Chopin came from Ipanema
Originally published in the TLS, June 20, 2003
Vagabond hearts, freed melody, and the moment of bossa nova
Bossa nova in the United States was a victim of its own early success. The songs were attractively translated, superbly performed, and at a stroke transformed into a jazz idiom. That moment -the moment of "The Girl from Ipanema" as performed by Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto, with Gilberto's wife on vocals fixed the image of bossa nova in our minds, and the image has proved unshakeable. "Tall and tan and young and lovely … " Well, here it is -as Vinicius de Moraes wrote it, as it could be literally translated, and as Astrud Gilberto sang it so memo rably (in Norman Gimbel's translation):
A Garota de Ipanema
(Moraes's lyrics)
Olha que coisa mais linda
Mais cheia de graca
E ela menina
Que vem e que passa
Num doce balanco
Caminho do mar
Moca do corpo dourado
Do sol de Ipanema
O seu balancado
E mais que um poema
E a coisa mais linda
Que eu ja vi passar
Ah, por que estou tao sozinho
Ah, por que tudo e tao triste
Ah, a beleza que existe
A beleza que nao e so minha
Que tambem passa sozinha
Ah, se ela soubesse
Que quando ela passa
O mundo sorrindo
Se encha de graca
E fica mais lindo
Por causa do amor
The Girl from Ipanema
(literal)
Look, the most beautiful thing,
The most imbued with grace,
Is her, the child
Who comes and goes
With a sweet sway,
On the road of the sea.
Girl whose body is golden
From the Ipanema sun:
Her gait
Is more than a poem;
It is the most beautiful thing
That I've seen pass.
Ah, why am I so alone?
Ah, why is it all so sad?
Ah, the beauty that exists,
Beauty which is not mine alone
But which passes, alone.
Ah, if only she knew
That when she passes
The world, smiling,
Fills with grace,
And is itself more beautiful
Because of love.
The Girl from Ipanema
(translated by Norman Gimbel)
Tall and tan and young
And lovely, the girl from
Ipanema goes walking,
And when she passes,
Each one she passes
Goes "ah."
When she walks, she's like
A samba that swings so low
And sways so gently
That when she passes,
Each one she passes
Goes "ah."
Oh, but he watches so sadly.
How can he tell her he loves her?
Yes, he would give his heart gladly;
But each day when she walks to the sea,
She looks straight ahead, not at he.
Tall and tan and young
And lovely, the girl from
Ipanema goes walking,
And when she passes
He smiles,
But she doesn't see.
It is hard to quarrel with Gimbel's version; it makes such a lovely lyric and captures so much of the feeling of the original. But as must be true with any translation, much is lost as well. In this case, what's missing is the philosophy.
Moraes's poem isn't about, or just about, lonely-guy-wishes-he-could-meet-lovely-girl-but-she-ignores-him; it is about beauty which is made corporeal in the girl, somehow separate from her, certainly from her consciousness -and it isn't the girl he can't have, it's beauty itself.
Even if he "had" the girl, he wouldn't have beauty. It exists, reified in a person, but it is simply unavailable. All of which could have been an excuse for the music to slip into an easy Sondheimish wistfulness -but the music opts instead to give us the girl, her walk, her grace, the beach, the sun … and then, in the bridge, to state its inwardness and its philosophical longing -a delicious longing, saudade.
Is it fanciful to hear in this lyric an echo of one of Dante's? Here is his sonnet "Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare" (as translated by Luciano Rebay):
So gentle and so virtuous she appears,
My lady, when greeting other people
That every tongue tremblingly grows silent,
And eyes do not dare gaze upon her,
She passes by, hearing herself praised,
Graciously clothed with humility,
And she appears to be a creature who has come
From heaven to earth to show forth a miracle.
She shows herself so pleasing to her beholders,
That she gives through the eyes a sweetness to the heart,
Which no one can understand who does not feel it;
And it appears that from her lip moves
A tender spirit full of love,
Which says again and again to the soul: "Sigh."
One of the most important musical events of the twentieth century was the marriage of African and European musical languages. It wasn't just one marriage, but a series of marriages -in the American South, in Cuba, in Jamaica, in Brazil, and, of course, Africa. There is something about each of the two music cultures that seems to need the other. The short description of what happened, each time in a different way, is that European music provided harmonic progressions organized around a tonal centre -an idea which, once you've heard it, is irresistible. African music offered its poly-rhythms, rhythms that occur in layers -a kind of beat which, once heard, is hard to live without. The melodic structures of each culture were close enough in form (no Indian quarter- tones, for instance) to allow new melodies to be written in a compromise language. The children of these unions included blues and jazz and rock'n'roll, salsa and son, reggae and samba, High Life, and so on. At a time when American society was still rigidly segregated, jazz, for example, was so thorough an integration of European and African musics that there was no difference in the musical language being used by Benny and Duke, Louis and Bix, only in what their individual geniuses used it to express.
Bossa nova is a latecomer to this family, with cross-generational mixes. It starts from samba, itself an Afro-European product, and other popular Brazilian forms, from which it picks up traces of Portuguese fado (and Iberian music was perhaps the first Afro-European marriage), adds the influence of jazz, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, among others -and Chopin. When a good history of popular twentieth-century music is written, Chopin may appear as a central influence.
He is certainly central to the Brazilian composer, singer, guitarist and pianist, Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927-1994). Jobim acknowledged the little E minor Prelude, whose barely moving, hovering half-step melody over descending chromatic harmonies is given an explicit echo in "Insensatez" (in English known as "How Insensitive", though "Foolishness" might be better) and indirect echo in dozens of other songs. If you are playing the piano, the chord progressions seem to crawl down, shifting a finger or two with each chord change. Another layer of resemblance may be an accident of history -the rhythmic independence between melody and harmony.
This independence was discovered not by the composers and lyricists, but by a performer. Until Joao Gilberto performed them, the songs didn't know what they were trying to be. Gilberto's performances taught Jobim the essence of his own music. Is there another moment in music history when a performer was so intimately involved with the evolution of a style? What Gilberto did was to free the sung melody from the rhythmic confines of the accompaniment. This is easier to say than to do, incidentally. The rhythmic freedom is different from jazz singing, where delays and anticipations heighten our awareness of the relationship between melody and pulse. Gilberto puts the melody seemingly on a different rhythmic track altogether. You don't notice it if you're just listening, but if you start to pay attention at the technical level you feel your mind being pulled apart as you try to follow these two different times simultaneously. The effect that this performance style has on the (non-technical) listener is to make the music even more horizontal in feel -melody and chords and beats rarely line up together to create strong verticals. The rhythmic pulse, with its shy, decentred quaver accents, is away from the chord changes, the melody is away from the rhythmic pulse, and all three flow forward in tension, agreement, balance, and movement. Gilberto, in freeing the melody from the rhythm, multiplied the horizontal effect, and taught Jobim (I speculate) that this is what his music was all about.
Similarly, Chopin's plan was to free his melodies from the rhythmic patterns of their accompaniments (in Chopin, generally a matter of freeing the right from the left hand). Much of this freedom, like Gilberto's, is a matter of the performer's approach, but much is already indicated in the score: Chopin writes five right-hand notes against three in the left hand, three against two, four against three, sometimes flamboyant passages of twenty against six and so on. A nasty passage in the B major Nocturne has a straightforward two-beat melody in the right hand, a "three" pattern in the left hand, and in between, back in the right hand, a series of little chords on quaver offbeats. "Slippage" as a literary term refers to a slippage between signifier and signified, where a word slips its moorings and floats free from its dictionary meaning. I use it here to refer to the slippage between the elements of melody and harmony, which, in both Chopin and bossa nova, creates a kind of special hidden space, the entry space for our imaginations. Chopin is in many respects typically Romantic, but in this respect he is unique. Romantics love flexible time, an indicator that the music is moving with the emotions. But they tend to be controlling -you are supposed to feel what they feel. There is an openness about Chopin -seen also in his unwillingness to have his music tied down by descriptive literary interpretation (he argued with George Sand about this) -not characteristic of his contemporaries Wagner, Verdi, Schumann, Berlioz.
The early Bossa recordings seem over- produced today. Flutes, trombones.
(Jobim's day job was as an arranger at a radio station.) Stan Getz's arrival helped clean things up -winnowing down from the orchestral to the simplicity of a jazz group. All you really need -as the lyrics to "Corcovado" (1960) make clear -is a voice -a bossa nova voice -and a guitar ("a corner, a guitar, this love, a song"). As the performing style evolved, it became aware of its essence in intimacy -the closeness of the voice to the microphone, whispering huskily in your ear. The intimacy of the music is related to an intimacy in the lyrics.
It is not just that the lyrics are about intimate relationships between men and women: the action of the lyrics is taking place inside the narrator's head. He isn't actually talking to the girl, he's thinking about her. He's not telling the story of their lives, and he's not telling it to her; he's telling himself what he's thinking, and, only incidentally, what he's feeling. Inward thoughts, inward music.
This sense of intimacy also goes back to the inward direction, the philosophy.
The standard way for an American female singer to sing "The Girl from Ipanema" is to tell the story in the third person -she's looking at a boy who's looking at a girl. This is the gender/voice shift that results in the disastrous line "She looks straight ahead not at he". But when Brazilian women sing the song, they sing the lyrics as they are, with no shift in gender, partly because the lyrics are so philosophical, so inward, so, in effect, un-gendered; and partly because they are the lyrics and deserve that much respect.
The typical Jobim melody moves by small steps, up or down, and wants only to return to its resting place. But the Jobim harmonies creep crab-like away from their starting spot and eventually the melody is forced to respond. Sometimes it opens up in striking Romantic gestures, sometimes it corrals its harmonies back and gathers them once again under its wing. But beneath this, the rhythm is the bossa nova rhythm, a series of quaver pulses, eccentrically but delicately accented, always pushing with horizontal movement, moving ahead without pause or hesitation in a constant and even flow. One of the most perfect of Jobim's songs, the song which distils the essence of Jobim, was in fact written by Caetano Veloso -his "Coracao Vagabundo". Its melody begins with a movement a half-step up, then back to the starting note, then a half-step up again -it does this nine times before moving a step down. Then it repeats the pattern, a little lower, then comes back, another few times, until finally the harmonies changing underneath force the melody to move into a wider range, outlining a new chord, only then resulting in a big leap and the grand gesture of a falling scale. The words are a little cryptic -
Meu coracao nao se cansa
De ter esperanca
De um dia ser tudo o que quer
Meu coracao de crianca
Nao e so a lembranca
De um vulto feliz de mulher
Que passou por meu sonho sem dizer adeus
E fez dos olhos meus um chorar mais sem fim
Meu coracao vagabundo
Quer guardar o mundo em mim
My heart never gives up
hoping someday
everything will be as my heart wants it to be
My childish heart
is not just the memory
of a happy shadow of a woman
that passed through my dreams without saying goodbye
and filled my eyes with endless tears
My vagabond heart
wants to keep the world in me.
-but contain the inward meditative impulse that runs through so much of the bossa nova poetry. It could all be so heavy ("endless tears") but the many-layered rhythms, the harmonies that are voiced out of root position, the melodies that seem to hover until they are forced into motion, all contribute to an amazing lightness.
There is a moment near the beginning of the film Black Orpheus -a film based on a stage play by Vinicius de Moraes, for which Jobim had written music (it was the beginning of their collaboration) -in which a boy is playing with a kite, flying it off the side of one of the favela-clad hills behind Rio. The flying kite matches the song which is playing on the soundtrack, "A Felicidade" by Jobim and Moraes, the lyrics of which talk of the temporary nature of happiness ("Happiness is like a feather that the wind lifts through the air"), and both are a match for the bossa nova quality in which the breeze of the beat lifts the kite of the melody -and all are a metaphor for the moment of bossa nova itself. It was a fleeting one. When Brazil's military dictatorship came to power in 1964, bossa nova was not the language with which to respond.