Portuguese Guitar
The Portuguese guitar is the pear-shaped twelve-string cittern with a flat back and a sharp, ringing tone that is the defining instrument of fado, the song of Lisbon. It is played with a long plectrum, its six double courses of metal strings laid over a tear-shaped body, and it developed in Lisbon in the 18th and 19th centuries from the English cittern brought by British merchants, taking on its Portuguese character in the hands of local makers such as the Machado family. In fado the guitar answers and weeps with the singer, and the idiom is often said to voice saudade itself, the untranslatab