Amália Rodrigues, the voice of fado, dies in Lisbon: 6 October 1999

Amália Rodrigues died on Wednesday 6 October 1999 in the house at number 193 Rua de São Bento, in Lisbon, which she had bought in 1955 and lived in ever since. She was 79, and the cause was a heart attack. She had given her last recital five years earlier at the Coliseu dos Recreios. César Seabra, her partner of 42 years, had died in 1997.2 sources

Portugal was in the last week of a general election campaign. The vote was set for Sunday 10 October, and the Socialist prime minister, António Guterres, was seeking a second term. Guterres declared three days of national mourning. From right to left, every party stopped campaigning.2 sources

Guterres said, as BBC News reported, that the country had lost “the voice of the Portuguese soul”. The funeral mass was held at the Basílica da Estrela, with Guterres and the president, Jorge Sampaio, among the mourners and guitarists playing in the church. Press reports put the crowds that lined the streets in the tens of thousands as her coffin, draped in the national flag, was taken to the Prazeres cemetery.2 sources

Not every tribute was simple. Journalists kept asking whether she had been the singer of the dictatorship that ruled Portugal until 1974. That same day, in Paris, the novelist José Saramago, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year before, gave the correspondent of the Lisbon daily Público a different answer.2 sources

The remark started Miguel Carvalho, a reporter for the news magazine Visão, on 20 years of research into her politics, published in the magazine in 2019 and as a book in 2020. Both versions of her, the regime's star and the secret donor, have evidence behind them.3 sources

Fado is the urban song of Lisbon: one voice, usually with the guitarra portuguesa, a twelve-string instrument found only in Portugal, and an ordinary acoustic guitar, which the Portuguese call the viola. UNESCO describes it as a blend of Afro-Brazilian sung dances, local song, rural music brought to the city by migrants and urban song of the early nineteenth century. It added fado to its list of the intangible heritage of humanity in 2011.2 sources

Fado grew up in the taverns and back streets of nineteenth-century Lisbon, among sailors, coachmen and prostitutes, and educated Portugal long looked down on it. Its founding legend is Maria Severa Onofriana (1820–1846), a singer and prostitute said to have been the lover of the Count of Vimioso. A novel about her by Júlio Dantas, published in 1901, became the first Portuguese sound film in 1931.1 source

After the military coup of 1926, fado was regulated. A decree-law of 6 May 1927 brought licences for venues, professional cards for performers and the prior approval of programmes and lyrics. Improvisation faded, singers turned professional and listening to fado moved into fado houses, most of them in the Bairro Alto from the 1930s.1 source

Her parents, Albertino de Jesus Rodrigues and Lucinda da Piedade Rebordão, came from Fundão, in the poor inland province of Beira Baixa. She was born in Lisbon almost by chance, while they were staying with her mother's parents in Rua de Martim Vaz, in the parish of Pena. When she was 14 months old, says the Museu do Fado (her foundation's chronology gives 1922), her parents went back to Fundão and left her with her grandparents.3 sources

She grew up in Alcântara, the docks district in western Lisbon. Her grandparents moved there when she was about six, according to the Museu do Fado, and she stayed until she was 19, first with them and then with her parents, who came back to Lisbon in 1934. Her foundation's chronology first places her in Alcântara in 1935. Several of her brothers and sisters died young, and the family often went hungry.3 sources

She finished primary school at the Tapada da Ajuda. Her grandmother then took her out of school, against her will, reckoning that “for a woman she already knew too much”. She went to work as an embroiderer and an ironer, and in cake and sweet factories. With her sister Celeste, and for a time their mother, she sold fruit on commission along the Alcântara quay.3 sources

In 1935 she was picked to sing “Fado Alcântara” as the soloist of her neighbourhood's marcha, the parade each Lisbon district stages for the June saints' festivals. In 1938 she signed up for a contest to choose a Rainha do Fado, a queen of fado, but pulled out before it was held. Through it she met Francisco da Cruz, a lathe operator and amateur guitarist, whom she married in 1940. The marriage lasted two years; the divorce came only in 1949.2 sources

In July 1939, after an audition, she made her professional debut at the Retiro da Severa, a fado house named after the nineteenth-century singer. By early October she topped the bill. Within a year, at the Café Luso, she was the best-paid fado singer in the country, earning a conto, a thousand escudos, a night. She also began singing dressed entirely in black, which became the fado singer's uniform.2 sources

Revue theatre came next, from 1940, then travel. In 1943 the Portuguese ambassador in Madrid, Pedro Teotónio Pereira, invited her to sing at one of his parties. In 1944 and 1945 she sang for months at the Copacabana casino in Rio de Janeiro, and in Brazil she made her first records, eight 78 rpm discs.3 sources

Cinema made her a national star. Capas Negras, shot in 1946, opened at Lisbon's Cinema Condes on 16 May 1947. Within months she also starred in Fado, História de uma Cantadeira, which won her the best actress prize of the Secretariado Nacional de Informação, the regime's propaganda office.3 sources

Capas Negras also carried a song that would follow her abroad. Raul Ferrão had written the melody of “Coimbra” in 1939 and could not place it. In the film it was sung by her co-star Alberto Ribeiro, with little success. About three years later Amália sang it on an international tour, and it went round the world as “Avril au Portugal” and “April in Portugal”, in close to a thousand recorded versions.1 source

The 1950s made her an international star. She sang in 1950 in a series of Marshall Plan shows in Berlin, Rome, Trieste, Dublin, Bern and Paris, spent 14 weeks at La Vie en Rose in New York in 1952, and in 1953 became the first Portuguese artist on American television, on Eddie Fisher's show. In 1956 Bruno Coquatrix, who ran the Olympia in Paris, booked her after the success of “Barco Negro”. She returned in 1957, 1959 and 1960, and an eighth time in 1989.2 sources

So abroad she alternated light fados and serious ones with livelier songs and Spanish numbers, and once she had the audience, she said, she could sing whatever she wanted.1 source

Most fado lyrics had been written by popular poets. Amália reached for literature early, recording Pedro Homem de Mello's “Fria Claridade” in the early 1950s and David Mourão-Ferreira's “Primavera” in 1953. The decisive step came with the composer Alain Oulman. The sources disagree on when they met: her foundation says they were working together in 1959, while the National Pantheon dates their meeting to 1961.4 sources

Their first album, released in 1962 and known as Busto or Asas Fechadas, opened with her voice and a piano, without the usual guitars. It set poems by Luís de Macedo, Pedro Homem de Mello (“Povo que Lavas no Rio”) and David Mourão-Ferreira (“Abandono”, “Maria Lisboa”), and her own “Estranha Forma de Vida”. The partnership lasted until 1975. Her guitarists had to learn harmonies that, she said, had nothing to do with fado.2 sources

In 1965 she recorded poems by Luís de Camões, the sixteenth-century national poet. On 23 October the Lisbon daily Diário Popular put the question on its front page and asked public figures whether a fado singer had any business singing Camões. Some approved; others were scathing.2 sources

The poet Alexandre O'Neill wrote “Gaivota” for her in the mid-1960s. He once said, as she recalled it, that fado had been all curls until Oulman straightened it. In 1970 came Com que Voz, named after a Camões line, “with what voice shall I weep my sad fate”, with poems by Camões, Cecília Meireles, Manuel Alegre and Mourão-Ferreira. Her foundation calls it her masterpiece.3 sources

Nuno Domingos, a researcher at the University of Lisbon's Institute of Social Sciences, argues that the Estado Novo did not pick fado as propaganda; Amália's popularity made fado useful to it. She played a part in the regime's cultural diplomacy, through its propaganda secretariat and its colonial agency, sang many times for the elite and admired Salazar. In a 1973 interview the writer Manuel da Fonseca and her agent, João Belchior Viegas, told her she was the only good thing the regime could show the world.1 source

Some episodes fixed that image. In 1958, weeks after a presidential election rigged against the opposition candidate Humberto Delgado, the opposition asked for public shows to be cancelled. Pressed by both sides, she appeared, escorted by the PIDE, at a show in the Alvalade stadium for the anniversary of Sporting, the Lisbon football club, which turned into a rally for the regime.1 source

In 1966, days before the new bridge over the Tagus opened, she wrote Salazar a letter that, in Miguel Carvalho's words, melts with patriotic pride and praise for him. She sang for soldiers in the colonial wars and took part in a 1971 record for the Movimento Nacional Feminino, a women's group that supported the troops.2 sources

After 25 April 1974 the bill came due. Fado was out of fashion and politically suspect: the Grande Noite do Fado contest stopped for two years and fado was heard far less on radio and television. Amália stayed in Portugal and was called a fascist, “the princess of the PIDE”, and insulted at concerts. Oulman organised a letter in her defence, arguing that she had been a professional who accepted contracts like many others. Few signed it.3 sources

The other side came out after her death, mostly through Miguel Carvalho's research, which Visão published in 2019 and the academic journal Análise Social reviewed in 2020. According to Carvalho, she gave money, usually through close friends, to opposition groups involving the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), banned under the dictatorship. They ranged from the youth wing of the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD) to a committee supporting political prisoners.3 sources

Carvalho writes that she paid young communists' fares to Warsaw and passed money for prisoners through her hairdresser. The witnesses he gathered say she also tried to use her influence to free political prisoners, Oulman among them. Her own foundation now says she gave financial support to anti-fascists in secret.3 sources

Communist Party veterans confirmed the story to him, among them Domingos Abrantes, who called her help to the MUD youth wing “a thoroughly confirmed fact”. Domingos accepts the findings, while noting that the book does not reference its sources rigorously. A PIDE report of 1939 on a “Communist Organisation in Fado”, found by Carvalho, mentioned her name in passing.2 sources

César Seabra, her partner and later her husband, backed Delgado's campaign in 1958. In 1962 she recorded “Abandono”, also known as the “Fado de Peniche”, which was taken as a comment on the imprisonment of the communist leader Álvaro Cunhal in the political prison at Peniche fort. She always said she chose songs because she liked them.2 sources

Rehabilitation was slow. Only on 19 April 1985 did she give her first solo concert in Portugal, at the Coliseu dos Recreios. In 1990, at a concert there for her 50 years on stage, President Mário Soares gave her the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint James of the Sword. The Estado Novo had made her a knight of the same order in 1958.2 sources

She was first buried at Prazeres. In December 1999 the Fundação Amália Rodrigues was set up under her will. On Sunday 8 July 2001 her remains were moved to the National Pantheon, the domed church of Santa Engrácia at Campo de Santa Clara. She was the first woman given that honour, and, as Domingos notes, it had never gone to a popular artist.4 sources

Santa Engrácia took so long to build that “obras de Santa Engrácia” is still Portuguese for a job that never ends. A law of 1916 made it the national pantheon, but its dome was finished only in the 1960s, and it opened in 1966. Since then the remains of only seven people have been brought there.2 sources

The fashions she set lasted: the black dress and shawl, the singer standing in front of her guitarists, the habit of singing serious poetry. By the time UNESCO inscribed fado in 2011, a new generation of singers had made their names, among them Camané, Ana Moura, Carminho and Mariza, who built the biggest international career.3 sources

The argument about her politics has not quite closed. In 2019 a town in the south of Luxembourg, home to many Portuguese emigrants, dropped a plan to name a street after her, after objections that she had been complicit with the old regime.1 source