Aldina Duarte
Aldina Duarte
Born in 1967, Aldina Duarte was just seven years old at the time of the Revolution of 25 April 1974, growing up apparently far removed from fado’s quaintness, as propagated by the Estado Novo during its final years in power.
According to the fadista herself, the five most determining milestones of her career were: a childhood harshly shaped by the dictatorship; the discovery, at a young age, of a desire to explore her literary imagination; listening to a live performance by Beatriz da Conceição, the fado singer from Porto who successfully achieved fame in the capital during the 1960s; her own performance of the ‘Novo Fado da Severa’ [‘New Fado of Severa’] (commonly known as ‘A Rua do Capelão’ [‘Capelão Street’], evoking fado’s origin myth) in the film Xavier, directed by Manuel Mozos in 1992; and establishing herself as a professional in 1995, when she joined the permanent line-up of the Fado Club, in Lisbon’s Alfama district, at the invitation of guitarist Mário Pacheco.
In the following decade, with the 21st century already underway, she recorded her first album Apenas o Amor [Only Love], authoring eight of its twelve fado poems. According to information from the Fado Museum, more than seventy of her poems are now registered with the Portuguese Society of Authors. In the poem ‘M. F.’ (2004), Aldina Duarte sang of the puniness of human life with an expressive emotional intensity: ‘A sad voice in my memory / will not stop telling me / that all that here exists today, / one day, must surely die.’ Apparently freed from the need to symbolically reinforce Portuguese identity in her fado lyrics, Aldina Duarte nevertheless expresses her emotional intensity by singing, in ‘Mother-home / City’, about abandonment and jealousy, saudade [nostalgic longing] and the typical cobblestones of Lisbon’s pavements, life and loneliness, all of which are associated with the wistful image of the nation’s identity previously forged within the tradition.
On the eminently patriarchal, and therefore by definition conservative, fado scene, Aldina Duarte dared to criticise tradition, mentioning the death of ‘the glory of that story’. The end of the era of gender stigmatisation in fado was tentatively beginning.
