I just spent a week in Lisbon, Portugal, and its surrounding towns. Although I’m not often tempted to write disgustingly gushing prose about anything aside from Jane Austen, chocolate souffle, Harry Potter, and excellent borscht, Portugal brings me dangerously close to that point — the people, the food, the wine (forget port — everyone should try vinho verde, along with hundreds of other Portuguese vinos), the weather, the architecture, the ceramics, the prices … but most of all, the music.
This trip was one of those yearly jaunts in which I was at a serious disadvantage, being crushed in among corporate social committments and expectations of time spent with the boss’s wife (we’re friends, really, it’s just that we have very different ideas of how to spend a day in a foreign country), so getting to a fado house was a feat of Hercules (or maybe Xena the Warrior Princess, since it involved brains rather than brawn, but whatever). Someday I’ll write that book Travels and Confessions of a Corporate Housewife and you’ll know what I mean. While not technically a housewife, I get to play one during spouse’s conferences.
Fado is not only unique to Portugal, it’s unique to Lisbon (a separate, perhaps more formal style has emerged in the university town of Coimbra). It consists of one singer accompanied by two guitars (one a Portuguese 12-string), and the essence of fado is its heartrending narrative of love and loss and longing. World Music Central says that, “a fado performance is not successful if an audience is not moved to tears,” and I can attest to its effectiveness (no, not just on my sappy and pregnancy-hormonal self) — the power of this music does not lie in understanding the words.
It is said that the essence of fado lies in its link to saudade , a word practically impossible to translate into English, but which means something like a longing for that which is gone or that which might never come. The descriptions I came across caught my attention partly because they remind me sharply of attempts to describe the condition of the Russian soul, an equally amorphous concept, if not quite so immediately stirring. The Wikipedia definition quotes this much better description from A.F.G. Bell: “The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.” When I read this, I knew I had to find my way to a fado house because is this not, quite simply, the discontented state of human existence?
The difficulty in getting a corporate group to a fado house (and no, I couldn’t just run off on my own, tempting as it was) had to do with the Barcelona-like schedule of the Portuguese table. Americans, of course, are used to eating dinner around 6 to 7 p.m., where in Lisbon we’d been stretching our appetites to start at 8 and still finding that restaurants didn’t begin filling until after 9. Fado houses push it even later. Dinner reservations don’t start until 9, and the music itself not until at least 10. Nobody wanted to eat that late, and the houses wouldn’t let non-diners in until after 11 (when I saw the size of the place we went to, I could understand why — it’s more like a tiny dinner theater with no stage).
Finally, after many bottles of wine one evening, at about 11 p.m., I got a small group to crash Senhor Vinho , a local having tipped to me that it was probably the best place for music, if still a bit touristy. The hostess edged us into a tiny table at the back, which an American couple had just vacated for a cab and their cozy beds, and we ordered enough wine to cover the 25-euro-per-head entry minimum. She also, after half an hour, brought us a free plate of freshly baked custardy things. “Especially for the lady,” she said, waving at my slightly cumbersome tummy, emphasizing yet again that the guidebooks aren’t joking when they say the Portuguese love children, even barely visible ones.
Most of the other diners were just finishing their meals. The lights dimmed once, twice, then stayed down. The two guitarists wiggled to the cleared space at the center of the small room, where they sat down as the waiters quieted chatting tourists. The singer, a tall, dark-haired woman, walked like a minor diva to the guitarists. No applause greeted her, only the compliment of silence. The guitars plucked, and suddenly a voice belted out of the slim woman that I thought might shake the ancient blue tiles off the walls. It was like Edith Piaf in an opera singer. She sang … oh, I don’t know. She could have been singing about a lover at sea, a betrayal, or a death. It didn’t matter. I got it. Everything came through her voice, her expression, her music. The second song a Portuguese-speaking acquaintance was able to mostly translate (“Poetry’s difficult,” he had said, which is quite true), and it was about a missing lover. “Why are you gone? Where are you? I am lonely.” Very crude translation of some of the most soulful music I’ve ever heard. The singer sang three songs to the audience’s heartbeats, and our applause at the end rattled wineglasses and the remains of dinner.
Several singers will accompany the guitar players throughout the evening. Each sings about three songs, with the lights coming up in between performances so dinner service can resume and finish. We heard a few more, including a man who seemed to work in the kitchen and got the audience to join him for a traditional Portuguese song, but nothing compared to the heartstopping, yearnful performance of the first singer.
Inspired by Sheila’s original post about buying local music when you travel, I’d stolen the attention of someone else’s guide for recommendations on good fado CDs. At home I can now listen to the classic, revered Amalia Rodrigues and the modern queen fadista, Mariza. But nothing can come close to the gut-shivering experience of being under fado’s spell in person.
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