O violeiro na obra de Elomar Figueira Mello: quatro canções em perspectiva tensiva

Abstract

The Bahia composer Elomar Figueira Mello is part of the pantheon of Brazilian music as the author of a unique literary-musical work that includes song, chamber music, opera and chivalric romances. His songs have the attribute of approaching the culture of the interior of the contemporary Brazilian Northeast and the troubadour culture of the medieval Iberian Peninsula, representing these Portuguese-Brazilian cultural consonances by means of a sertão that he himself created. The theoretical framework of Semiotics of the song was used to delineate the identity of the character O Violeiro, individual whose destiny is to wander around the world to tell and sing stories, sometimes narrating them, sometimes playing the leading role on them, and by doing so, he keeps alive the imaginary and the memory of the people from sertão with their syncretic religiosity, their ethics and their moral values. For that, four songs were selected in which O Violeiro is recurring, applying two isotopic values prescribed by Luiz Tatit (2010): thematic song x passionate song and inactive force x musical form. Through the application of these isotopic values, it was possible to verify that Elomar uses thematic discursive strategies to establish O Violeiro as a Bakhtinian polyphonic hero. This research also had the theoretical support of scholars such as Bakhtin (2003), Guerreiro (2007), Simões (2003), Machado (2003), Tatit (2010), Zilberberg (2011) and Zumthor (1993).