Abstract
This article analyzes the articulation between music, word, and urban experience in Mário de Andrade’s Lira Paulistana, taking as its central axis the image of the viola that, throughout the poetic trajectory, shifts from “beautiful” to “broken”. This is a qualitative, bibliographical, and interpretative study, based on the works and references selected for the present analysis, with emphasis on Mário de Andrade, Lafetá, Matos, Major de Netto, Frye, Grout and Palisca, Sadie, and Guimarães. The analysis focuses on the musical genesis of Lira Paulistana, the recurrence of images linked to song and listening, and the contrast between musicality and disenchantment in the face of São Paulo’s modernization. The results indicate that the viola participates in the construction of the lyrical subject’s memory: it first appears as a companion and later as an image of fracture, associated with anger, struggle, misery, and urban exhaustion. The article concludes that the “broken viola” condenses a simultaneously subjective, musical, and urban crisis without extinguishing song, which persists as a critical way of naming the city and its inequalities.