I must have looked quite confused as I stood in front of the shelf with all the fado CDs, because out of nowhere he appeared and with a mysterious expression he pointed to the CD of a singer: Mafalda Arnauth.

It was April 2001, and I was in Lisbon, Portugal, for a conference organized by the company I was working for at the time. On the flight, I was leafing through the Baedeker – which was still available in printed form back then – and stumbled across a musical genre that has fascinated me ever since. It was fado, a musical genre from Lisbon and Porto that seems quite melancholy and indeed is, and not without good reason means “fate”. In any case, I had decided to take a closer look at it.