Fado becomes world heritage: UNESCO's verdict in Bali, 27 November 2011

The committee was running late. By the evening session of Sunday 27 November 2011, the sixth meeting of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, at the Bali International Convention Centre in Nusa Dua, had spent hours on disputed files from Japan, from Mali and Burkina Faso, and from Oman. The chairperson suspended the debate on Oman's file and moved on to draft decision 6.COM 13.39: fado, from Portugal.3 sources3 sources

The chair of the Subsidiary Body, the six committee members who had examined the nominations in advance, read out a short description. Fado was a symbol of identity, widely sung in Lisbon, a synthesis of Afro-Brazilian music, local song and dance, rural music and the urban song of the early nineteenth century. The body found that the file met all five criteria. Paraguay congratulated Portugal, Spain thanked it, and no one objected.1 source1 source

The decision was adopted. In Lisbon, people had gathered at the Museu do Fado in Alfama to wait for the result. In Bali, the city's mayor, António Costa, spoke of the pride of the people of Lisbon and dedicated the honour to fado's practitioners and scholars. To the Portuguese press he put it more briefly.2 sources2 sources

Fado is a song for one voice, male or female. Traditionally a Portuguese guitar and an acoustic guitar accompany it, both strung with wire; since the late twentieth century the group has often grown to two Portuguese guitars, a guitar and a bass. Much of the repertoire still rests on a small number of traditional melodies, though new tunes and poems keep being added and performers still improvise a good deal.2 sources2 sources

It is learned by ear. The bid described young singers and players training informally in neighbourhood associations and fado houses, often from one generation to the next within the same family, under the eye of older performers. Professionals play the concert halls and the casas de fado, small venues with resident musicians; amateurs sing in the clubs of Lisbon's older districts, from Alcântara and Madragoa to Alfama, Bica, Bairro Alto and Mouraria.2 sources2 sources

The bid did not try to freeze fado. It would be “unrealistic and undesirable”, its authors wrote, to fix a canon of authenticity for a genre that had always changed. What they called urgent was preserving its historical heritage, much of which was at risk.1 source1 source

Fado took shape in nineteenth-century Lisbon, in taverns, cafés, streets and parties among the poor. Its early world was one of sailors, coachmen and prostitutes, and Portuguese intellectuals long rejected it. The bid dated its emergence to the second quarter of the century.2 sources2 sources

Where it came from before that is disputed. Rui Vieira Nery, who chaired the bid's scientific committee, traces it to Afro-Brazilian song and dance such as the lundum: fado is first recorded as a sung dance in colonial Brazil early in the nineteenth century, and reached Lisbon in the late 1820s. The researcher José Alberto Sardinha links it instead to the Portuguese tradition of troubadours and wandering singers. A third theory, now less accepted, looks to Arab music.2 sources2 sources

Its founding legend is Maria Severa Onofriana. Her baptism record, in the parish of Anjos, gives her birth as 26 July 1820; her death record says she died at Rua do Capelão, in the Mouraria, on 30 November 1846, aged 26 and unmarried. A plaque at number 33 Rua da Madragoa nevertheless marks that street as her birthplace. Almost everything else rests on the accounts of a few men who met her: a proud, quick-tempered singer with a loud, moaning voice, thought to have worked in the prostitution circuits of the Bairro Alto and the Mouraria.2 sources2 sources

Her fame came largely from her affair with the Count of Vimioso, which brought her to sing before young aristocrats. A “Fado da Severa”, attributed to Sousa do Casacão and dated 1848, appears in Teófilo Braga's Cancioneiro Popular of 1867. In 1901 Júlio Dantas turned her into a romantic heroine in A Severa, a novel and then a play, and Leitão de Barros's film of the story, which opened on 18 June 1931, was the first Portuguese sound film. No verified portrait of her survives.2 sources2 sources

The ancestry of the instrument that gives fado its sound is also disputed. Some time after about 1760, British merchants in Lisbon and Porto brought in the “English guittar”, a kind of cittern. One school, including Nery and Salwa Castelo-Branco, sees the Portuguese guitar as a local version of it. Another, led by the guitarist Pedro Caldeira Cabral, argues that a Portuguese cittern played since the sixteenth century, the cítara, borrowed the English instrument's name and tuning mechanism, adding “portuguesa” to tell them apart. Written sources link the guitar to fado from about 1840.2 sources2 sources

The guitarra portuguesa is pear-shaped, with twelve wire strings in six pairs, and the bid described it as unique to Portugal. Two main models settled in the first half of the twentieth century: the Lisbon guitar, with a shorter string length of about 440 mm and a higher pitch, and the larger Coimbra guitar, at about 470 mm. Many fado players now use the Coimbra model tuned up to Lisbon pitch.2 sources2 sources

In the twentieth century the state stepped in. After the military coup of 1926, Decree-Law 13 564 of 6 May 1927 regulated public entertainment in 200 articles: promoters needed licences, performers needed professional cards, and programmes and lyrics went to the censor first. Improvisation faded and singers turned professional. From the 1930s, fado houses gathered in the historic districts, above all the Bairro Alto.1 source1 source

Radio carried fado beyond Lisbon. Portugal's first station, CT1AA, began broadcasting in 1925 and played it, reaching emigrants abroad, and the genre spread across the country in the middle decades of the century. Between the 1930s and the early 1960s singers such as Alfredo Marceneiro, Ercília Costa, Berta Cardoso, Hermínia Silva, Maria Teresa de Noronha, Lucília do Carmo, Carlos Ramos and Fernando Farinha set the repertoire and style.2 sources2 sources

Amália Rodrigues took it abroad. She made her professional debut in 1939 at the Retiro da Severa, a fado house named after the legend, and from the 1950s her films, records and seasons in Paris made fado known worldwide. She sang poets such as David Mourão-Ferreira and Alexandre O'Neill, often to music by Alain Oulman, and dominated the genre until her death in 1999, a story Lisboeta tells in a separate article.3 sources3 sources

The Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, which ended the Estado Novo dictatorship, brought hostility towards fado. The Grande Noite do Fado contest was suspended for two years and airtime shrank. Fado returned after 1976, and from the 1990s Mísia, Cristina Branco and Camané reached new audiences, followed by Mariza, Ana Moura, António Zambujo, Carminho and others.1 source1 source

According to RTP, the groundwork was laid by Pedro Santana Lopes, one of Costa's predecessors as mayor. Lisbon City Council approved the bid unanimously on 12 May 2010, and the municipal assembly voted for it “unanimously with acclamation”. It went to the Presidency on 28 June 2010 and on to UNESCO in Paris through Portugal's national commission. The national parliament also backed it unanimously, and the President of the Republic gave it his patronage.3 sources3 sources

The work was done by EGEAC, the city's company for culture and events, through the Museu do Fado, in partnership with the Instituto de Etnomusicologia (INET-MD) of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. A scientific committee of the musicologist Rui Vieira Nery as chair, the ethnomusicologist Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco and the museum's director, Sara Pereira, wrote the file.2 sources2 sources

Performers such as Vicente da Câmara and the guitarist António Chaínho sat on a consulting committee with the guitar maker Gilberto Grácio and two associations, the Associação Portuguesa dos Amigos do Fado and the Academia da Guitarra Portuguesa e do Fado. Mariza and Carlos do Carmo, whose story Lisboeta tells in a separate article, were the bid's ambassadors. The brochure named 89 supporters, most of them singers and musicians, from older singers such as Argentina Santos to Camané, Ana Moura and Carminho.2 sources2 sources

The museum was the bid's backbone. The city had opened it in 1998 in Alfama, in the old water pumping station, and filled it mostly with donations from hundreds of singers, musicians, authors and their families. When the bid was written, its catalogue held 18,205 items. Since 2005, working with INET, the museum had recorded interviews with leading performers and instrument makers, and a database of fado recordings, still under construction, listed more than 15,000 entries.3 sources3 sources

UNESCO asks every nomination for a safeguarding plan, so that listing does not harm what it honours. Lisbon's, drawn up by the city with the support of the Ministry of Culture, set out its first steps for 2010 to 2013. The largest single item, €500,000 of about €1.2 million, was a digital archive of old fado records.1 source1 source

Fado was one of 19 elements the committee added to the Representative List in Bali. Its decision noted that the Museu do Fado's catalogue, expanded in 2005 into a general inventory of other museums and archives, met the inventory criterion, and that singers, researchers and institutions had taken part in the bid.2 sources2 sources

In Lisbon, President Cavaco Silva called it “a reason for pride for all Portuguese”. Francisco José Viegas, the Secretary of State for Culture, said Portugal needed good news as never before. Carlos do Carmo told Antena 1 radio that after the emotion he would see whether he still had the voice to sing.1 source1 source

Rui Vieira Nery, in Bali, was less diplomatic about the wait. He put the slow debate down to “extraordinary incompetence” in the chairing of the meeting. On the eve of the vote he had told Lusa that the bid had brought a “national reconciliation” around fado, a genre shunned for a time after the 1974 revolution.2 sources2 sources

On 27 November 2014, three years to the day after Bali, the committee's ninth session, at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, inscribed a second Portuguese song on the list: cante alentejano. The bid came from Serpa town council and the regional tourism board for the Alentejo and Ribatejo.3 sources3 sources

Cante works almost the other way round from fado. It is sung in groups, with no instruments, by amateur choirs of up to thirty people. A lower voice, the ponto, opens the song; a higher one, the alto, doubles the melody a third or a tenth above, often adding ornaments; then the whole choir sings the remaining stanzas in parallel thirds. The poems are about rural life, nature, love, motherhood, religion and social change.1 source1 source

Listing brought the choirs onto new stages. Serpa's third Cante Fest, in 2017, was billed with 60 choirs and more than a thousand singers. Ten years on, António Silva, of the Rancho de Cantadores da Aldeia Nova de São Bento, told Lusa that new groups of adults and children had sprung up after 2014 and then largely disappeared, and that the older choirs now went to the schools to find children to sing with them.2 sources2 sources

The clearest result is in the archives. In 2009, before the vote, the city and the Ministry of Culture bought the museum a collection of 5,000 historical 78 rpm fado records, according to the bid. Diário de Notícias later put the collection of the collector Bruce Bastin, bought by the state with EGEAC's financial support, at about 8,000 recordings and described it as part of the basis of the museum's Arquivo Sonoro Digital, which now offers 6,159 tracks to listen to online.3 sources3 sources

The museum now runs a school with a course in Portuguese guitar and a seminar for fado lyric writers, and a workshop that teaches guitar making, two of the measures the bid promised. In June 2016 it started its own record label with an album by the guitarist José Manuel Neto.4 sources4 sources

The listing did not freeze the genre, which was the bid's own warning. What it gave fado was an official place: a genre that grew up among Lisbon's poor, was censored under the dictatorship and then shunned for a time by the revolution became, by a unanimous vote of parliament and a UNESCO decision, part of the heritage Portugal has promised to look after.3 sources3 sources