Mísia

Real name Susana Maria Alfonso de Aguiar, Portuguese singer Mísia embodies the new generation of Fado. Born in Porto on June 18, 1955, to a Portuguese father and a Spanish-Catalan mother, Mísia spent her youth in the popular establishments where the fado tradition was perpetuated. Brought up by her grandmother, a former cabaret singer, she abandoned her studies in anthropology to try her hand at singing according to her own tastes, between the popular tradition and the classical education she had received from her mother, a former dancer. She moved to Barcelona, where she frequented the fringe scene, and then to Madrid, where she adopted her "garçonne" haircut. Returning to Portugal in 1991, she took the pseudonym Mísia after the French pianist Misia Sert, and sang Fado in her own modern way to texts by contemporary poets, enriching the musical arrangements of her repertoire on the first album Mísia (1991), also heralded as "the Fado revival". Subsequent albums brought her to the attention of an ever-widening audience, and the singer performed at concerts and festivals around the world. Settling in Paris in the 2000s, she returned to Portugal five years later, appearing in a series of specially-created shows. In 2008, she performed Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat in Barcelona , based on a text by the poet Ramuz. A polyglot performer, Mísia sings in Portuguese, Spanish, French and English. In 2011, she took part in the festivities for the 101st anniversary of the Portuguese Republic at the National Palace in Belém, then in Fabrizio Romano's Delikatessen and Salto created by Christine Pluhar and her ensemble L'Arpeggiata. After the release of the album Pura Vida in 2020, the autobiographical project Animal Sentimental (2022) is released as a book, record and show. This was the last appearance for Mísia, who died of cancer on July 27, 2024 at the age of 69.

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