Description
The sentimental modinha stands as one of the most traditional song-forms of the Portuguese-speaking world. In the present paper, however, I shall highlight two nineteenth-century modinha songbooks that are currently held neither in Brazil nor in Portugal. Rather, though produced in Rio de Janeiro, the songbooks are presently housed at the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart and the Spanish National Library in Madrid. This unlikely situation raises a few basic but hitherto unexamined questions: how did these codices find their way into non-Luso-Brazilian repositories? What chain of custody did they go through? Was their transit isolated or representative of wider transnational flows? My paper demonstrates that, despite their common origin in the print shop of Pierre Laforge (1791-1853), a famous local publisher, these songbooks followed rather different paths under very distinct circumstances: up until the 1970s, the volume in Germany was the idle possession of a member of the former royal family in Rio de Janeiro; at the mid-nineteenth century, the one in Spain was actively enlivening the gatherings promoted by Maria Benedita Buschental (1815-1891), one of Madrid’s paramount salonnières. I shall conclude with comments on the textual relevance of these songbook-sources for the critical edition of the songs of Cândido Inácio da Silva (1799/1800-1838), a project I carried out under the sponsorship of the Brazilian National Library Foundation, American Musicological Society, and University of South Carolina.
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