Bossa Nova Killed Opera in Brazil

The sultry new sounds that bossa nova actively came to encompass
would give an entirely fresh and original slant to the much-maligned
term "modern classical music," literally transforming guitarist
Bonfá, the shy piano-playing Jobim, and his partner Vinicius de
Moraes, into latter-day Franz Schuberts for their songwriting skills.

Joe Lopes

Brazil's Fat Lady Can't Sing—Epilogue

In 1959, almost two years after she had officially left the concert platform, Brazilian opera singer Bidu Sayão returned from her self-imposed retirement to participate in the recording of a new work entitled A Floresta do Amazonas, written by her close friend and fellow compatriot, the staggeringly prolific Heitor Villa-Lobos.

It was a vigorous, soul-stirring piece cobbled together from the scattered remnants of his stillborn Hollywood film score for the movie Green Mansions.

But despite the presence of Brazil's greatest living classical composer and his favorite native songbird, the album failed to catch fire with fans and quickly went out of print. Villa-Lobos himself was to pass away on November 17, a few short months after the recording was completed; for her part, Bidu would never again step into a gramophone studio, nor would she perform before a live paying audience.

In that same year, the revitalized Brazilian motion picture industry, soon to be known as the Cinema Novo (New Wave) movement, would test its fledgling wings by becoming the proud beneficiary of a more exceptional multicultural event: the worldwide release of French director Marcel Camus' production of Orfeu Negro, or Black Orpheus, as contemporary English-speaking audiences would come to know it—a movie based on the musical play penned by Carioca poet Vinicius de Moraes.

A multi-award winner and surprise international hit, the film's extraordinarily influential soundtrack, co-written by musicians Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim, with an able assist from lyricist Vinicius, would help launch the coming bossa nova invasion of the early to middle sixties.

The sultry new sounds that this style of world music actively came to encompass would give an entirely fresh and original slant to the much-maligned term "modern classical music," literally transforming guitarist Bonfá, the shy piano-playing Jobim, and his hard-living partner de Moraes, into latter-day Franz Schuberts for their singularly unique songwriting skills.

Their historic collaboration would help sweep Música Popular Brasileira (or MPB for short) into a whole other musical realm, permanently changing the face and focus of jazz and other forms of popular entertainment for years to come (see my article "Jazz Can't Resist Brazil," in the online Brazzil magazine - http://brazzil.com/2003/html/news/articles/may03/p120may03.htm-, for more on this subject).

While this was all well and good for the pop and tourist trades, where did it leave the opera? What would happen to the over 300-year-old art form in Brazil, now that its feasibility had been suddenly called into question?

In Act Two of my continuing series on "Brazil's Fat Lady," I wrote that in 1960 the country's capital underwent a dramatic change from the old Portuguese-dominated center of Rio de Janeiro to the futuristic metropolis of Brasília.

As an unfortunate consequence of this move, Brazil's major theaters and government-sponsored opera houses were relegated to a perpetual state of penury, if not outright impoverishment.

Opera, as it had been presented and performed in the land of Carnaval and samba, was in danger of going the way of the dinosaur; it was gradually being forced to make way for the sashaying young charms of the seductive new kid on the block, the statuesque "Girl from Ipanema."

Going on the Record

With extinction unavoidably looming, there simply had to exist a more practical method for preserving the rich cultural heritage (or what little of it there was) of the Brazilian national opera, not to mention the outstanding creative contributions of so many of its finest proponents, before this cataclysmic event would come to pass.

The only way this could be done was through the medium of recordings—ironically, the same technology that was threatening to displace opera's intellectual preeminence.

Why threatening? Had not Bidu Sayão, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Camargo Guarnieri, Francisco Mignone, and dozens of other classical artists committed their best-known interpretations to long-playing disc? Had not the prized theatrical works of Carlos Gomes, Alberto Nepomuceno, and Henrique Oswald been given the deluxe three-record treatment on the major international labels?

Hardly, is the brutally honest response to those queries. While even at the zenith of her European and American opera career, Bidu Sayão had left only a comparable handful of recorded extracts from her most popular stage parts, with very little in the way of complete works preserved for posterity.

Her only commercially available complete opera recording (made in 1947) was a version on Columbia of La Bohème, with colleagues Richard Tucker, Frank Valentino, and Salvatore Baccaloni, and the Orchestra and Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera conducted by Giuseppe Antonicelli.

The album was re-released a few years ago on compact disc by Sony Masterworks. It was a fine, even nostalgic production, but paled in comparison to the classic renditions presided over by Arturo Toscanini, Sir Thomas Beecham, and Tullio Serafin.

Another of Bidu's signature roles, that of Norina in Don Pasquale, was launched into the market only via a private, off-the-air transcription from 1940, and featured Baccaloni, Valentino, and tenor Nino Martini in the leads, with Gennaro Papi as conductor.

Much later, the Met itself would issue two wonderful, live broadcast performances from the forties as lavish gift sets for its subscribers: the first, from the 1940 revival of The Marriage of Figaro, starred the ever-beguiling Bidu as Susanna, with matinee idol Ezio Pinza as her Figaro; the second, from a 1947 production of Roméo et Juliette, had Swedish tenor Jussi Bjoerling's impassioned Roméo serenading the soprano's sparkling Juliette.

But as far as satisfying consumers with her thoroughly rounded (and much-admired) portrayals of Violetta, Gilda, Lucia, Manon, Mélisande, Micaela, or even Rosina, record companies looked to other, more "familiar" names to fill the Brazilian singer's studio shoes—Licia Albanese, Erna Berger, Lily Pons, Victoria De Los Angeles, and Lucine Amara—familiar, that is, to New York record-buying audiences.

In truth, the rationale for this decision was quite simple: as regrettable as it may have been for her legion of loyal followers, the closing portion of Bidu's career with the Met and other leading opera theaters had coincided with the advent of the 33S‡long-playing record, occurring sometime around the years 1948-1949.

Moreover, the initial releases of an exciting newcomer named Maria Callas (first on Italian Cetra, then on England's EMI/Angel Records) had spurred renewed interest in the once neglected bel canto masterworks, as did the recitals of early-period Verdi on Decca/London by the superb spinto Renata Tebaldi, her main rival in the opera house.

Commencing in the early 1950s, these two aspiring young artists began to record the standard soprano repertoire (Tosca, Mimì, Violetta, the two Leonoras, Aïda, Butterfly) over an impressive ten-year span. In doing so, they joined another dominant vocal personality of the time, Czech diva Zinka Milanov, who had previously signed with RCA Victor, in the hopes of giving the paying public a solid run for their operatic money.

Callas, Tebaldi, and Milanov. This phenomenal recording triumvirate, accompanied by their usual stage-partners Giuseppe Di Stefano, Mario Del Monaco, and Jussi Bjoerling, proved to be a highly potent combination for millions of classical record buyers in North America and abroad.

Their standing in the classical music world, however, would make it extremely difficult for past opera luminaries, such as the diminutive Bidu Sayão, to successfully compete with on any conceivable basis.

Shunned in the fifties by an intransigent Met Opera management, poor under-represented Bidu was left holding the bag, as it were, by this intolerable state of recorded affairs—a disappointing casualty in the complete opera album wars.

Luckily for collectors, her varied interpretations of Brazilian folk tunes, art songs from France, Portugal and Spain, arias from Italian, French and Brazilian opera, and lyrical Brazilian and French showpieces, written or arranged for her by Villa-Lobos, Hernani Braga, Reynaldo Hahn, and others, have been beautifully restored by Sony, with all of the selections undergoing miraculous sonic transformations, enhancements that have contributed enormously to their shelf-life, as well as to their future enjoyment.

The Girl of the Golden West, and Other Recorded Oddities

The not so subtle shifting of musical tastes in the early 1960s from the classical to the pop arena, with pop steadily encroaching upon opera and, irrevocably, gaining the upper hand, was uppermost in the minds of record producers, and clearly reflected in the preferences and patterns of the album-buying public of that period, both in Brazil and in the United States.

The times were indeed changing, as evidenced by the increased attention being paid to native performers Tom Jobim, João Gilberto, Nara Leão, Luiz Bonfá, Astrud Gilberto, Baden Powell, Sérgio Mendes, and their work, by a plethora of entranced American players, among them guitarist Charlie Byrd, saxophonist Stan Getz, flutist Herbie Mann, pianist Vince Guaraldi, harmonica exponent Toots Thielemans, and many others.

Pointing the way toward this newly expansive musical plain, bossa nova, samba, and (to a lesser extent) other varieties of MPB, experienced a near cosmic explosion on American airwaves, and in record shops, not seen since the heyday of Carmen Miranda, almost to the point of oversaturating the imported music mart all too quickly and too soon, according to some critical ears.

Nevertheless, once firmly committed to this unalterable path, Brazil's homegrown talent (and, more importantly, her audiences) would never again go back to the way things were—the notoriously volatile Brazilian economy would surely see to that, never allowing for the majority of its citizens the experience of such First World amenities as regular concert-going, the purchasing of vast quantities of classical music albums, the attending of live opera performances, or the listening of classical records made famous by native-born artists.

In all fairness, it must be added that the U.S. record industry was experiencing many of the same trials and tribulations with respect to the marketing and selling of the classical repertory as Brazil was, only on a more calculated scale.

Once most of the standard works were more than adequately represented on LP, record companies had nowhere else to go except to engage in a treasure hunt for rare and undiscovered "gems" that might still have gone unnoticed in some obscure backwater of the unrecorded repertory.

A perfect illustration of this was the concurrent 1958 release of two competing stereophonic versions of composer Giacomo Puccini's Italo-American "spaghetti Western," the opera La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), based on playwright David Belasco's turn-of-the-century stage spectacular.

At the time, this infrequently performed work—more a provocative, whole-tone experiment by the renowned Italian melodist than a true successor to his previous Belasco influence, Madama Butterfly—had been given an inferior rendering (on Cetra) of a 1950 radio broadcast from Italy's RAI network, with an even more ineffectual roster of unknowns doing it a disservice.

It cried out for a modern, technologically advanced production, with a cast of equally distinguished stature to promote it; but instead of one new stereo recording, EMI and Decca treated a reticent buying public to two.

The full story behind these differing releases need not be retold here, but let it suffice that EMI's project was originally to have featured an exceptional, all-star lineup to include the divine Maria Callas, leading man Franco Corelli (three years before his Met debut), and veteran baritone Tito Gobbi, with the full forces of the Teatro all Scala of Milan, under the direction of Lovro von Matacic.

What finally emerged from these sessions was a disheartening blend of substitute singers: alongside famed Wagnerian Birgit Nilsson, a last-minute replacement for the departed Callas, EMI enlisted the aid of the incongruously cast João Gibin, a barrel-chested Brazilian tenor who later changed his name to the more Italianate-sounding Giovanni, in lieu of the formerly announced Corelli; second stringer Andrea Mongelli subbed for Gobbi, another ideal cast member to have been dropped from the proceedings.

In volume three of the book Opera On Record, reviewer Edward Greenfield went on to blithely praise Gibin's "beautiful shading of tone and dynamic" and his "very distinctive timbre," which were welcome but decidedly unexpected compliments, given the tidal wave of sound registered by that titan of the turntable, tenor Mario Del Monaco, on the rival Decca set.

In spite of this lone favorable assessment, negative criticism of the whole misguided EMI venture doomed the album to backorder oblivion; it was sadly prophetic, too, of the complicated course Brazilian opera singers would inevitably take with regard to their own future lack of stability in the post-bossa nova period.

Incidentally, nothing further in the way of commercial recordings was ever forthcoming from Gibin, only a few sporadic appearances in the States, including a debut at San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House in the mid-sixties, followed by a solitary Metropolitan Opera assignment as Radames in Aïda a few years later.

Aside from Bidu, the only other Brazilian-born, classical vocal artists to be captured by the microphones with any degree of consistency over the years have been, coincidentally enough, two lyric baritones.

An exceptionally versatile artist, with a "pure, limpid tone, and a gorgeously pliant natural instrument," the handsome singer Paulo Fortes made his operatic debut in 1945 as Germont in La Traviata, at the Teatro Municipal in his native Rio de Janeiro.

For the next half-century, Fortes would enjoy an immensely diversified entertainment career, appearing with many of the major stars of the day (i.e. Callas, Tebaldi, Gobbi, Di Stefano, Del Monaco, and Beniamino Gigli) on the stage, as well as performing on radio, in television, and in the movies.

He sang throughout most of Latin America, and even traveled abroad to Italy and Portugal, but preferred to stay close to his home base in Rio. In fact, prior to his death in January 1997, Fortes held the house record for making the most appearances at the Municipal of any artist that had ever sung there.

His only two complete recordings were of Gomes' Il Guarany in 1959, presented in the original Italian, and the same composer's symphonic cantata Colombo from 1963, both for Chantecler. The latter piece, heavily cut, was recently issued in CD format on the Master Class label, but is primarily of historical interest.

A trio of thrice-familiar Puccini operas, made in Bulgaria, of all places, for the budget label Frequenz—one of Tosca with soprano Raina Kabaivanska, tenor Nazzareno Antinori, and conductor Gabriele Bellini; another of Madama Butterfly, again with Kabaivanska, Antinori, and Bellini; and a third of Manon Lescaut with the same team—co-starred the Brazilian baritone Nelson Portella, a favorite with European audiences of the early eighties and nineties.

The possessor of a warm and mellifluous singing voice, Portella's parts in these frequently performed soprano showstoppers, while fairly involving dramatically, could hardly be termed as true theatrical tours de force.

Opposite his splendid recorded competitors—and there were many to contend with, to be certain—the vocally lightweight Portella came off as a dependable but dull routiner, an also-ran before he ever left the starting gate.

Plenty of Pop Stars

So where had Brazil's myriad opera talents migrated to all these years? Why were there so few classically trained singers around to fill the empty stage left vacant by the departure of that prima donna par excellence and quintessential role model, Bidu Sayão, from the international operatic scene?

One possible explanation may lie within the pop field itself. As irreconcilable as it may seem to us today, Brazilian power vocalists of the 1950s-1960s typically personified the penchant for over-the-top delivery that was so strongly in vogue at the time: they were considered the ne plus ultra of the Latinate-style of pop singing much favored in South America's largest country—at least, until the arrival of bossa nova and MPB.

Among female interpreters of this type were the legendary Dalva de Oliveira, the husky-toned Leny Andrade, and the creamy-voiced Ângela Maria, three individual stylists who could be construed as direct descendants of the vocal tradition previously laid down for them by the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, and the American jazz specialists Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan—extraordinarily moving artists in their own right, epitomizing the raw brand of this emotional, all-or-nothing approach to popular songs that had so imbued Brazil's own version of the hit parade.

On the distaff side, there were Agnaldo Rayol and Agnaldo Timoteo, two charismatic male performers who possessed powerful, tenor-like voices, with all the requisite richness and passion necessary for full-throated vocalizing of the operatic kind.

One of them, Agnaldo Timoteo, was widely acclaimed for two solid hits from 1968, the romantic "Meu Grito" (My Cry) and the tender "Mamãe," a sweetly sentimental paean to Brazilian mothers everywhere. The other, Agnaldo Rayol, with his fluffy, pompadour hairstyle and choirboy good looks, physically resembled the once fashionable African American pop crooner, Johnny Mathis.

Mathis, it should be pointed out, had taken up serious vocal studies near the start of his career, but abandoned his operatic pursuits in the mid-fifties in favor of the more lucrative song sphere. His smooth-as-silk ballad style became instantly recognizable through the liberal use of head tone and falsetto, whereas Rayol's more robust sound can best be described as having a cutting edge to it, what Italians refer to as squillo (pronounced skwee-lo, and not to be confused with the Portuguese word for squirrel).

Squillo is a term used to identify the visceral, penetrating ring in the upper-middle to top-third of the male tenor voice, a somewhat indefinable trait not all members of this voice category can lay claim to.

Ideally, Rayol had this quality in spades. Why he chose the popular song route over a possible career on the operatic stage, after having been blessed with such a remarkable, God-given endowment, is not immediately clear, but that he had the right equipment in his larynx is absolutely without argument.

Like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett before him, two immortal American singers who went through numerous ups-and-downs in their long musical pathways, Rayol had a late-flowering vocal resurgence characterized by his warbling of the trenchant main theme to the hugely successful soap opera Terra Nostra, "Tormento d'Amore" (Torment of Love), sung as a duet with Welsh singing star Charlotte Church.

Their 1998 Italian-language recording of the number was an unparalleled cultural phenomenon in Brazil, and was, undeniably, Rayol's most financially prosperous pop foray in years, resurrecting his sagging singing career at a relatively late stage in his professional life.

It also sounded in eerie imitation of an earlier 1996 Euro-pop confection, "Con Te Partirò" (Time to Say Goodbye), recorded jointly by tenor Andrea Bocelli and soprano Sarah Brightman. That trite tune spirited the blind Bocelli to the top of the crossover charts, where he has encountered substantial media coverage ever since, however debatable (or unwarranted) that may be.

This was not the first time that an Italian popular song had heightened Brazilian awareness of this crowd-pleasing musical sub-genre.

A major event of thirty years prior, one that did much to signal the final transition over into the pop world, and, nearly single-handedly, to derail the classical "gravy train" in the country, once and for all, was the participation in the 1968 San Remo Song Festival by Jovem Guarda (The Young Guard) emblem and Brazilian pop sensation, singer-songwriter Roberto Carlos.

His winning entry, a sappily written love song by Sergio Endrigo, was a Neapolitan-inspired romanza, "Canzone Per Te" (A Song for You), aimed squarely at Brazilian youths' recurring obsession with Italianità, and the obviously partisan Mediterranean judges of the contest.

At that fortuitous moment, however, O Rei Roberto proved that he could deliver the finished goods as well as, if not better than, most of the mediocre talents that had comprised that year's list of ignoble song candidates, thus securing for himself in Brazil the permanent and undisputed title of "The King" (Elvis Presley aside).

The Brazilian Ratings Battle

As it eventually played out, the real struggle for audience attention had already begun to be waged on Brazilian television during the mid-1960s, in the form of live broadcast song festivals, but with a slightly different angle: it was not to be a battle between opera (or classical music) and pop at all, but between the burgeoning Brazilian rock and MPB factions.

This openly competitive situation, brought about by the rivalry of these two popular entertainment forms, quickly led to their becoming a regular weekly feature on the major networks (TV Excelsior and TV Record) of the time.

Strangely, this type of domestic programming has even permeated the pop culture of North American television, what with the recent rebirth of "song contests" recycled as reality shows (American Idol and Pop Diva) ruling much of the TV-ratings game of late.

In Bahian singer Caetano Veloso's candid look at the era, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, New York, 2002), the consuming, all-pervasive influence that was exerted on promoters, performers and viewing public alike, by this new and highly attractive format, was convincingly described in this fashion:

"After this (1965) festival, producers at the other broadcasting company were also more receptive, and initiated a kind of programming that would transform television as much as music. The idea of song competitions had been borrowed from the San Remo Festival in Italy, but in Brazil, after the success of the first one, it was to acquire different characteristics and carry a different sort of weight. Elis Regina's performance had shown the owners of TV Record how broadly appealing MPB could be with the Brazilian public, the scope of its potential audience as well as prestige… MPB started to be taken seriously in Brazil, in every sense: from the specifically musical aspects to the literary and the political, there was an aura of mission connected to the songs."

As a result of this sudden flash with success, fast-rising pop-rock artists of every description and persuasion, including Roberto and Erasmo Carlos, Wanderley Cardoso, Wilson Simonal, Elis Regina, Jair Rodrigues, Wanderléa, Chico Buarque, Jerry Adriani, Renato e Seus Blue-Caps, The Fevers, and Ronnie Von, to be joined later by Gilberto Gil, Rita Lee, Edu Lobo, Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia, Gal Costa, and Tom Zé, in addition to Italian pop favorites Rita Pavone, Gigliola Cinquetti, Gianni Morandi, Jimmy Fontana, and others, would reign supreme (for a time, anyway) as the New Young Guards of the Living Room.

In the same, inexplicable manner that Carnaval and samba had meshed into a feverish, tropical goulash of colorful rhythmic delights, Brazilian rock and popular song had somehow come to terms and agreed to peacefully "coexist," in that genuinely affecting way that the Brazilian people seem to have of digesting non-native musical forms—and, most intriguingly, of turning out lush, finger-snapping oeuvres of deceptively simple structure, despite the presence of so much political turbulence and economic turmoil, particularly during the military years of the mid-sixties to early eighties.

Although opera (and by that, I mean Italian, French, and German opera) had continued to thrive in a few isolated spots in the country—invariably presented by contracted visiting artists, foreign conductors and outside producers—the demigods of Brazilian pop music, once they grabbed hold of the entertainment headlines, would systematically and conscientiously throttle the classical competition into the back-pages of the obituary section.

And they still refuse to let go, as witnessed by the disastrous decline in new and complete opera recordings, and by the rapid slimming down of the classical recorded repertoire by the prime international record labels.

Where this bare road will lead to for the opera in Brazil will be the subject of my final article in this series.

Joe Lopes, a naturalized American citizen born in Brazil, was raised and educated in New York, where he worked for many years in the financial sector. In 1996, he moved to Brazil with his Brazilian wife and daughters. In January 2001, he returned to the U.S. and now resides in North Carolina with his family. He is a lover of all types of music, especially opera and jazz, as well as an incurable fan of classic and contemporary films. You can email your comments to JosmarLopes@msn.com.

Copyright © 2004 by Josmar F. Lopes