Carnaval is celebrated in all of Brazil's cities, but Rio's is the biggest and most flash. From the Friday before Ash Wednesday to the following Thursday, the city shuts up shop and throws itself into the world's most famous manifestation of unbridled hedonism. Its greatest quality is that Rio's Carnaval has never become stale, something to do with its status as the most important celebration on the Brazilian calendar, easily outstripping either Christmas or Easter. In a city riven by poverty, Carnaval represents a moment of freedom and release, when the aspirations of cariocas can be expressed in music and song.

Background
The direct origins of Carnaval in Rio can be traced back to a fifteenth-century tradition of Easter revelry in the Azores that caught on in Portugal and was exported to Brazil. Anarchy reigned in the streets for four days and nights, the festivities often so riotous that they were formally abolished in 1843 - although the street celebrations have remained the most accessible and widely enjoyed feature of Carnaval ever since. In the mid-nineteenth century, masquerade balls - bailes - were first held by members of the social elite, while processions, with carriages decorated in allegorical themes, also made an appearance, thus marking the ascendancy of the procession over the general street melee. Rio's masses, who were denied admission to the balls, had their own music - jongo - and they reinforced the tradition of street celebration by organizing in Zé Pereira bands, named after the Portuguese tambor which provided the basic musical beat.

Carnaval - The action

The organizational structure behind today's samba schools ( escolas da samba) was partly a legacy of those bands sponsored by migrant Bahian port workers in the 1870s. Theirs was a more disciplined approach to the Carnaval procession: marching to stringed and wind instruments, using costumes and appointing people to co-ordinate different dimensions of the parade.

Music written specifically for Carnaval emerged in the early twentieth century, by composers like Chiquinho Gonzaga, who wrote the first recorded samba piece in 1917 ( Pelo Telefone), and Mauro de Almeida e Donga. In the 1930s, radio and records began to spread the music of Rio's Carnaval, and competition between different samba schools became institutionalized: in 1932 the Estação Primeira Mangueira school won the first prize for its performance in the Carnaval parade. The format has remained virtually unchanged since then, except for the emergence - in the mid-1960s - of the blocos or bandas : street processions by the residents of various bairros, who eschew style, discipline and prizes and give themselves up to the most traditional element of Carnaval - street revelry, of which even the principal Carnaval procession in the Sambódromo is technically a part.

Rio de Janeiro guide
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