Fado

Fado is a genre of urban popular song born in Lisbon, a foremost expression of Portuguese culture and one of its most recognised symbols around the world. On 27 November 2011, it was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, under reference number 00563, consecrating a tradition that for almost two centuries was handed down from generation to generation in the neighbourhoods, the taverns and the fado houses of the capital.

Origins and history

The word fado derives from the Latin fatum — destiny, fate, fortune — and the song itself often makes destiny its central theme. Emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century, Fado is the result of a multicultural synthesis: it brought together Afro-Brazilian sung dances, traditional genres of song and dance, and rural musical traditions that flowed into the port city and cosmopolitan Lisbon of the time. It took firm hold above all from 1840 onwards in neighbourhoods such as Alfama, Mouraria, Bairro Alto and Madragoa, associated with the taverns and with working-class circles.

The figure of Maria Severa Onofriana (1820–1846), a singer of the Mouraria, is traditionally regarded as the first fadista of whom there is any record, becoming an almost mythical presence in the history of the genre. In the twentieth century, it was Amália Rodrigues who renewed Fado and projected it internationally, joining erudite poetry to the song and giving it the stature of a universal art.

More than a repertoire, Fado is a way of inhabiting the Portuguese language — saudade, love, loss and destiny find in it an emotional grammar that few musical traditions have managed to fix in so recognisable a manner.

The Portuguese guitar and the practice

In its classical form, Fado is performed by a soloist accompanied by string instruments. The most characteristic instrument is the Portuguese guitar, a pear-shaped twelve-string chordophone unique to Portugal, whose undulating, melismatic timbre is inseparable from the song. It is joined by the viola (a name that, in fado circles, refers to the classical guitar) and, frequently, by the bass viola, creating the harmonic support over which the voice traces the melody.

The transmission of Fado takes place above all informally, in the fado houses of the historic neighbourhoods and in family settings, where experienced singers guide the younger ones. Two great traditions are distinguished: the Fado of Lisbon, popular and sung by both men and women, and the Fado of Coimbra, bound to university academic life, performed by men in formal dress and marked by a lower, graver sound.

Meaning and recognition

Through emigration and the international circuits of music, Fado has become an emblem of Portuguese cultural identity, able to engage with other traditions and audiences across the world. The Museu do Fado, opened in 1998 in Alfama, is devoted to safeguarding, documenting and disseminating this heritage, bringing together sound archives, instruments and the memory of its great voices.

The UNESCO inscription places Fado among a set of internationally recognised Portuguese intangible expressions, alongside the Cante Alentejano and other manifestations of the national intangible heritage. Its recognition confirmed what the neighbourhoods of Lisbon had long known: that a single song can hold, in full, the soul of a city.