24–
It is probably no surprise to read that I am fond of lots of Portuguese musicians. Rui Veloso is one of them. (I like Brazilian music too, but Rui Veloso (not to be confused with Caetano Veloso) happens to be Portuguese.)
There is one thing I like less about his music, though: the lyrics often don’t fit to it. In technical terms: there is a mismatch between the metre of the music and the prosody of the language.
Wikipedia tells me most of Rui Veloso’s lyrics are written by Carlos Tê, so maybe the problem is a less than optimal cooperation between the two? Or conscious choice, for effect?
I don’t know, but I do know that I don’t like it. It degrades the otherwise nice songs and lyrics.
Sometimes in two versions of the same song, Rui Veloso violates the stress rules of the Portuguese language in different ways. So he sings the lyrics the wrong way, but inconsistently. Very strange.
Now after making such harsh claims, of course I must corroborate them with verifiable facts.
In some cases, I can indicate the wrong stresses by spelling devices. For example, a normally unstressed ‘a’ that Rui Veloso incorrectly stresses, I can write as ‘â’ to show that it is stressed but doesn’t become a different vowel.
Likewise, I can write an incorrectly stressed em as ‘êm’ and am as ‘âm’, or ‘ão’ if final.
However, when Rui Veloso stresses a normally unstressed vowel written as ‘e’, orthography cannot visualise that. That’s because in the Portuguese language, such a vowel is never stressed, so there isn’t a spelling convention for it that would use an accent mark.
In Portugal, they use a high central vowel for that, which is unknown in Brazil. Brazilians pronounce ‘sabe’ as ‘sábi’.
Therefore, in order to be able to show exactly what I mean, I decided to use background colours, boldface and italics to be unambiguous, and add accent marks only where possible.
The syllables normally stressed in Portuguese I will display in boldface on a green background. Those that Rui Veloso incorrectly stresses are shown in italics on a red background.
The lyrics of the song are here. The song is also sometimes referred to as ‘Anel de Rubi’ (Ruby Ring). Here is a video of a live performance of the song.
From 0m59s:
Mas esse
teu mundo era mais forte do que eu
E nem com â
forçâ
da música ele se moveu
From 1m28s:
Para te
levar
ao concerto
Que haviâ
no Rivoli
Note: the transcriber of the lyrics on the Brazilian site writes that last name as “rivóli”, but I think what is meant is the Rivoli Theatre in Oporto. (Both Rui Veloso and his letrista (lyricist) Carlos Tê are from that city.)
If the name is correctly spelled in the Portuguese Wikipedia entry, it doesn’t have a written accent, so the last syllable bears the stress. But judging from Rui Veloso’s pronunciation, the last-but-one syllable doesn’t get the normal [u] which can be expected from an unstressed written ‘o’, but it gets the open vowel that we also hear in the first syllable of ‘procuro’, meaning ‘I search’.
The Brazilian transcriber probably didn’t understand that, being unfamiliar with the local situation, and wrote ‘rivóli’. In older spelling variants of Portuguese, you could indicate this special quality of an unstressed vowel, but with a grave accent instead of an acute accent: Rivòli. In the modern spelling, the only remnant of that is found in à, às, àquela etc.
If I am right about this, Rui Veloso makes no mistake here and sings it as he should.
A different version of the same song ‘A paixão’, which is also used next to the lyrics on the Brazilian site, is in this video:
As said, not all metre mistakes are the same here
as in the other performance of the same song.
At 0m14s:
Tu eras
âquela
At 2m07s:
Não se ama alguém que não
ouve
a mesma canção
This songs has so many examples of incorrect metre, and they are so conspicuous and horrible, that you’d almost think it was done on purpose.
Right from the beginning:
Não há
estrelas
no céu a dourar a meu caminho
Por mais
âmigos
que tenha
sinto-me
sempre sozinho
De que vale ter a chave de
càsâ
para entrar
Ter
umâ
nota no bolso para cigarros e bilhar
A primâvera
da vida é bonita de viver
Tão depressa
o sol
brilha como a
seguir
está a chover
From 0m40s:
Parece
que o mundo inteiro se uniu para me tramar
I skip a few examples, because there are too many to mention them all.
From 2m48s the
song’s title is repeated many times,
consistently in a metre that violates the Portuguese
language that I love so much:
Não há
estrelas
no céu
It really hurts my ears to listen to that.
Two Dutch songwriters who would certainly support my view on the metre-prosody conflicts in Rui Veloso’s songs: Ivo de Wijs and Drs. P.
Here’s a song, however, in which everything is OK most of the time. I found only a few mistakes. It is called ‘Não me mintas’ (Don’t lie to me) and I like it a lot. Lyrics are here.
From 0m47s:
E queria vencer todos os vendavais
que se erguem quando o
diabo
se assoa
From 1m15s and 2m46s:
Mas isso já
eram
sonhos
a mais
From 2m00s:
Com a
força
bruta
das trepadeiras
From 2m25s:
Juro
ganhar o jogo sem espinhas
To end with, a song that I like even more than the previous one, and in which I found only one (1!) stress error: Porto sentido.
From 2m11s:
E é sempre a primeira vez
em
cada
regresso a casa
The song is about Oporto (or ‘o Porto’ in Portuguese). How long is it since I was there last? Saudades!
Addition 16 March 2012: explanation of the title of the article.
Addition 1 April 2012: (but not April Fools at all!):
I knew I must have noticed at least
“Não há estrelas no céu” long before I wrote
my article.
Today by mere coincidence, when checking something
unrelated, I ran into some proof, dated
28 November 2005.
To quote myself:
“Heard a song on the radio,
look up the lyrics using keywords 'uniu' and 'tramar',
found:
http://landeiro.deviantart.com/journal/762099/
and was amazed about the many unstressed syllables
that become stressed in the song.
"ParecE" etc., a badly written text, or badly
written music that doesn't go with it.
Nice sounding song, though.