Sousa do Casação's "Fado da Severa" and Júlio Danta's "A Severa": The Genesis of National Folklore in the Death of a "Mouraria Fadista"

Abstract: This article examines the genesis of the folkloric figure of the nineteenth-century Mouraria fadista as a national icon in twentieth-century Portuguese popular culture. In his drama, A Severa: Peça em quatro actos, Júlio Dantas establishes a metaphoric correlation between Maria Severa, the Mouraria, the fado and Portugal, when his heroine dies in the arms of the fado, thus realizing the fate of all Portuguese (according to Dantas’s protagonist, the Count of Marialva). Dantas’s mise-en-scène of Severa’s death is followed by the refrain from Sousa do Casacão’s “Fado da Severa,” the last lines of the play. Fado novo lyricists from the 1930s to the 1970s recontextualize Sousa do Casacão’s  lyrics and Dantas’s proposal of a folkloric Mouraria—the cradle of the national song—to elevate the urban song in the Portuguese collective conscience.