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A very active composer and singer of modinhas and lundus (and also an actor) in the 19th century, Xisto Bahia was a highly influential artist due to his extreme popularity in all Northeast region, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais, and his importance to the Brazilian popular music can never be overstressed. Being a mulatto son of a major, Xisto Bahia was instrumental to the transposition of the popular culture to the major entertainment of the middle-classes in his time, the theater; and he did so bridging the gap between the cultivated composers of the first half of the 19th century and the popular singers of the streets who would reach the next century. Encouraged by Bahia's massive popularity and talent as an entertainer and musician, several members of the élite wrote lyrics for him to put music on, like the Viscount of Ouro Preto, the chronicler Melo Moraes Filho and the poet/lawyer Plínio de Lima.
Along with this invaluable role as mediator, Bahia left true classics even if many of his compositions were lost; he was the author of the first song recorded in Brazil (by Fred Figner's Casa Edison, in 1902): the lundu "Isto é Bom," interpreted by Baiano (Zon-o-phone 10001). Documents of his contemporaries acknowledge Bahia's interpretation for the modinha "Quis Debalde Varrer-te da Memória" as magnificient. A self-taught musician, Bahia started to write his own modinhas and lundus at 17. In 1858, after his father's demise, he became a professional forced by economical difficulties. Working as a baritone for several theater companies, he performed in many provincial cities of Bahia. In 1864, he was hired by the impresario Couto Rocha, touring for ten years throughout the north region. More and more famous, Bahia seemed to fail to prepare himself properly for his performances, which brought him some hooting and negative reviews. After a profound depression, Bahia put himself together and was highly acclaimed in the states of Maranhão and Ceará, returning in 1873 as a very popular artist. After having written the abolitionist/republican comedy Duas Páginas de Um Livro, Bahia arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1875, where he opened it in 1875 at the Ginásio theater in the Vicente Pinto de Oliveira company. His performance granted him invitations to perform several other comedies while he continued to have success as a composer and singer. In that period, his rivalry with Laurindo Rabelo (who was also famous at writing and interpreting double-sense, satiric lundus) yielded, according to Afonso Rui, the use of double-entendre in the theater (a tract still visible in today's cultural production in Brazil). A versatile artist, Bahia enjoyed popular success interpreting these lundus for the people while he also entertained the aristocracy, evidently with an entirely different repertory. Still in 1875, he worked on the play Uma Véspera de Reis (Artur Azevedo) and so creative was his performance that Azevedo considered him to be a co-author in an essay published in the O País newspaper. In 1878, Bahia inaugurated the Teatro da Paz theater in Belém do Pará with the drama As Duas Órfãs. In 1880, the Emperor D. Pedro II attended the play Os Perigos do Coronel, a commemoration of the Riachuelo battle, and praised Bahia's performance in a letter to the Countess of Barral. In spite of his success in all of northeast Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais, Bahia always lived in precarious material conditions, which gradually made him to hate his life as an artist. After losing a humble work as a bureaucrat, he had to return to the theater representing O Filho do Averno, his last play, at the Apolo theater. Praised by Artur Azevedo in the weekly Álbum, Bahia was invited in 1892 by the Portuguese impresario Sousa Bastos for a season in Lisbon, Portugal, but was kept from traveling by the episode known as Revolta da Armada (Revolt of the Armada). With the subsequent closing of theaters due to the economic crises brought by the political aspects of the revolt, Bahia, already ill, left for Caxambu, where he died two years later.
© Alvaro Neder /TiVo