Brazilian National Anthem

The story

The music of the Brazilian National Anthem was composed by Francisco Manuel da Silva and first played in public on 13 April 1831. Days earlier, on 7 April, Brazil's first emperor, Pedro I, had abdicated, leaving his five-year-old son as Emperor Pedro II, and on 13 April the ship carrying him left the port of Rio de Janeiro. The anthem Pedro I had composed himself for independence in 1822, now the Independence Anthem, fell out of favour, and da Silva seized the moment to present his own. When he wrote it is disputed: some historians hold that he composed it in late 1822 for independence, others in early 1823, others that it was new in 1831. In style it resembles early Romantic Italian music such as Rossini's. 13 April is now the Day of the Brazilian National Anthem.

At first the music carried words by the appeals judge Ovídio Saraiva de Carvalho e Silva, as a hymn to the abdication and the new emperor, known as the "April 7 Hymn"; those words were thought poor, even offensive to the Portuguese, and soon dropped. The music stayed popular, and by 1837 it was played without words at all public ceremonies, the national anthem in practice though no law named it. New words for Pedro II's coming of age and coronation in 1841 were also abandoned, by the emperor's order that the anthem be played without words whenever he appeared in public and at military and civil ceremonies. The American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, living in Rio de Janeiro, based two popular works on it: the Brazilian Solemn March, dedicated to Pedro II, and the Grand Triumphal Fantasy on the Brazilian National Anthem, dedicated to the Princess Imperial Isabel.

After the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889 the new government held a contest for a new anthem, won by Leopoldo Miguez with words by Medeiros e Albuquerque. Protests followed, and Deodoro da Fonseca, head of the Provisional Government, who was said to prefer the old music himself, kept da Silva's composition as the national anthem by a decree of 20 January 1890; the winning piece became the Anthem of the Proclamation of the Republic. For three decades the anthem still had no official words, and several states adopted words of their own. In 1922, at the centenary of independence, an adapted version of words that Joaquim Osório Duque-Estrada had proposed in 1909 was made official by President Epitácio Pessoa's decree of 6 September; the government bought the rights to the words from him for five contos de réis. On 7 September 1922, the centenary itself, Brazil's first radio broadcast opened with the anthem and its new words, followed by the president's speech.

A law of 1 September 1971 on the national symbols fixed the anthem's form in detail, making official Alberto Nepomuceno's long-used vocal adaptation in F major and the band version with Antão Fernandes's march. For the rest of the military dictatorship, which ruled from 1964 to 1985, any other arrangement was forbidden and closely watched. Gottschalk's long-forgotten Fantasy returned in 1985, at the funeral cortège of the president-elect Tancredo Neves. Since the return of democracy, freer renderings have been allowed, such as Fafá de Belém's, criticised at first and now widely accepted, though most singers keep to Nepomuceno's setting. The Constitution of 1988 names the anthem one of Brazil's four national symbols, with the flag, the coat of arms and the national seal. Its two stanzas are sung to the music played twice; on most official occasions only the first is sung.

What it says

A patriotic hymn, Parnassian in style and Romantic in content. It opens with the proclamation of independence on the banks of the Ipiranga, the stream near São Paulo where the future Pedro I declared Brazil free of Portugal, and goes on to celebrate the homeland, borrowing phrases from Gonçalves Dias's poem "Canção do exílio". The music is a stately patriotic march.

The words