the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt ten)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

In relation to repertoire choice on the Olympia album, to some extent, Amália’s voice, as extracted from her live 1956 concerts, was made to sound more “Portuguese” than in the live performances (for example, not including a song she performed in Spanish). David Looseley, in his cultural history of Edith Piaf, notes something similar in relation to Piaf’s performances in New York, where she represents an essentialized American ideal of France. While Piag was becoming the sound of the French for New York audiences, Rodrigues was being shaped as the voice of Portugal. Looseley writes about how Piaf’s image postwar, as the “voice of France,” is an image “refracted through an American lens,” a representation that is then exported back to France. In making this argument he draws on the work of Richard Kuisel, who writes about the ways in which France, during the postwar period, is shaped from the perspective of the United States, as America’s “other.” Piaf’s representation as a French national icon is, to some extent them, “refracted” from the mirror that is the music and culture industry in the postwar U.S. For Amália Rodrigues, as the “voice of Portugal,” the most powerful refractions are cast from a three-way mirror, triangulated between Portugal, France, and the United States and the key cities of Lisbon, Paris, and New York (and Hollywood). At the same time, Amália’s Olympia album launched in a moment marked by “the fastest growth in popular music ever seen in France.” Portugal, in terms of geography, economic resources, and international visibility and power, was on the periphery, and the conduit of France helped to amplify Amália’s celebrity and voice for an international and European public.