Mario de Andrade

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From left: Candido Portinari , Antônio Bento , Mário de Andrade and Rodrigo Melo Franco (1936)

Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (born October 9, 1893 in São Paulo ; † February 25, 1945 there ) was a Brazilian writer and musicologist. He is of paramount importance to Brazilian literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, and in the field of ethnomusicology his influence extends well beyond Brazil.

life and work

Andrade was born in São Paulo and lived there most of his life. He was a child prodigy at the piano and later enrolled at the conservatory in his hometown. He interrupted his studies in 1913 after his 14-year-old brother Renato died unexpectedly during a soccer game. Mário Andrade later graduated from piano studies, but did not give concerts and began to study singing and music theory with the intention of becoming a music teacher. At the same time he did self-taught studies in history, art and French literature . He was an avid reader of the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and the great symbolists . In 1917, the year he graduated from the Conservatory, he published his first volume of poetry: Há uma Gota de Sangue em Cada Poema , 'There is a drop of blood in every poem' , under the pseudonym Mário Sobral.

His first book, however, was not a great success, and Andrade began collecting material on everyday life, folklore and especially music of Brazil in the rural areas of São Paulo and the Brazilian northeast . At the same time he was teaching piano at the São Paulo Conservatory. Also at the beginning of the twenties Andrade built up a circle of friends in São Paulo, consisting of young artists and writers who pursued modernist goals based on the European model . Some of them later came to be known as the Grupo dos Cinco 'Group of Five' : Andrade, the poets Oswald de Andrade (not related to Mário de Andrade) and Menotti del Picchia , and the painters Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti . Malfatti had toured Europe before the First World War and introduced Expressionism in São Paulo .

Under the title Paulicéia Desvairada , for example: 'Crazy City of São Paulo', Andrade collected poems of various lengths and syntactic structures over the course of two years , which mainly consist of impressionistic and fragmentary descriptions and are interrupted by apparently incoherent utterances in the São Paulo dialect . After completing the collection of poems, the author added a “very interesting foreword” to explain the theoretical background. In 1922, when he was preparing the publication of Paulicéia Desvairada , he organized the Semana de Arte Moderna 'Week of Modern Art' together with Malfatti and Oswald de Andrade in order to make the works of the modernists known to a wide audience. As the highlight of the art week, Andrade read from the Paulicéia Desvairada . Although the reading was interrupted by boos, a large part of the audience was very impressed, and the event was later described as a triggering event in modern Brazilian literature.

Using the techniques developed in Paulicéia Desvairada , Andrade wrote two novels on it : the first, Amar, Verbo Intransitivo ' to love, intransitive verb' , was mainly a formal experiment. It appeared in 1933 in an English translation by Margaret Richardson Hollingworth under the title Fräulein . The second novel, published in 1928, was Macunaíma . The protagonist of the same name, a “hero without any character”, takes a trip from the Brazilian jungle to São Paulo and back. On his way he meets different orishas , at the end of his life he ascends to heaven and there becomes the constellation of the Great Bear . With the help of techniques that are later assigned to magical realism , Andrade processes in this novel his investigations into the language and oral traditions of the indigenous people of Brazil , as well as his personal experiences as a mulatto .

During the whole of the 1920s Andrade undertook further extensive trips through Brazil, studied the folklore and music of the interior and published a travelogue from 1927 under the title O Turista Aprendiz 'The Tourist Apprentice' for the newspaper O Diario Nacional .

Andrade was not directly affected by the revolution of 1930 . After the establishment of a military dictatorship under the leadership of Getúlio Dornelles Vargas , he was able to keep his position at the Conservatory of São Paulo and now headed the Department of Music History and Aesthetics. From 1938 to 1941 Andrade was director of the Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Rio de Janeiro , but later returned to his old job. His last poetic work, Meditação Sôbre o Tietê , is a declaration of love for the Rio Tietê , which flows through São Paulo and is compared in Andrade's work with the Tejo in Lisbon and the Seine in Paris .

Awards

When the Academia Brasileira de Música was founded in 1945, Renato Almeida (1895–1981) chose Mário de Andrade to be the namesake of the chair ( cadeira ) 40.

In 1993, the Central Bank of Brazil issued a 500,000 Cruzeiros note with his image on it.

Works (selection)

in German translation
  • Macunaíma. The hero without any character . From the Brazilian Portuguese and with an afterword by Curt Meyer-Clason. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1982. New edition Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-42375-2 .
  • Senhorita Elsa. The school of love . From the American English by Johanna von Koppenfels. Louisoder Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-944153-38-4 . (Original title: Amar, verbo intransitivo . 1927).

Web links

Commons : Mário de Andrade  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Website of the Academia Brasileira de Música , there Cadeira 40. Retrieved on December 6, 2014 (Portuguese).
personal data
SURNAME Andrade, Mário de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Morais Andrade, Mário Raúl de (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Brazilian writer and music researcher
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH São Paulo
DATE OF DEATH February 25, 1945
Place of death São Paulo