An Evening Of Fado

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An Evening of Fado: Beyond the Music Experiencing an evening of Fado can be more than you're expecting for. It isn't just a live concert where music with sad lyrics is heard, accompanied by two guitars. This can be the main idea and, in fact, this is not totally wrong because nothing else is required anything else to play this “sad Portuguese folksong”1. This notion is shared by thousands of people in the world, including a huge percentage of the young generations in Portugal who have never experienced such a typical Portuguese evening. And this is something bad because an evening of Fado goes beyond the music, it is a meeting with some of the most quintessential aspects of Portuguese culture. Let's see why. Firstly, it is important to remember that Fado arose from the folk, from the streets, where it started to be sung. Born in the middle of the nineteenth-century in Lisbon, Fado was present in moments of socialization and leisure in the fields, alleys and taverns evoking everyday themes like love, suffering, maritime disasters, cities, villages, neighborhoods, biblical passages, etc....and it was related, at is first beginning, to social contexts guided by marginality which made Fado to be unappreciated by the high society. During this time, Fado was also an important tool for political intervention, however, with the beginning of the dictatorship in the early twentieth century, this feature lost space becoming once again the everyday life themes of the streets. Nowadays the scenario has changed and Fado crosses the whole society and is appreciated by everyone. However, although the dictatorship has finished, the artists continue to sing mostly about love. This persistence on such an issue makes me think that Portuguese people are not sad, but sentimental, and for those who have never experienced a live concert, they can be surprised: A lot of songs are

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