ABSTRACT
This text describes and discusses Frederico de Freitas’s (1902–80) music for the first Portuguese sound film, A Severa (1931), based on two analytical standpoints: the relevance of the music as a narrative of portugality, in the cultural and ideological context of the dictatorship regime, and the composer’s role in the construction of a repertoire that has survived the film itself. Freitas’s options regarding the combination of music, image and script are analyzed, as well as the aesthetic universes that arise from the presence of the fado genre in this film.
