Mísia, who brought a modern flair to fado music, dies at 69

With her smoky voice and her high-fashion look, the self-proclaimed “punk of fado” found stardom by shaking up a venerable Portuguese genre. by Alex Williams

NEW YORK, NY.— Mísia, an acclaimed singer who helped modernize fado, a traditional Portuguese music known for wistful songs of fate, loss and regret, with a runway-ready style sense and an eclectic approach that earned her the label “anarchist of fado,” died July 27 in Lisbon. She was 69.

Her death was announced by Dalila Rodrigues, Portugal’s minister of culture, who called Mísia “a fundamental voice in the renewal of fado.” News reports said the cause was cancer.

Fado — the name is derived from the Latin word fatum, meaning fate — is an urban folk music spiced with Arabic and other global influences that arose in the 19th century in the grittiest quarters of Lisbon. Marked by a minor-key plaintiveness, the music is rich with feelings of longing and resignation.

Like the American blues, fado long functioned as the song of the disenfranchised, a search for transcendence amid struggle. “It was sung in the taverns and the houses of prostitution,” Mísia said in a 2000 interview with American arts magazine Bomb, “where a lot of sailors and rough people, people who had a hard life, went to hear the music.” Fado, she added, “was the shouting of the people with no power.”

Fado is also known for its theatrical, if spare, presentation: stylized, almost ritualistic performances by vocalists typically dressed in black, accompanied by traditional instruments such as the Portuguese guitarra, a 12-string guitar dating to the 13th century.

Her ascent to global success began with the release of her critically acclaimed debut album, called simply “Mísia,” in 1991. She eventually performed in the esteemed music halls of New York, London and Tokyo and attracted a particularly avid following in France.

At home, she was embraced as an heir to her idol, Amália Rodrigues, who reigned for a half-century as the so-called Rainha do Fado (Queen of Fado) until her death in 1999.

Mísia was known for her nuanced vocal stylings. “Her voice can be like smoke, velvet or acid,” Johanna Keller wrote in a 2002 profile in The New York Times. “It sobs, whispers and seduces with the raw emotional daring of Edith Piaf’s.”

She also brought a high-fashion sensibility to fado, appearing onstage and in music videos in catwalk-ready attire that referenced “both fado’s past (its shawls, dark colors and poses) and its present in a world of high-definition photography, light shows and contemporary fashion,” Richard Elliott wrote in his 2010 book, “Fado and the Place of Longing.”

In a 1999 Times review of a performance at Town Hall in Manhattan, Jon Pareles noted her style savvy. Although “black and an air of tragic dignity are essentials for fado,” he wrote, Mísia walked onstage that evening “in a long white cloak with a shawl covering her hair, looking pristinely penitential,” only to remove the cloak after the first song to reveal “a severe black dress and, on one wrist, a glittering, dangling bracelet that made every stylized gesture more striking.”

Musically, too, Mísia was as much an innovator as a curator of a treasured form: She expanded fado’s musical vocabulary by incorporating instruments including bass guitar, violin, piano and harp, while blending elements of bolero, flamenco, baroque music and even the gloomier recesses of rock, with covers of “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division.

“I am not the queen of fado,” she said in a 2005 interview with Portuguese newspaper El Mundo. “I am the punk of fado.”

Susana Maria Alfonso de Aguiar was born June 18, 1955, in Porto, a coastal city in northwest Portugal, to a Portuguese father and Catalan mother. With a maternal grandmother who was a music-hall dancer and a mother who was a classical Spanish dancer, arts were part of her lineage.

She eventually chose her stage name after reading a biography of Misia Sert, a Russian-born, Belgian-reared muse to belle epoque cultural giants such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Marcel Proust.

As a teenager, she sang in fado houses in her hometown. She moved to Barcelona, Spain, when she was about 20 and later to Madrid, where she held various jobs in the entertainment industry while growing more interested in the music of her country. Returning to Portugal in the early 1990s, she committed herself to a music career.

In 1993, after the success of her first album, she released “Fado,” an album that featured her version of “Lágrima” (“Tear”), an Amália Rodrigues standard that Mísia credited as a major inspiration.

Her album “Tanto Menos Tanto Mais” (“So Much Less So Much More”), released in 1995, earned a Grand Prix award from the French cultural organization the Académie Charles Cros, which in 2020 recognized her with an “In Honorem” award for her career accomplishments.

By the time Mísia released “Garras dos Sentidos” (“Claws of the Senses”) in 1998, she had become known for recording songs featuring lyrics by several Portuguese literary lions. This album contained “Dança de Mágoas” (“Dance of Sorrows”), with lyrics by José Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature that same year.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Mísia continued to perform and record for the next two decades. She released her final album, “Animal Sentimental,” in 2022, when she was 66.

To Mísia, age was an advantage in rendering Portugal’s sound of the soul.

“For fado, you must not be very young,” she told Bomb. “You must have the scars of life. If you don’t, you won’t have anything to share.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.