Chico Buarque, the samba poet who invented a fake composer to outwit the censors

Chico Buarque

Photo: CPFL Cultura / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 19, 1944 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Occupation	Singer-songwriter and novelist
Awards	Camões Prize · 3 Grammy · 3 Prêmio Jabuti

For a few months under Brazil’s military dictatorship, one of the sharpest new songwriters in the country did not exist. His name was Julinho da Adelaide. He had an identity card, gave an interview to a newspaper and got songs past the censors that a better-known composer could no longer place, among them Acorda Amor, a samba in which a man woken by a night raid begs his wife to call the thief, because the police are already at the gate. Julinho was Chico Buarque, whose own name on a credit sheet had become enough to get a song stopped. The stunt contains the whole artist: a man who rarely raises his voice, because he can nearly always find a more precise way of saying the forbidden thing.

That precision made him the nearest thing Brazilian music has had to a consensus. The humorist Millôr Fernandes called him the “unanimidade nacional”, and the label stuck for decades. It also hides what is interesting about him. Buarque has spent a career admired by listeners who agree on little else while declining the job of monument: he writes novels rather than memoirs, tours rarely and has handed many of his best songs to other voices.

Francisco Buarque de Hollanda was born in Rio de Janeiro on 19 June 1944, the son of the historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and of the painter and pianist Maria Amélia Cesário Alvim. In 1953 the family followed his father to Rome, where the boy spoke English at school and Italian in the street and wrote his first carnival marches. Three of his sisters, Miúcha, Cristina Buarque and Ana de Hollanda, also became singers. He enrolled in architecture at the University of São Paulo in 1963 and left two years later; the bossa nova of João Gilberto and Tom Jobim had already settled the question.

The break came at TV Record’s festival in October 1966, when Nara Leão sang his A Banda and the jury declared a tie with Geraldo Vandré’s Disparada. Decades later the critic Zuza Homem de Mello published the voting sheets: A Banda had won seven to five, and Buarque had told the organisers he would refuse a victory over Vandré. His debut album, Chico Buarque de Hollanda, came out that year; its cover, a smiling young Chico beside a glum one, became an internet meme half a century later.

In 1968 his play Roda Viva was invaded during its São Paulo run by a far-right paramilitary group that beat the cast, and after the regime hardened its rule at the end of that year he left for Italy, where he befriended Lucio Dalla and turned his 4 marzo 1943 into Minha História. He came home in 1970 to a country where his songs passed through the censor before they reached anyone else. Apesar de Você sold more than 100,000 copies before the authorities pulled it from the shops. Cálice, written with Gilberto Gil around a pun that makes the word for chalice sound like an order to keep quiet, waited until 1978 to reach a record.

The records of that decade are the ones Brazilians still name first. Construção (1971) is built around its title song, a construction worker’s last day told in lines that each end on a word stressed on its third-to-last syllable, reshuffled until the man falls from the scaffolding and dies in the road, holding up the traffic. Meus Caros Amigos (1976) carried Meu Caro Amigo, a sung letter to the exiled theatre director Augusto Boal, and O Que Será, recorded with Milton Nascimento. Ópera do Malandro, his 1978 musical drawn from John Gay and Brecht, moved the story to the Rio underworld. Singers such as Maria Bethânia and Elis Regina gave him a parallel career as the author of their signature songs, from Olhos nos Olhos to Atrás da Porta.

Those songs in a woman’s voice are also where the reputation gets complicated. Com Açúcar, Com Afeto, commissioned by Nara Leão in 1967, hands the microphone to a wife who bakes her husband’s favourite sweet while he drinks and argues about football in the bars. In 2022, in the Globoplay documentary series O Canto Livre de Nara Leão, Buarque said he would stop singing it: the feminist critics were right, and at the time nobody had thought of the song as oppression. Columnists split between calling it integrity and calling it self-cancellation. The episode punctures the flattering myth that he understood women better than anyone. The more accurate reading is less comfortable: he was a superb ventriloquist of his own era, blind spots included, and late in life he chose to say so in public.

From the 1990s fiction claimed long stretches of his time. Estorvo (1991) won the Prêmio Jabuti for best novel; Budapeste (2003), about a Rio ghostwriter who loses himself in Hungarian, and Leite Derramado (2009), a dying centenarian’s monologue, both won it as book of the year. O Irmão Alemão (2014) chased a half-brother his father had left behind in Berlin, and Essa Gente followed in 2019, the year he was awarded the Camões Prize, the highest literary honour in the Portuguese language. The ceremony came four years late, in April 2023 at the Palace of Queluz near Lisbon.

The music slowed without stopping. Querido Diário, from the album Chico (2011), won the Latin Grammy for best Portuguese-language song. Caravanas (2017) won best MPB album at the 2018 Latin Grammys, and its title track took the song award. In 2022 the single Que Tal um Samba?, recorded with Hamilton de Holanda, launched a tour with the singer Mônica Salmaso that ran into 2023 and reached Portugal. In 2024 he published Bambino a Roma, a novel drawn from his boyhood in Italy.

The past year has been busier than his reputation for retreat suggests. In April 2026 he flew to Havana, his first visit to Cuba in 34 years, to record Silvio Rodríguez’s Sueño con serpientes with its author; both pledged the proceeds to the children’s ward of Cuba’s National Institute of Oncology. In September his voice appeared on Incompatibilidade de Gênios, with the Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, on João Bosco’s 80th-birthday album Amigos Novos e Antigos. In October, at 82, he was back on the streets of Rio at campaign rallies during the presidential runoff.

He was married for 33 years to the actress Marieta Severo, with whom he has three daughters, and he remains a football obsessive. No new album of his own has been announced. The last decade suggests he does not need one to stay present: a single here, a duet there, a book every few years, each finished to the last syllable by a songwriter who once had to invent another man to be heard.

Selected Discography

• Chico Buarque de Hollanda (1966)
• Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Volume 2 (1967)
• Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Volume 3 (1968)
• Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Nº 4 (1970)
• Per un pugno di samba (1970)
• Construção (1971)
• Sinal fechado (1974)
• Meus caros amigos (1976)
• Chico Buarque (1978)
• Chico Buarque en español (1982)
• Francisco (1987)
• Album blanco para Silvio Rodriguez (2025)

Tags: singers, MPB, Chico Buarque, Caravanas, Construção, Meus Caros Amigos

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