MUSIC-BRAZIL: “Chiquinha” – a Very Singular Woman

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 2 1999 (IPS) - The local Globo TV network has resurrected the story of “Chiquinha Gonzaga” in a long-running mini-series on the life of one of Brazil’s most famous musicians – a feminist, years ahead of her time.

The series is half way through its 38 segments, and has attracted big ratings despite being aired late at night – just before 11 p.m. local time.

Francisca Gonzaga, affectionatly known by the nickname “Chiquinha,” scandalized Rio de Janeiro society for some 60 years at the turn of the century as as a revolutionary composer in a musical world that was exclusively male.

Born in 18947 she married in adolescence to a wealthy businessmen at the bidding of her father, a military man but left her family to pursue a musical career. That was nearly 120 years ago, and such an act signified open defiance of patriarchal society and earned her moral condemnation.

She lost custody of two of her three children but was left with a son and then bore a daughter when she went to live with a lover. Her father never forgave her audacity and considered her to be “dead.”

The rejection lasted for generations, making it extremely difficult to resurrect her memory because even her grandchildren concealed their relationship with Gonzaga, according to Edinha Diniz, the author “Chiquinha Gonzaga, a History of Her Life”, which served as the basis for the TV series.

Allegedly, she composed nearly 2,000 musical works, among which were 77 scores for theatrical pieces. A good pianist, she took on the artistic status quo of the era, disrupting the social order, which only permitted women to practice music in their homes, never in public.

She abandoned the white elite, to which she belonged, to mix with black musicians and achieved a synthesis between European music – specially the polka, and rhythms of African origin.

Chiquinha is credited with the creation of “chorinho,” a style of Brazilian music that was the sophisticated forerunner of the samba.

Popular Brazilian music “has many fathers, but only one mother, who is without doubt Chiquinha Gonzaga,” says Diniz in her biography.

The televised history of the composer, however, mixes fact with fiction, admits screenwriter Lauro Cesar Muniz. he says this is because there are many contradictions among the biographies and scattered information that permits only a shadowy reconstruction of the life of the composer.

The series, whose quality has been hailed by critics, divides the story into three epochs. The first, about Gonzaga’s youth, portrays the conservative environment and patriarchal authoritarianism, while the second part, about her adulthood, is when she develops her musical creativity.

The actress Regina Duarte, known for her numerous roles in telenovels and a series about the 1980s, “Malu Mujer,” and her daughter Gabriela Duarte play the composer.

The final part shows Gonzaga as a octogenarian, assisting in a theatrical work about her own life and narrating some episodes with her last husband, who was several decades younger than her. Regina Duarte is heavily made-up to appear like an old woman, 30 years older than the actress.

Some critics accused the screenwriter of having prolonged the first, young segment for too long, taking away from Gonzaga as a composer, who created the rhythm that Brazilians sing and dance to in this century. Her first song that was a popular success was composed in 1877, when she had just turned 30.

But the formation of her personality, under the thumb of her father and husband, was shaped by living through the Paraguayan war, obligatory for her spouse, and living with the cruelty of slavery, abolished only in 1888, and constituted unavoidable dramatic material, Muniz says.

Besides her decisive musical contributions to the expression of the national identity, Chiquinha Gonzaga fought against slavery and defended social ideas that were progressive for her time.

The composer of the first truly Brazilian rhythms was also a practical forerunner of feminism, which would take almost a century to become a worldwide movement with its own doctrines and its own life and struggle to affirm its calling against “machismo” and patriarchy.

The series, which brought people throughout the country closer to the contribution of Gonzaga, forgotten by official history, consolidates television as the mass media most apt to promote self- knowledge and self-esteem among Brazilians.