolic of a popular national vocality. One
question posed by the film was simple: Would fado look and sound right on the
screen? Marques was the first to address it, just months before the film’s pre-
miere, in an illustration for Kino titled “How they want her, and how she will
be” [Como eles a querem e como ela será] (see fig. 8.2). The illustration con-
tains four alternative cinematic frames for the song. The first drawing imag-
ines the possibility that the screen might preserve old-fashioned conventions of
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186 gabriela cr uz
naturalistic representation previously associated with theatrical treatments of

fado, routinely rehearsed in performances of Júlio Dantas’s 1901 play on which
the film was based. The second drawing trades naturalism for a new cinematic
glamor contained in the spectacle of stylized historicism. The third adopts for
fado the stylistic values and practices of American populism, complete with a
banjo, a revealing women’s bathing suit, chic sports attire, and a blues scale,
appropriating a modus vivendi that local audiences had recently discovered in
the movies. The final scene, the punch line of the strip, abandons social con-
cerns in favor of a strict aesthetic solution for fado in film, laying out the possibil-
ity of a new “fado-cubism.” In Marques’s visual vocabulary, cubism often stood
for German aesthetic proclivities, a cultivation of the inhuman, and a love of
monumental abstraction—a willingness to trade the contours of life for the plea-
sures of cold analysis. With this final vignette, the cartoon proposes that cinema’s
essential contribution to national music may well be to disorient habit and taste,
and thus recast fado as a novel vibration, irreducible to tradition and custom.
Marques imagined that cinema could yet endow Portuguese culture with a
new sort of “voice.” Obviously, so did Leitão de Barros, as indeed did the large
majority of the filmmaker’s critics in 1931. One single unambiguous condemna-
tion of A Severa was issued in 1931, penned by the composer Fernando Lopes-
Graça, who, as he wrote the review, was arrested in Lisbon for communist
activity.21 Extraordinarily committed to the powers of the genuine, Lopes-Graça
hoped that fado would not survive the modernity of the screen. More ambiva-
lently, Gomes Ferreira imagined it salvageable only under the condition that it
could adapt itself to the new medium. In a conciliatory fashion, acknowledging
both the staying power of the song and the altering force of the medium, he
wrote that in A Severa “the figure was done, created, finished, and nevertheless it
became necessary to alter it completely. A loutish character such as the theatrical
Severa, could never live in the whiteness of the screen. In celluloid, souls appear
lighter, clearer, and more serene than in the theater.”22 A new hygienic zeal
informs this vision of aesthetic change. And, indeed, fado survives into moder-
nity only as a reinvented authenticity, its sight and sound drastically redrawn,
cleared of what had previously been its essence (see fig. 8.3).
Beginning with A canção de Lisboa (1933), proudly advertised as the first
talkie produced entirely on native soil, Portuguese sound cinema celebrated
the genre through a variety of plots and images, all endowed with disciplinary
force. In this sense, the Aldeia da roupa branca (1938), João Ratão (1940), O pátio
das cantigas (1941), O Costa do castelo (1943), to name but a few films of the era,
pave the way to the industry’s final word on the genre : Perdigão Queiroga’s
Fado: História de uma cantadeira (1947). This film, in which Amália Rodrigues
stars, is routinely described as Portuguese cinema’s most genuine and com-
petent homage to the genre. It was important in launching Amália’s singing
career in Portugal and in Brazil, and it is a main exhibit in the established
narrative of the genre, occupying its own exclusive corner in the Museu do
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Figure 8.2. Bernardo Marques, “How they want her, and how she will be,” Kino
(August 29, 1930), 3. The captions read (left to right): first: Es os que a querem com
todos os matadores: a competente facada um pouco de tísica á mistura e quanto
mais estilizada melhor. (There are those who want her with all the ingredients: the
competent knife stab, mixed with a bit of tuberculosis, the more stylized the better);
[Severa sings:] Uma facadela di o peito e o ritrato di os jornais (One knife stab on
the chest, the portrait in the papers); second: Outros são partidarios duma Sevéra
toda guipures, fourrures, manicures, etc. É o que eles chamam uma Severa estilizada
(Others take the party of a Severa that is all lace, furs, manicures, etc. That is what
they call a stylized Severa); third: Ha varios tambem que a desejam perfeitamente á
americana. Banjo nas unhas, muitos foxe em ré maior e um ou outro “Blu” à mistura
(There are also several who wish her to be perfectly American. Banjo in nails, a lot
of fox-trot in D major mixed with one or another “blues”); fourth: Consta porém que
o realizador para mostrar ao estrangeiro o nosso estado de cultura vai fazer uma
Severa absolutamente cubista (It has been said, however, that the director is going to
do an absolutely cubist Severa to show our state of culture abroad). (Orthographic
inconsistencies in the original are preserved in the transcription.)
Fado in Lisbon, where the final scene is shown in continuous replay. Luís de
Pina summarized a whole tradition of critical reception when he wrote about
the film in 1994:
The story seems to imitate life, told like a traditional melodrama and often
veering toward the sentimental. But Armando Vieira Pinto has created empa-
thetic characters, well conceived human types, animated by simple emo-
tions, living a daily neighborhood routine to which Queiroga has imprinted
remarkable popular truth. They speak above all in loose and vivid dialogue,
tinted by irony and a critical edge that guarantee the necessary colloquial
tone. Naturalness is, in short, the strongest asset of this film.
All this explains the greatest phenomenon in the film with regard to natu-
ralness, that is, the performance of Amália Rodrigues, who is perfectly at ease
in a story that captures much of her biography, singing fado divinely and as
she rarely sang it afterwards, a true queen to her art.23
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188 gabriela cr uz
Figure 8.3. Cover sheet for Novo Fado da Severa do fonofilme : A Severa. Sung by Dina
Teresa. (Lisbon: Sassetti, 1931).
Never mind Amália’s own resistance to assertions of biographical fidel-

ity. She insisted that she was, after all, never an orphan; that her real life
neighbors in the popular and historic Lisbon neighborhood of Alfama (steps
away from Mouraria, the official birthplace of the song) never showed her
the kindness bestowed on her character on the screen; that she was really
married briefly to a guitar player who lived in Algés, then a new suburb of
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Lisbon, from whom she separated never to reconcile. Finally, she noted that
her husband never became an alcoholic, though he did emigrate to Africa.24
Maybe by the time she issued her protest in 1987, it no longer mattered.
Maybe it never did, for the reality of fado, as António Ferro explained when
he presented the award of the Secretariat for National Information (SNI) to
Queiroga in 1947, was the reality of song.25 What distinguished Queiroga’s
film, in Ferro’s estimation, was its portrayal, “with no concession to what is
low and commonplace, of the environment that this popular song inhabits,
an environment not always marked by infirmity.”26 Implicit in Ferro’s words
is the understanding that Queiroga’s effort released fado from an earlier
defeatist historiography. The film left behind the well-explored theme of
affinity between the song and vice, disease, and ruin, a topos common to criti-
cal dismissals of the song by Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, José Gomes
Ferreira, and others, whose texts were finally anthologized for general enjoy-
ment in Luiz Moita´s O fado, canção de vencidos (1936).27 Indeed, Queiroga’s
approach to fado was meticulously built on the discipline of studio work, then
relatively unknown in Portugal. He famously built his Alfama entirely from
scratch, drawn, nailed and painted to let off just the right amount of realness.
Félix Ribeiro points out that Queiroga’s film, fado’s first virtual reality, was an
expensive studio luxury, which raised production costs well above the norm
in the Portuguese film industry.28 The rightful portrayal of the popular song,
praised by Ferro, required an act of invention, the labor of subsuming life to
the technical requirements of studio work.
Queiroga lavished a new kind of virtuosic labor on sound. Here is an
example : market vendor Ana Maria (Amália Rodrigues), an orphan born
and bred in Alfama, makes her singing debut at the neighborhood venue
“Unidos do Fado.” (See fig. 8.4.) She is accompanied by her boyfriend
Julio Guitarrista (Virgílio Teixeira) and two other musicians (Raul Nery
and Jaime Santos play themselves) and is introduced publicly to her neigh-
bors and friends by Chico Fadista (António Silva). Ana Maria places herself
behind the guitarists, puts on a black shawl, and begins singing. What fol-
lows on screen is an elaborate visual montage sutured by music. The image
of Ana Maria alternates with close-ups of those who listen (listed here in
the order in which they appear and reappear): Luisinha, the musicians,
Raul Nery’s hands (pretending to be Júlio’s), Luisinha again, pai Damião,
mãe Rosa, Senhora Augusta, Luisinha, Júlio’s friends, the journalists,
Joaquim Marujo and Lingrinhas, Peixe Espada, Chico Fadista, mãe Rosa.
That the viewer is able to name them all is significant in itself. The point
is clear: here everyone is included — the old, the young, men, women, the
ambitious, the contented, the curious, the moved, and the angry. Moreover,
their attention and gestures deliver a lesson in listening. Each display of
voice, each sustained high note, each slight messa di voce elicits a nod, a
look, a tear. The scene writes the emotion of fado.
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190 gabriela cr uz
Figure 8.4. Ana Maria (Amália Rodrigues) at her debut at “Unidos do Fado,” Fado:
História de uma cantadeira (1947) © Lusomundo.
In 1947, the scene peddled Estado Novo propaganda: Alfama as a workers’

paradise. It also spoke more specifically, and no less ideologically, to a certain
narrative of fado, which is still with us. The listening choreography, all the sig-
nificant nods and looks, tell of aesthetic belonging. The relentless close-ups
are pedagogic: they show a collective made of individuals, all connected, all
strikingly involved in interior affective contemplation. This is one of the most
thorough stagings of authenticity cinema ever put together for the genre, vali-
dated in the plot by a little trinity of higher forces: Ana Maria’s dead mother,
whom Chico Fadista explains is dead but still somehow alive in Ana Maria’s
throat; God, whom Ana Maria invokes by crossing herself before performance;
and the boyfriend guitarist who teaches her to sing. “Authenticity” is certified
by biological, religious, and social belonging, values intrinsic to the conserva-
tive lore of fado.
More relevant, perhaps, is that the conservative politics of the scene
are aired in the spirit and the letter of modernity. Film critics routinely hail
Queiroga’s virtuosic camerawork and montage technique. Less remarked-
upon are the important compositional resources mobilized for the making of
the film. Jaime Mendes, a successful composer of light musical comedy for the
Monson.indd 190 10/17/2013 5:50:09 PM

stage and for the screen, was the film’s music director and wrote all of its music
except for the three original songs that showcase Amália’s voice. “O fado de
cada um,” “És tudo para mim,” and “O fado não sei quem é” were composed
by Frederico de Freitas, a composer of impeccable classical credentials. As well
as being a well-established figure in Lisbon music circles, he was politically well
connected and cherished by the Portuguese film industry.29 A longtime col-
laborator with Leitão de Barros, he composed the music and songs for A Severa
(1931), As pupilas do Sr. Reitor (1935), Maria Papoila (1937), and Varanda dos
rouxinóis (1939). He wrote the music for Chianca de Garcia’s O trevo de quatro
folhas (1936, now lost), as well as António Lopes Ribeiro’s A exposição do mundo
português (1941, a film of political propaganda lavishly financed by the regime),
and contributed popular “Portuguese” songs (one sung march and one fado)
to Francisco Ribeiro’s successful musical comedy O pátio das cantigas (1942).
Freitas’s impressive curriculum as a composer for the local film industry under-
scores the peculiar form of musical authority bestowed on him in the 1930s
and 1940s. Looked upon with undisguised suspicion by his peers — he wrote
too easily, too fast, and in too many idioms — Freitas was notably unintimidated
by technology.30 He joined the Portuguese national radio as orchestra conduc-
tor in 1935, and as a musician in broadcasting and in film he defined the terms
under which music was to exist for the electrified nation. His film songs helped
to craft a popular musical aesthetics for modern media producing the musical
equivalent to the light, clear, and serene soul Gomes Ferreira had found on
the celluloid surface of A Severa.
Queiroga’s Fado was at the center of this process.31 Consider “O fado de
cada um,” sung by Ana Maria at “Unidos do Fado,” lyrics by Silva Tavares and
José Galhardo.
Bem pensado,
todos temos os nosso fado
e quem nasce malfadado
melhor fado não terá.
Ai, é a nossa sorte

e do berço até à morte
ninguém foge por mais forte
ao destino que Deus dá.
[If you think of it, we all have our destiny, and those born to misfortune
will never escape it. We all have our fate, and from cradle to death, no one
escapes the destiny given by God.]
The piece is a tautology, wrapped in a skeletal musical sequence. It is modern

in both its disquieting insistence on eternal returns and its ascetic confidence
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192 gabriela cr uz
in clean, angular lines. In most postwar art, these two conditions are sufficient
to obviate subjectivity. And here, as elsewhere, the process is intentional. The
song draws on a very minimal repertory of topoi known to the genre, deployed
not in a spirit of creative engagement but in one of anomie. Frederico
de Freitas’s musical abstractions reduce the genre to the voice, recast as an
extraordinary, indeed suprahuman, object. The gesture is political and signifi-
cantly bound to technology.
The song enforces a new listening regimen, transferring to the stage of
“Unidos do Fado” new cultural behaviors anchored in modern audile tech-
niques.32 Luís de Pina’s assertion that Amália sang “divinely in the film
and as she rarely did since then” is foolish for the simple reason that the
singing voice’s path into celluloid occurs through channels unknown to
live performance.33 In classical film, at least since Broadway Melody (1929),
music is prerecorded and played back on the set to be mimed by the actors.
Scenes are conventionally shot silently and then synchronized postproduc-
tion. Amália sang on set accompanied by Raul Nery and Jaime Santos, while
Virgílio Teixeira’s doings on the guitar are bluntly uncoordinated with the
soundtrack. In any case, the music heard on that particular shooting session
exists no longer; what we hear in the film is the product of postsynchronized
sound. The scene contains no natural performance noise; the accompa-
nying guitar is not even always present (possibly due to poor microphone
placement or sound mixing); and Amália’s singing is inflected by the habit
of performing with a microphone. She croons, modulating her voice into a
near-vanishing point and then bringing it back to acoustic presence. This is
singing marked as “from the soul,” yet it is, above all, a technical accomplish-
ment. It is vocal technique, the messa di voce for which eighteenth-century cas-
trati were once so admired, helped along by the sensitivity of microphones.
The song has become a signature of the new studio culture.
Finally, the inescapable truism: there is no acoustic point of view in the
scene. Two different perceptual schemes operate in this as in most other films
of the classic era.34 The sequence of alternating close-ups of Ana Maria, her
musicians, and her public, constructed through multiple camera shots and
painstaking montage, delivers a prescribed visual trajectory that places the
viewer within the imaginary room as an ambler among visible bodies. The lis-
tener is treated in an entirely different fashion, his ears conceded perfect musi-
cal acuity and omnipresence and made unaware of any room noise. Thus, we
experience music as a phenomenon wholly detached from the physical labor
of its production, cleansed of all imperfections. Which is to say that we are
made to occupy the position of the ideal listener portrayed by Queiroga within
the diegesis: one undistracted by noise, attentive to sonorous detail, inhabiting
a private sphere of uncorrupted auditory affect, absorbed by the electric. Here
is one of the ways in which the film rescues fado for modernity, by bringing
it into the new media-enforced auditory discipline peculiar to our age. The
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aesthetic preference has social relevance : the genre flourishes post-Queiroga

as a new discipline of feeling extended to all by means of technology.
What does it mean for a voice to be caught in electronic circuitry? The sus-
pended voice has talismanic force — Amália on record certainly has that
quality — akin more to magic than to representational aesthetics. Queiroga
himself was keen to include this form of the extraordinary in his film, empha-
sizing the notion of suspension in two key scenes of performance in the nar-
rative. In both scenes long tracking shots bring the camera to the foreground
of filmic consciousness. These were not the first scenes in Portuguese cin-
ema where fado was associated with virtuosic camera work: in Aldeia da roupa
branca (1938), Chianca de Garcia had also filmed the song using long track-
ing shots. In the first of his two fado scenes, guitars and a woman’s voice are
heard performing as the camera wanders into a musical venue in Lisbon. The
eye of the camera meanders in, surveying the performance space and the lis-
tening public until it finds the source of song (see fig. 8.5). There it stops,
giving us a close-up shot of Maria da Luz, the film’s fado star. In Garcia’s
film, the visual traveling of the camera to the source of song dramatizes the
dangerous allure of fado, while the actors depict its culture of vice. The scene
is unintentionally comic for its blunt display of bad behavior. In this fado
venue, women not only are “of easy virtue,” they smoke up a storm with their
male counterparts while listening to song. But the musical genre has a differ-
ent symbolic value in Aldeia da roupa branca than in Fado. In the earlier film,
the Lisbon song is a condemnable form of modern desire, firmly rooted in
the life of the city. Against its degenerate urbanity, the virtues of country life
and music are glorified.
Queiroga may well have had Chianca de Garcia’s scene in mind when he
planned his own performance scenes in 1947. Twice in his film, he uses the
same camera technique previously used by Garcia, staging two impossible musi-
cal performances. Thus, the scene of Ana Maria’s theatrical debut and rise to
fame is presented as an extraordinary event, not just in the sense offered in
the narrative as a moment of outstanding artistry, but as a performance that
could never take place in the theater. The very long tracking shot that cap-
tures the entire musical act begins with the singer leaning on a staircase before
a backdrop of Alfama. The stage set replicates the studio set seen earlier in
the film. Ana Maria moves in tandem with the camera as she sings. She takes
twelve steps forward, reaches a street arch, leans against it, and crosses it. Then
she descends seven steps down a staircase to lean again, this time on the giant
sound hole of a Portuguese guitar, and passes through it, as if through a por-
tal. As she continues her song, she steps out of the gigantic guitar (the prop is
now shown in full detail) and walks five steps down another staircase (see fig.
8.6). Then she continues walking forward, ending her song at the proscenium.
The song’s path is unreal, meant to elicit wonder, but it is only in the final
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194 gabriela cr uz
Figure 8.5. Smoking away at the fado house where Maria da Luz (Hermínia Silva)
performs. Aldeia da roupa branca (1938) © Lusomundo.
moment, when the camera detaches itself from the character and surveys the
stage from the back of the auditorium, that the impossibility of this theatrical
performance is revealed. In an actual theater, audiences would have had no
visual access to the recessed space in which she began her performance. They
would have seen precious little beyond the giant guitar affixed in the center
of the stage, and they would have been beyond auditory reach for most of the
song. In this, the scene bluntly evades the effect of reality otherwise central to
the film’s narrative. The choreography of the song has obvious allegorical value,
tracing the story of a singer, and that of fado, from its amateur origins in the tra-
ditional neighborhood to worldly spectacle. This is the story of fado’s existence
as modern song in the postwar years. But the scene is more than an allegory of
history; it delineates a new listening practice for the genre. Like the suspended
listener described earlier, the viewer floats wherever the camera takes him or her
and perceives fado as belonging to the realm of the extraordinary. The eye of the
viewer and the eye of the camera: these are two of the trinity of imaginary objects
that define the new regime of perception crafted for the genre in the film.
Quieroga’s Fado ends at “Unidos do Fado.” Júlio, now estranged from Ana
Maria, has become an alcoholic and will soon emigrate to Africa. A musi-
cal benefit is given at “Unidos do Fado” to collect money for his fare. He is
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Figure 8.6. Ana Maria (Amália Rodrigues) sings in the theater, Fado: História de
uma cantadeira (1947) © Lusomundo.
called on stage, joins a large guitar ensemble, and begins playing “O fado de
cada um,” the song Ana Maria had sung on the same stage years before. What
Virgílio Teixeira plays on the guitar in the scene is immaterial — he obviously
can’t play, and the sound track preserves nothing of his performing efforts on
the set. Still, the synchronized soundtrack produces a wretched performance
on the Portuguese guitar underlined by an overemphasized bass accompani-
ment. Jaime Santos, or whoever performed the track, must have had fun pro-
ducing such music! The over-present bass, the hesitations, and the wrong notes
are calculated gestures — they call attention to the missing voice, eventually
introduced under new conditions, unhinged from performance. After some
time, a woman’s voice finally joins the musical performance, and from the
back of the room, the camera begins a slow movement toward the front of the
stage. Those in the audience make way for its passage slowly, with respect (see
fig. 8.7). Finally, the camera turns around and reveals Ana Maria singing. She
reaches the stage and restores the song to “performative normalcy.”
For a brief but powerful moment, a disembodied singing voice (the third
object in the cinematic trinity) is aligned with the all-seeing eye of the camera.
In film, as in opera and fiction before it, disembodied voices, especially those
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196 gabriela cr uz
Figure 8.7. The long tracking shot accompanying Ana Maria’s final performance
in the film, Fado: História de uma cantadeira (1947) © Lusomundo.
with a point of view such as this one, carry immense authority and are vener-
ated sources of disquiet.35 The inaugural moment for such voices on the screen
is Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Here, a girl walks home bouncing a ball. The camera
follows her closely in a tracking shot, isolating her from other pedestrians. As
the shadow of a hatted man appears from nowhere and bends toward the girl,
a high-pitched voice is heard saying: “My, what a pretty ball you have. What’s
your name?” It is with the bodiless utterance that Lang’s account of the hor-
rific begins. After M, cinema turned regularly to the incorporeal vocal object
in its tales of horror. The female voice-over in Psycho (1960) is perhaps the
best known example in the genre, the quintessential floating voice for which
there is no resting place and which continues to haunt the viewer even after
it embeds itself in the (wrong) body of Norman Bates, “her” son.36 Operatic
counterparts are also not hard to find. In Tales of Hoffmann, Offenbach’s last
opera premiered in 1881, the disembodied voice of a deceased opera diva sings
to her daughter and forces her into a duet that kills her on the spot.37 These
are not examples completely alien to the film scene in question — remember
that Ana Maria’s great singing voice echoes that of her mother.
So, the phantasmal makes a short appearance at the end of Queiroga’s very top-
ographical essay on fado. Disembodied song, an object lost in the film’s acoustic
Monson.indd 196 10/17/2013 5:50:10 PM

apparatus, requires and desires reattachment. This is necessarily so, because care-
ful synchronization of voice and body, text and meaning, subject and culture are
absolute requirements in the discipline of the authentic, the pet project of mod-
ernist hermeneutics to which the Estado Novo notoriously subscribed.
In 1947, on the occasion of awarding the distinction of the Secretariat for

National Information for Fado: História de uma cantadeira, António Ferro con-
gratulated Queiroga on putting fado in its rightful place. But nothing would be
more appropriate than to regard the film as a reflection piece on a new culture
of the genre, one that reimagines song and its addressees as existing beyond
location, suspended in electronic oscillation. Much might be made of this fruit-
ful media transfer. Ferro’s remark that Queiroga portrays a fado “not marked
by infirmity” suggests a hygienic perspective of sorts, the idea that electronics
give popular expressive forms a good scrub, making them fit for general con-
sumption. After the 1940s, Amália’s singing was increasingly experienced “in
absentia,” as an effect of the electronic circuit. And this should give us pause
as we ponder the overwhelming status of her “pure voice” in Portuguese iden-
tity politics. Veneration for the voice is fundamentally entwined with an unac-
knowledged veneration for modern media and for mass culture, and thus with
a cultivated esteem for a new kind of commodified experience on which the
Estado Novo’s project of a national acoustics depended entirely. After the war,
fado was perhaps the most appealingly modern object in Portuguese popular
culture, one that naturalized industrial experience, transforming local habits
of listening to suit new forms of musical mass consumption.
Notes
Research for this project was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia /
Projecto Estratégico–Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical (CESEM/
FCSH/UNL) — 2011–12/ Pest — OE/EAT/UI0693/2011.
Epigraph: Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the
Emergence of Modern Society (New York: Atheneum, 1971), xix.
1. Paul Vernon, A History of the Portuguese Fado (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 62–66.
2. Nelson Ribeiro, A Emissora Nacional nos primeiros anos do estado novo, 1933–1945
(Lisbon: Quimera, 2005), 135–52, and Manuel Deniz Silva, “Rádio,” Enciclopédia da
música em Portugal no século XX, ed. Salwa Castelo Branco, 4 vols. (Lisbon: Círculo de
Leitores, 2010), 4:1081.
3. All translations from the Portuguese are my own unless otherwise noted. Adelino
Gomes, “Emissora Nacional,” in Dicionário de história de Portugal, ed. A. Barreto, M. F.
Mónica and J. Serrão, 9 vols. (Lisbon: Livraria Figueirinhas, 1999), 7:618.
4. Nuno M. Antão and C. G. Tavares, “Henrique Galvão e o assalto ao Santa Maria:
Percurso de uma dissidência do Estado Novo e suas repercussões internacionais,”
Sapiens: História, património e arqueologia, vol. 0 (2008), http://www.revistasapiens.org/
Biblioteca/numero0/henriquegalvao.pdf, accessed May 30, 2013.
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198 gabriela cr uz
5. Examples of this disciplinary focus on cinematic verisimilitude abound in Portuguese

narratives of sound cinema; this is reflected most recently in Paulo Jorge Granja, “A comédia
à portuguesa, ou a máquina de sonhos a preto e branco no Estado Novo,” in O cinema sob o
olhar de Salazar, ed. Luís Reis Torgal (Lisbon: Temas & Debates, 2001), 194–233.
6. Miriam B. Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as
Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6 (1999): 59–77.
7. Michael Colvin, “Images of Defeat: Early Fado Films and the Estado Novo’s
Notion of Progress,” Portuguese Studies 26, no. 2 (2010): 149–67; and Colvin, “Perdigão
Queiroga’s Film Fado: História d’uma cantadeira: Construction and Deconstruction of the
Fado Novo,” Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, http://www.Plcs.umassd.edu/forth
comingarticles/michaelcolvin.htm (accessed May 30, 2013); Tiago Baptista, Ver Amália:
Os filmes de Amália Rodrigues (Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2009).
8. Rui Vieira Nery, Para uma história do fado (Lisbon: Publico, 2004).
9. Manuel Deniz Silva, “Musique nationale et mémoire collective : Le débat cri-
tique autour de l’identité du fado dans les années 30,” in Musique et mémoire (Paris:
l’Harmattan, 2003), 208–9.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Zu einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion (Frankfurt:
Surkampf, 2001), 175; published in English as Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, ed.
Henri Lonitz; trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 134–35.
11. Gomes, “Emissora Nacional,” 618.
12. The preference for broadcasting live music is well documented in the United
States, where it has been considered in light of the poor quality of early phonograms
(until the 1920s) and of union efforts to keep recorded music off of the airwaves. Union
efforts culminated in a ban on recorded music in radio broadcasting between 1942 and
1944. See James Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950
(Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 106–61. Yet, Evan Eisenberg has
noted that the ascent of radio and decline of the phonogram during the great depres-
sion may have had as much to do with technical matters and social policy as with the
appeal of broadcast listening as shared social ritual during a period craving rituals of
social solidarity. See The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 26. Carolyn Abbate (“Speaking and Singing:
What is Real?” a paper delivered at the Harvard Humanities Center, Harvard University,
November 15, 2007) has recently described the same desire for “transparency,” or an
imagined liveness, in approaches to sound film in the 1930s and 1940s, and the practice
of imprinting the soundtrack with simulacra of “live noise.” On the Portuguese prefer-
ences for and practices of live transmission, see N. Ribeiro, A Emissora Nacional, 146.
13. José Gomes Ferreira, “Cinema Sonoro,” Kino, May 1, 1930, 3.
14. António Ferro, Hollywood, Capital of Images (Lisbon: Portugal-Brasil Soc. Ed.,
1931), cited in António Pedro Pita, “Temas e figuras do ensaismo cinematográfico” in O
cinema sob, 40.
15. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,”
in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed.
M. W. Jennings, B. Doherty and T. Y. Levin, trans. E. Jephcott, R. Livingstone, H. Eiland
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2008), 35. Benjamin writes that “the vision of immediate reality”
in film becomes “the Blue Flower in the land of technology.” Benjamin (p. 41) concludes
that “reception in distraction—the sort of reception which is increasingly noticeable in all
areas of art and is a symptom of profound changes in apperception—finds in film its true
training ground. . . . In this respect, too, it proves to be the most important subject matter, at
present, for the theory of perception which the Greeks called aesthetics.”
Monson.indd 198 10/17/2013 5:50:10 PM

16. Original strip reproduced in Paulo Emiliano, A banda desenhada portuguesa 1914–
1945 (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1977), illustration 26.
17. Norberto Lopes (“Ouvir e prever: A língua portuguesa e o microfone,” Kino, July
3, 1930, p. 3) earnestly defended the photogeny of the Portuguese language, effectively
praising the Portuguese talkies for capturing the “solidity, sweetness, richness, manly
efficacy and majesty” of the language and adding that “our words are all very distinc-
tive : they have personality, character, their own physiognomy.” Unlike Gomes Ferreira,
he imagined acoustic photogeny — really audiogeny — as a form of fidelity to life, and
hoped the celluloid strip would stay close to the reality of the spoken language, retain-
ing the essential quality of what is.
18. On the foundational force of the figure of Maria Severa in the historical narra-
tive of fado, see Pinto de Carvalho, A história do fado (1903; Lisbon: Publicações Dom
Quichote, 1994), 60–168. The point is echoed most recently in Richard Elliot, Fado and
the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 13–14.
19. Manuel Félix Ribeiro, Filmes, figuras e factos da história do cinema português (Lisbon:
Cinemateca Portuguesa, 1983), 286–90.
20. Martin Barnier, “A Severa: José Leitão de Barros, Portugal (1931),” in O cinema
português através dos seus filmes, ed. C. O. Ferreira (Lisbon: Campo de Letras. 2007), 24.
21. Fernando Lopes-Graça, Disto e daquilo (Lisbon: Cosmo, 1973), 154.
22. José Gomes Ferreira, “Os intérpretes do Fonofilme de Leitão de Barros A Severa,”
Imagem 31 (July 1931), republished in José Gomes Ferreira: uma sessão por página, ed. T. B.
Borges and N. Sena (Lisboa: Cinemateca Portuguesa— Museu do Cinema, 2000), 159.
23. Luís de Pina, “Fado: História de uma cantadeira,” typescript, 1994, in vol. 50:331,
Archive of the Cinemateca Portuguesa, Lisbon.
24. Victor Pavão dos Santos, Amália: Uma biografia (Lisbon: Contexto, 1987), 39.
25. SNI was the regime’s propaganda office.
26. Ferro’s speech for the award ceremony of 1947 was published as “O cinema e o
teatro” in António Ferro, Teatro e cinema (1936–1949) (Lisbon: SNI, 1950), 89.
27. Moita, O fado, canção de vencidos (Lisbon: Empresa do Anuário Comercial, 1936).
28. M. F. Ribeiro, Filmes, figuras, 592.
29. São José Corte Real, “Freitas, Frederico de,” in Enciclopédia da música em Portugal,
2:525–26.
30. João de Freitas Branco, História da música portuguesa (Lisbon: Edições Europa-
America, 1959), 313.
31. Teresa Cascudo, “Frederico de Freitas e o seu tempo: Reflexões em torno de uma
exposição,” in Frederico de Freitas (1902–1980), ed. H. Trindade (Lisbon: Museu de la
Música, 2003), 33.
32. On the notion of audile technique, see Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 137–87.
33. Pina, Cinemateca portuguesa 50, 331.
34. On the sound economy of film, see Rick Altman, Sound Theory / Sound Practice
(New York: Routledge, 1992).
35. See Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1988), 47–54; and Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 32–33.
36. On the disembodied voice and the uses of the dolly shot in the visual economy
of the horror genre, see Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry (London: Routledge, 1992), 116–19.
37. Heather Hadlock, Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann”
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 76–77.
Monson.indd 199 10/17/2013 5:50:10 PM

Cruz SuspendedVoiceAmlia 2013

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Boydell & Brewer

University of Rochester Press

Chapter Title: The Suspended Voice of Amália Rodrigues

Book Title: Music in Print and Beyond

The Suspended Voice of

For Portuguese music as for Portuguese politics, 1926 marked a historical

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determine the song’s collective appeal today. A recognition that technology

Theodor Adorno remarked in Zu einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion

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the inventor of a phenomenon which in turn “initiated a novel emotion in

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strangeness of the first dialogue between the Count of Marialva (António

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naturalistic representation previously associated with theatrical treatments of

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Never mind Amália’s own resistance to assertions of biographical fidel-

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In 1947, the scene peddled Estado Novo propaganda: Alfama as a workers’

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Ai, é a nossa sorte

The piece is a tautology, wrapped in a skeletal musical sequence. It is modern

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Monson.indd 192 10/17/2013 5:50:09 PM

aesthetic preference has social relevance : the genre flourishes post-Queiroga

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Monson.indd 194 10/17/2013 5:50:09 PM

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In 1947, on the occasion of awarding the distinction of the Secretariat for

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5. Examples of this disciplinary focus on cinematic verisimilitude abound in Portuguese

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Monson.indd 199 10/17/2013 5:50:10 PM

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