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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
The Estado Novo's plans for urban rehabilitation in Lisbon, (1) carried out by Duarte Pacheco's 'Plano de Urbanizacao e Expansao da Cidade' and Faria da Costa's 'Salvacao Barreto' programme, justified the demolition of historic neighborhoods 'condemned to progress', including the capital's oldest districts: Mouraria and Alfama. (2) However, just before Salazar's death, in 1969, and the consequent shift in political regime as Portugal advanced to its 25 April Revolution, the Salvacao Barreto project had lost its momentum. Although as early as 1940, national attention focused on the restoration of the Se and the Torre de Belem, the Camara Municipal de Lisboa did not propose a plan to protect Lisbon's architectural heritage until 1967. (3) By then, the lower Mouraria had suffered the blows of the Estado Novo's progress. Plans to widen Rua da Palma and Avenida Almirante Reis--first presented in 1852--were realized in the 1930s. (4) Between the 1930s and 60s, the lower Mouraria was demolished: the palace of the Marques de Alegrete in 1946; the Apollo Theatre in 1949; the church of Socorro and the buildings to the west of Rua da Mouraria in 1956. In 1961, Lisboners reacted to Salvacao Barreto's neglect of the capital's architectural heritage when the Mouraria's only extant gates on the fourteenth-century Fernandine Wall--Portas de Sao Vicente da Mouraria/Arco do Marques de Alegrete--were demolished. In the midst of the destruction of the lower Mouraria, the sixteenth-century hermitage of Nossa Senhora da Saude was spared. The hermitage's anomolic condition, perched unscathed among unsophisticated shopping centres and cement fountains--the bleak manifestations of Salvacao Barreto's progress--has made it a symbol of tradition in a Lisbon compelled to modernization. (5)
The hermitage of Nossa Senhora da Saude and its four-century-old procession serve as leit-motifs in the fado novo of the 1940s-60s, as symbols of resistance to the Estado Novo's modernization of Lisbon, while the Salvacao Barreto urban rehabilitation project threatens to erase the Mouraria. The lyrics of the fado novo manifest a protest to the demolition; they denounce the Estado Novo's concept of progress by evoking nostalgia for a pre-Republican Mouraria, embodied in the hermitage. Gabriel de Oliveira wrote 'Ha Festa na Mouraria' in the 1930s, during the first stages of the Mouraria's rehabilitation. (6) His fado recalls the extinct procession of Nossa Senhora da Saude, interrupted by the First Republic. However, when fadistas performed and recorded the song after the procession had reappeared in the Mouraria, in 1940, it was recontextualized in the memories of a Mouraria that had already vanished: a decadent Mouraria characterized by prostitution and violent crime. I propose that Gabriel de Oliveira's motifs of the hermitage of Nossa Senhora da Saude and its annual procession in 'Ha Festa na Mouraria' have been appropriated by later fado lyricists to denounce the Salvacao Barreto urban rehabilitation project. I shall examine the evolution of the leit-motifs of the hermitage, the procession and the historical and poetic avatars of the song's protagonist, Rosa Maria, in the later fados novos, to conclude that Gabriel de Oliveira's 'Ha Festa na Mouraria' has inspired a subversive trend in the fado novo: the idealization of a pre-Republican Mouraria--emblematized by the hermitage and its procession--as an alternative to the Estado Novo's notion of progress.
By 1961, Lisboners were reacting to the Estado Novo's eradication of their architectural patrimony in the Mouraria. Political cartoons of the late 1940s to early 60s indicate popular opposition to the Salvacao Barreto project. Most cartoons appeal to an intrinsic irony in the Estado Novo's plans for progress: the demolition of the cradle of the fado. The regime's plans for urban renewal jeopardized Salazar's patriotic trinity of the Fs (fado, Fatima and football) by bulldozing Lisbon's most fadista quarter. By appropriating the musical form consecrated by the Estado Novo, the humorists turned the tables on the political regime. One cartoon entitled 'Fado da Demolicao' quotes newspaper headlines: 'Vao deitar abaixo mais uma parte da Mouraria', alongside the depiction of workers chipping away at the Arco do Marques de Alegrete. (7) Another represents 'O Fado Mouraria' as two construction workers playing the shovel and the pickaxe as guitarra and viola. (8) Stuart's drawing of the Escadinhas da Saude suggests that the demolition of the Mouraria threatened the nation's heroic past: 'Fado da Mouraria: D. Afonso Henriques conquistou Lisboa aos mouros, mas popou a Mouraria. Agora vai tudo abaixo sem salvacao nenhuma, ou, melhor, so com Salvacao [...] Barreto.' (9) Some satirists criticized the Salvacao Barreto project through parody of the lyrics of recognizable fados. 'Ai, Mouraria' is satirized as a guitarist who falls into a ditch at the site of the Martim Moniz metro, exclaiming: 'Ai [Mouraria, que nunca mais te tapam os buracos!].' (10) And a crying nineteenth-century fadista wanders through the rubble of the twentieth-century Baixa Mouraria, as he sings to the tune of the old 'Fado da Severa':
Chorai, fadistas, chorai Que a Mouraria l[sz] vai E est[sz] quase no 'squeleto Apesar da tradicao [ETH] bairro sem Salvacao Com o Salvacao Barreto. (11)
The cartoonists' manifest criticism of the Estado Novo's renovation of the historic district is tempered by the humorous context of the comic, thus its subversive intentions escaped censorship. The fado, however, benefited from a privileged position during Salazar's regime, when it was subservient to the Estado Novo's concept of nationalism. The censoring of Amalia Rodrigues's recording of 'Fado de Peniche (Abandono)' for subversive content, is testimony of the critical limits imposed on the fado novo. (12) But the fado novo never fully divorced itself from its anti-social character of the nineteenth century and continued to lampoon society's absurdities in the twentieth. The lyricists, however, had to resort to allegory and metaphor to criticize the Estado Novo.
Nostalgia for the pre-Republican Mouraria reappears in the fados novos of the 1940s-60s as subversive criticism of the Estado Novo's dream of progress. Because the theme of saudade is central to the fado novo, its manifestation within the context of a disappearing Mouraria seems inoffensive. Twentieth-century lyricists recognized the leit-motif of saudade in the recent fados and benefited from the emotion's capacity to denounce the present in light of a glorious past. (13) The fado novo, therefore, appeared to adhere to a Portuguese aesthetic: the morrinha of the cantigas d'amigo or Camoes's spleen in exile. Nevertheless, the recontextualized saudade questioned the judgment of the state, by accusing the Salvacao Barreto programme of ignoring the past. The fado thus points its finger at the regime's paradoxes, signaling the cannibalization of its ideals: progress implies the sacrifice of an heroic national history.
Examples of critical discourse masked by innocuous lyrical tropes abound in the fado novo. 'Ai, Mouraria' appears to be a love song imbued with nostalgia for Severa's Mouraria:
Ai Mouraria Das procisses a passar Da Severa em voz saudosa Na guitarra...
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