MANHA DE CARNAVAL
Morning of the Carnival
This is part of my ongoing exploration of the Orpheus myth in music and the powerful role it plays in personal memory. It is also a play on two key words: mourning and morning. First, some context.
Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) is a 1959 film set during carnival season in the working-class neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Eurydice has just arrived in the city to visit her cousin Serafina. She is also seeking refuge from a stalker, a man dressed for Carnival in a stylized skeleton costume – Death himself.
New to the city, Eurydice mistakenly rides a trolley to the end of the line, a trolley driven by Orfeu, who tells a station guard to direct Eurydice to her cousin’s home. As fate would have it, Cousin Serafina lives next door to Orfeu. When Serafina’s boyfriend unexpectedly shows up, Eurydice suddenly has no place to stay. Orfeu offers to let her sleep in his house, and before long they become lovers.
But dark forces are at work, both in the recurring figure of Death and in the presence of Mira, a woman to whom Orfeu was once engaged but who became furious with him when he was more invested in spending money to retrieve his guitar from a pawn shop than on paying for her engagement ring.
Mira becomes the living embodiment of the proverbial “scorned woman.” Her rage at Orfeu’s betrayal is compounded by his deceptions during a Carnival parade, where he dances with Eurydice. She and Death pursue Eurydice through the crowds. Panicked, she runs for her life to Orfeu’s trolley station, where she tries to hide -- only to be electrocuted, accidentally, by Orfeu himself, who soon dies with her in his arms.
Let’s return to our two key homonyms - mourning and morning - and the song “Manhã de Carnaval.” The local children are smitten with Orfeu as he plays his guitar and sings the melody. In fact, they believe that his singing makes the sun rise every morning. Orfeu and Eurydice sing and hum this signature melody throughout the film. After the lovers have met their tragic deaths, one of those local boys takes up Orfeu’s guitar. Playing for the sun to rise, he becomes the new Orpheus.
“Manhã de Carnaval” has taken on an immortality of its own. This song by Luiz Bonfá, with the original Portuguese lyrics by Antonio Mara, helped make bossa nova (a blending of samba and jazz) into an international sensation. Since 1959, the covers of this song number in the hundreds. The Guinness World Book ranks “Manhã de Carnaval” as one of the top ten songs played around the world.
I’ll highlight some of the key musical elements which I think help explain the widespread appeal of this song. Listen to the original performance as you follow along:
The melody has a gently syncopated bossa nova beat pulsing at about 64 beats per minute -- well within a comfortable resting heart rate.
The melody itself seamlessly fuses a sense of yearning with a relaxing sigh — this
naturally synchronizes with the slow inhale and exhale of breathing.
The sense of yearning is immediately expressed in the two opening lines. In each line, a “longing” upward leap of a minor sixth (C up to A-flat) is directly followed by a descending stepwise line filling in that space.
The next three lines reverse things as the melody moves up stepwise and then leaps down, suggesting a series of sighs — a sense of relief that “the sun in the sky came up, shining in every color, then the dream came back”/”O sol no céu surgiu, e em cada cor brilhou, voltou o sonho então.”
The melody then comes to briefly rest on a held note –“Ao coração”/”to the heart.”
The next line repeats the yearning upward leap, but doubt enters with the following line, “I don’t know if there will be another day”/“Não sei se outro dia haverá” as an unstable melodic interval intrudes (C up to F#).
At the same time, this prepares for the eventual resolution on the pitch center (F) of the whole song, which in the YouTube link is in the key of F minor.
Finally, the whole song occupies a space around Middle C, a comfortable accessible space for voices -- male and female, adult and child, and virtually all musical instruments — a true testament to the universality of the Orpheus myth and the power of music in personal experience.
Here are the original lyrics:
Manhã, tão bonita manhã
De um dia feliz que chegou
O sol no céu surgiu
E em cada cor brilhou
Voltou o sonho então
Ao coração
Depois deste dia feliz
Não sei se outro dia haverá
É nossa manhã, tão bela afinal
Manhã de carnaval
Canta o meu coração
A alegria voltou, tão feliz
A manhã desse amor
Copyright 2024 by Joshua Berrett. All Rights Reserved.
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