By WALNICE NOGUEIRA GALVÃO*
Considerations about the comic musical genre.
1.
the great author of alvaro shooting, Adoniran Barbosa, composed with his inimitable grace the best known of the macaroni sambas, the moth, making use of an extended metaphor in the first stanza:
Moths when the cold comes
Keeps turning to the lamp to warm up
They wheel, wheel, wheel, then sit down
On the plate of the lamp
To rest”
Then, with the greatest impudence, decipher the metaphor and reveal himself as its subject:
“I am the lamp
And the muié are the moths…”
Another in the same vein is the march-rancho”The mimoso hummingbirds”, by Hervê Cordovil and Osvaldo Moles:
“At the matinee hour when the mimoso hummingbirds
Volatilize, volatilize
I see the washerwomen on the farms putting ani
In the shirts, in the shirts
The song continues, bringing other information:
“It’s the stock jerseys
spring color
It's the brocchio shirt
Dos Mimoso Colibri”
Beautiful, friendly and cheerful like these, but forcing the hand much more in the caricature, is the samba “Oslávio Bisláquio”, whose attribution of authorship is discussed:
If we had a golden crest
Of silver blue wings
We put it on the stand
How did the poet
Napoleon Bonapalte
Oslávio Bisláquio
invented aviation
Flapped wings, soared to the sky
Around the Eiffel Tower
And he continues, amusing himself with erroneous attributions, but sometimes driven by rhyme, sometimes by homonymy or pun:
“Guilhelmo Malconi
invented the telephone
And Paganini was the greatest of trombone
Caxia was a great battery
But in aviation
Oslávio Bisláquio was the good one”
The macaroni samba, of which we have few examples, did not prosper much. Much more widespread was the written text of Italian bastardia, which makes many good people even today think that what is “Italian” is only macaroni. Big mistake – just look in the dictionary. Everything that deforms language with a playful, grotesque, or burlesque, or parody, or simply comic purpose is macaronitic.
The shock of Italian immigration was strongly felt when it was more recent, but it was attenuated as it became acculturated, or integrated into the population as a whole, with the fruitful contribution it brought to all sectors. And, if Braz was its bastion neighborhood, it ceased to be a long time ago.
This was the phase of the popularity of the character Juò Bananere, the creation of someone who had nothing to do with Italian, Alexandre Marcondes Machado. Caricatured by Voltolino, he commented on the news and made very amusing parodies of classic poems, which everyone knew by heart because he learned them at school. Today he is the subject of more than one doctoral thesis, which has contributed not only to drawing attention to his relevance as a perceptive historical witness, but also to collecting scattered and unpublished pieces that might otherwise have been lost. Many of these texts had already been collected in the book The divine increnca, mix of satire with social and political criticism.
Within Modernism, the tales of Braz, Bexiga and Barra Funda, from another Alcântara Machado, this one by the first name Antonio, stands out as a literary experiment, which was a successful one. It registers something that could be improperly called the “Italo-Paulista dialect”, now dead, which prevailed in these neighborhoods, whose concentration of natives since then it has spread to other quarters.
2.
If we understand “macarronic” in the broadest sense, we can include two compositions that are not just in language, but above all in the plot: history of Brazil e Crazy creole samba. Both carry out a process of carnivalization that focuses more on the meaning, unlike Adoniran Barbosa's compositions, which are macaronic in the signifier, when they use corrupted language. Anyone who wants to delve deeper into this subject can rely on the excellent thesis by Rachel Valença, Words of glitter: linguistic study of samba-enredo. There, the researcher at Casa de Rui Barbosa and member of the Velha Guarda do Império Serrano shows the compatibility between the stilted lyrics of the samba-enredo and the twinkling of the parade's vestments.
Those we are examining today are delusional, hallucinatory, anarchic, even surreal. They court the incongruity defined by Lautréamont and appropriated by surrealist poets: “Beautiful as the fortuitous encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella”.
One of them, by the way not a samba but a marchinha, bears the daring title of History of Brazil. Its author, Lamartine Babo, is one of the most extraordinary composers of popular music that has ever existed among us, with an unusual fecundity, which featured successful marches in every carnival. He himself was a fanatical reveler, always dressed as a “Widow”: black silks, face under veils, lacy gloves. And he didn't just compose marchinhas, he also composed classical music, songs for revues and an anthem for every soccer club in Rio de Janeiro. A great bohemian but a great worker, he had ten jobs at the same time, acting on the radio, in the newspaper, in the theater, in popular competitions, reaching the beginnings of television. His fundamental trait is irreverence. But let's go to History of Brazil.
It starts with the question: “Who invented Brazil?”, when at school we all learned that Brazil was not invented but discovered. And then replies:
“It was Seu Cabral! It was your Cabral!”
And on what date?
“On the 21st of April
Two months after Carnival”
It is remarkable: the date of foundation of the nation is Carnival, and not the discovery…
Afterwards, he continues bringing up the icons of the homeland:
“Then Ceci kissed Peri
Peri kissed Ceci
To the sound, to the sound of Guarani.
Do Guarani to guarana
came the feijoada
And then Paraty”
These icons are: the protagonists of Carlos Gomes' Indianist opera; the typical soda from Brazil; feijoada; and cachaça, or parati, as it was called then. Today we would say that only football was missing, because samba is subsumed in Carnival. And it doesn't end there.
Three decades later (1934-1968) another one would appear, the crazy creole samba, by Sérgio Porto, under the pseudonym Stanislaw Ponte Preta. More meticulous in its demanding parody of a samba-enredo, it deliberately goes to carnivalize the icons of the country. The basic premise is the well-known obligation that the samba-plot for the Carnival parade must deal with themes from the History of Brazil. Whence the greatest absurdities.
A very complicated plot will stage Juscelino Kubitschek, Diamantina, Princess Leopoldina, Chica da Silva, Tiradentes, Anchieta, D. Pedro II, and so on. From absurd to absurd, samba ends up celebrating the Proclamation of Slavery, duly attributed to its authors, previously mentioned, Tiradentes and Pedro II, the latter being the title with which Anchieta “was elected”:
“By their union the question was resolved.
And slavery was proclaimed!”
In addition to being good compositions, both the marchinha and the samba are extremely fun, intelligent and irresistible. They operate a sagacious commentary on the solemnity of the samba-enredo and deepen the meanings of carnivalization.
*Walnice Nogueira Galvão is Professor Emeritus at FFLCH at USP. She is the author, among other books, of Reading and rereading (Sesc\Ouro over Blue).
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