The music
Fado, saudade and the island
Where fado comes from, what saudade means, how the Portuguese guitar got its sound, and the island's own string music, which travelled as far as Hawaii.
Reserve your seat for the set ↗Fate, set to music
Fado is a Portuguese song form that can be traced to Lisbon in the 1820s, though it probably has earlier roots that nobody can pin down. The name likely comes from the Latin fatum, fate. Popular imagination ties it to mournful tunes about the sea and the lives of the poor, but in practice a fado can be about almost anything, provided it keeps the traditional structure. UNESCO added fado to its heritage lists for living traditions in 2011; Cante Alentejano is the only other Portuguese music to share that status.
What the songs are about
Popular belief pictures fado as mournful songs of the sea and of poor people's lives, coloured by resignation, fate and melancholy, and many songs fit that picture. Its roots lie with Lisbon's urban and seafaring working class, the same world that produced related genres elsewhere in the Portuguese-speaking world: the morna of Cape Verde, which may be linked to early fado, the modinha of Brazil and the kroncong of Indonesia. Each later grew its own tradition. That shared history is one reason fado travels well, and why short introductions help so much: once you know a song is about a departure, the melody explains the rest.
From the taverns of Lisbon
The music grew up in the working-class quarters of the capital, among sailors, dock workers and tavern regulars. Around the 1850s performers still danced as well as sang; by the end of the century the dance rhythms had faded and the fadista became a singer pure and simple. Maria Severa, who sang and played the guitar in Lisbon taverns and died in 1846 aged 26, is remembered as the first singer to make fado famous. In the twentieth century Amália Rodrigues, called the Queen of Fado, carried it around the world.
Two cities, two styles
There are two main styles. The Lisbon style is the better known, thanks largely to Amália Rodrigues. The style from Coimbra is tied to the city's university and to the old tradition of serenades: it is sung only by men, dressed in academic gowns and capes, often at night in the street. Each city even has its own model of Portuguese guitar, the Lisbon one brighter and the Coimbra one darker in tone.
Saudade
Fado goes hand in hand with saudade, the Portuguese name for a melancholic, nostalgic longing for someone or something that is absent and may never return. The word appears in thirteenth-century songbooks, and some writers connect it with the great Portuguese sea voyages, when families waited for sailors who did not come home. In performance you hear it in rubato, when the singer lingers on a phrase's last note and the guitars fall silent around it.
The guitar with twelve strings
The Portuguese guitar's ancestors are the citole, known in Portugal from the 1200s, and the later cittern; and was shaped in the eighteenth century by the so-called English guitar, which gave it its watch-key tuners and tuning. By the second half of the 1800s its partnership with fado had made it fashionable. Its twelve steel strings sit in six pairs, and in fado it carries the melody and fills the gaps between the singer's phrases, while a classical guitar keeps the chords and the rhythm.
Madeira's own strings
Madeira has its own folk music, with local string instruments such as the machete, the rajão, the brinquinho and the cavaquinho, played for traditional dances like the bailinho da Madeira. Madeiran emigrants carried some of them a long way. In 1879 islanders arriving in Hawaii played street concerts, and in the 1880s the ukulele was developed there from small Portuguese guitars, the machete, cavaquinho and rajão among them; three Madeiran cabinet makers are credited as its first makers. The fado you hear in Funchal today belongs to the national tradition and lives alongside this island music.
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