The Eurovision community has lost another artist after the announcement of Sara Tavares’ passing on Sunday. She had been dealing with the effects of a brain tumor for over a decade.
Tavares was born in Lisbon in 1978 and showed great musical promise from a young age. She was catapulted into the music industry when she won the Portuguese talent show Chuva de Estrelas in 1994, performing Whitney Houston’s hit song “One Moment in Time”.
In the same year at the age of 16 she was invited to participate in the Portuguese selection Festival da Canção, where she would win the selection and the right to represent Portugal at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin. To memorialize her, the official Eurovision YouTube channel uploaded a 4K version of her performance.
Tavares was the 8th artist to perform on the night of the contest, coming after Tony Cetinski of Croatia and before Duilio of Switzerland. At the end of the night her song “Chamar a Música” picked up a total of 73 points form the jury including 12 points from Spain, placing her in 8th place overall.
Following Eurovision, Tavares had a number of successful endeavors. She was selected to record the Portuguese version of “God Help the Outcasts” from the Disney movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996, and eventually won a Portuguese Golden Globe for Best Portuguese singer in 2000.
She would release a total of six studio albums across her career, and her music was known to blend cultural elements from both Portugal and Cape Verde (where her birth parents were from). Her last album Fitxadu released in 2017 received a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Portuguese Language Roots Album.
The thoughts of ESCUnited are with Sara’s family during this difficult time.
