The “Modinha” as an expression of the XIXth century: demystifying the priest Garcia’S Genius Aura

Abstract

The establishment of the romantic genius, full of anguish and misunderstood, who dies in misery, has followed the flow of historical mystification since the 18th century, in the figure of Mozart. Transferred to the tropics, this character was personified in Father José Maurício Nunes Garcia, black composer of the Court of D. João VI in Brazil, who would have Marcos Portugal as his rival and antipode – the true Salieri of Portugal / Brazil. Through our research, that analyzed all the Modinha Newspapers published in Lisbon from 1792 to 1796, and the Imperial Modinhas that were published by Mário de Andrade in 1930, one can see, furthermore, that the genre modinha, cultivated by José Maurício in at least four surviving pieces, has motivic links that can characterize him as belonging to an incipient nationalization of Brazilian music. Based on this argument, it was possible to draw a profile of the Father that demystifies the aura of genius, since his modinhas, specifically “Marília, si me não amas…”, bring characters that remind us the popular Brazilian oral tradition. Modinha, a song that would resonate in its own masses to constitute a Brazilianness in music, would not be a genre that brings together urban folk and popular influences, and the fact that José Maurício composed in this style would not bring him closer to the traditional currents of neo-troubadour rhetoric?