Amar, Verbo Intransitivo – Um romance musical de Mário de Andrade

Mário de Andrade’s Amar, intransitive verb – Idyll is a novel full of “geograficities” and brimming musicality. The study of such (ficcional or real) musical landscapes reveals the author's passionate relationship with music. This essay seeks to demonstrate how the poet, writer, composer and ethnomusicologist used music for various purposes: to report landscapes in literature; to design the plot, or still to maximize the aesthetic effect of the text. The article also shows how a kind of dialogue between Brazilian and German cultures is articulated by music; how the bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo in the 1920’s brings back Romanticism to recent Modernity, and the man-of-dream represented by Wagner stands before man-of-life, Bismarck, throurgh the Brazilian characters. The identification of metaphors and figures linked to extra-literary codes (like the psychoanalytic, mythic and musical ones) indicates levels of semantic organization and an original use of fictional categories that reflect the sophistication of the literary work, in this novel.