Vinicius de Moraes

Brazilian writer Vinicius de Moraes (1913–1980) helped to create two of the icons of twentieth-century culture, the play Orfeu da Conceição, which became known in English as Black Orpheus after it was made into an internationally successful film, and the song "Garota de Ipanema," better known as "The Girl from Ipanema."

Those two works formed only a small fraction of what Moraes accomplished. He wrote poetry for specialists and popular songs for the Brazilian people. A complete list of his occupations would also include diplomat, film critic, film censor, screenwriter, singer and recording artist, advice columnist, radio host, non-practicing lawyer, and general nonconformist with a taste for good whiskey. Moraes was always seeking something new, and that tendency helped make him a great crossover artist who fused Western and African cultural ideas in Black Orpheus and brought subtle Brazilian music to the top of the international charts with "The Girl from Ipanema."

Named after Character in Novel

Moraes—in full, Marcus Vinicius da Cruz de Mello Moraes—was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on October 19, 1913, to well-off parents who named him after a character in the Henryk Sienkiewicz novel Quo Vadis?, which was set in ancient Roman times. His father liked to recite poetry at family gatherings, and his mother sang and played the guitar. Moraes wrote his first poem at seven, was sent to some of Brazil's top schools, and earned a law degree by the time he was 20, also entering Brazil's army reserve. Moraes devoted little or no time to the practice of law, however, for he was devoting his energy to artistic pursuits.

Moraes and a pair of brothers named Paulo and Haroldo Tapajós (or Tapajóz) were friends in childhood, and formed a small musical group at the Colégio Santo Inácio school. When the two brothers began to gain national fame in Brazil as teenage recording stars, Moraes continued to work with them, writing songs in popular dance genres like the foxtrot. At age 15, Moraes had his first two hits as a songwriter with a pair of compositions called "Loura ou morena" (Blonde and Brunette) and "Canç da noite" (Song of the Night). He was also fascinated by trends in modern poetry. As he was finishing his law degree he published his first book of poetry, O caminho para a distância (A Road into the Distance), following it up with the sophisticated Forma e exegese (Forms and Interpretations) in 1935. Moraes spent several years working in Brazil's film industry. In 1938 he won a scholarship to study at Oxford University in England, and also wrote several volumes of difficult poetry, some of it in a mix of Portuguese and English.

The following year Moraes married his first wife, Beatriz. He was married several times, in official and unofficial ceremonies (later in life he was an adherent of an Afro-Brazilian variant of Catholicism), and he had four daughters. (The last, Maria, was born in 1970.) Forced to return to Brazil at the outbreak of World War II, Moraes wrote film criticism and worked as a film censor for the government. Though it was rather late in the game to be taking such a position, he penned articles condemning sound film and extolling the virtues of silent cinema. He also was heard for a time on the Portuguese-language shortwave radio service of the British Broadcasting Company. Moraes joined Brazil's diplomatic corps in 1943. At this point in his life he still shared his family's conservative political outlook and was ready to become a servant of Brazil's government and its interests. He was even sympathetic to fascism in the early stages of World War II.

Traveled Around Brazil

All that changed after Moraes met American leftist writer Waldo Frank in 1945. He was sent to provide safe passage around Brazil for Frank, who had been physically attacked by fascists in Argentina, and Moraes told Selden Rodman of Saturday Review that as the two traveled around the country, "I saw crime and sexual degradation and poverty for the first time. Within 30 days I was no longer a boy, no longer a citizen of the upper middle class, prepared by the priesthood to be a good rightist. I swung full circle." For the rest of his life Moraes was a defender of Brazil's sometimes troubled democracy and an advocate for social justice.

Further broadening of his horizons occurred when he was posted to Los Angeles, California, as Brazilian vice-consul in 1946. He spent three years in the United States, taking in jazz and Hollywood cinema and passing time with celebrities like director Orson Welles and actress Rita Hayworth. Moraes backed off his opposition to sound film, explaining, according to Kirsten Weinoldt of Brazzil magazine, that "I was and continue to be, not a cinematographic mute, as many think, just a little bit of a stutterer." He edited a film magazine, but it lasted for only two issues.

In 1950, after his father's death, Moraes returned to Brazil. He moved in with the 19-year-old sister of a friend, living in a Rio apartment with no electricity, for he had been forced to take a salary cut when not in a foreign post. Supplementing his income as a film critic for the newspaper Ultima hora, Moraes was forced to write an advice column as part of the job. But the environment of Rio stimulated his creative impulses. Visiting nightclubs, he heard upcoming musicians in the infectious samba genre and began writing song lyrics once again.

He also undertook a larger project. While sitting at home in Rio, he told Rodman, he heard "somewhere in the distance the Batucada drums were beating their samba rhythms. I was reading a French anthology of classical myths. Suddenly—boing!—the two ideas connected." By the next day Moraes had completed the first act of the play (his first and only one) that became Orfeu da Conceição. The title, he told Rodman, had the meaning that "Orpheus Jones" would have in English, but the play, a transposition of the Greek Orpheus myth to Rio's Afro-Brazilian slums, was renamed Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus) when it was filmed in the late 1950s. It took several years for Moraes to finish the play—while his divorce from his first wife was becoming final, he lost part of the completed manuscript and had to reconstruct it from memory.

Play Gave Birth to Bossa Nova

Orfeu da Conceição was staged at Rio's Teatro Municipal in 1956; it was the first time, aside from a Brazilian production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, that an all-black cast had performed at the theater. In the play, Orpheus is a streetcar driver, and Eurydice is a young woman from northeastern Brazil who is pursued by a jealous ex-boyfriend. She is killed, not by a snakebite as in the original myth, but by a live streetcar wire. The underworld into which Orpheus goes to try to rescue her is the city morgue. Moraes adds characteristically African images to the story at several points, and the songs, with lyrics by Moraes and music by the then-unknown Brazilian jazz musician Antonio Carlos Jobim, had a quiet sophistication that soon was given the name of bossa nova.

The film of Orfeu da Conceição had a screenplay by Moraes, but was directed by French filmmaker Marcel Carné. The film, a kaleidoscopic color spectacle of music and dance at Carnival time, won Cannes Film Festival and U.S. Academy Awards (the latter for best foreign film) in 1959, and became an international success. Moraes, along with many other Brazilians, was dissatisfied with the final product, believing that it treated Afro-Brazilian culture as an exotic attraction rather than capturing the essence of a serious play. The film did propel Moraes and Jobim to a new level of success as a songwriting duo, with such compositions as "Chega de saudade" (No More Blues) becoming bossa nova standards.

The pair's most famous composition came about while they were sitting at a sidewalk table at a bar near Rio's Ipanema beach, and became infatuated with a young woman they saw walking by. "Garota de Ipanema" became an international hit in 1963 when it was sung by the quiet-voiced Astrud Gilberto (wife of Brazilian star João Gilberto), and the song was given a verse of English lyrics. The music and lyrics were a perfect combination—just enough to communicate the sensuous atmosphere of Rio's beaches to American listeners. Under the title "The Girl from Ipanema," the song brought Moraes and Jobim a Grammy Award for record of the year. It was later recorded by Frank Sinatra and more than 100 other artists. The street where the bar was located was later named after Moraes. The woman who inspired the song, whose name was Helen Pinheiro, later entered a dispute with the families of Moraes and Jobim over rights to the "Girl from Ipanema" name.

Erudite, yet devoted to the art of living well, Moraes became a familiar figure in Brazil. He savored long baths and sometimes conducted interviews from his bathtub. He claimed to have sampled every brand of whiskey on the market, and often told drinking companions that beer was a waste of time. Moraes continued to write poetry, and recorded some of it on a spoken word LP, but he was best known during the last 15 years of his life as a musical performer. He formed a group called Quarteto em Cy in 1965 and had a hit with "Arrastaão."

In the late 1960s Moraes antagonized Brazil's right-wing government and was finally forced out of the country's diplomatic corps for good. He continued to perform through the 1970s, however, frequently making fun of the regime; his status as one of Brazilian culture's most accomplished figures kept him out of serious trouble. Moraes made more than 20 albums, and two of them were later reissued on CD by the Circular Moves label under the titles of Live in Buenos Aires and Days in Mar del Plata. He suffered from a lung disease in the late 1970s and succumbed to it on July 9, 1970, while working on a new song in his bathtub. Brazilian writer Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote the next day (as quoted by Ashley Brown in World Literature Today) that "Vinicius became the most exact figure of the poet that I have ever seen in my life. He was a poet in books, in music, and in life. Three forms of poetry." Tribute albums and biographies followed in the years after his death, and an edition of his complete poetry and prose appeared in 1998. The following year, Orfeu da Conceição was filmed once again by new-wave Brazilian director Carlos Diegues.