අමරදේව W.D.
175 songs performed · 9 compositions
Amaradeva (also spelled Amaradewa), born Wannakuwatta Waduge Don Albert Perera, ඩබ්ලිව්. ඩී. අමරදේව, was a Sri Lankan vocalist, violinist, and composer widely regarded as the central figure in twentieth-century Sinhala music. Across a career that ran from 1947 to his death in 2016, he built a body of work that fused Sinhala folk melody with North Indian classical form, and his recordings remain the reference point for serious Sinhala song.
He was born on 5 December 1927 in Moratuwa, a coastal town south of Colombo, into a large family. He took up the violin as a child and was performing and composing for radio while still a teenager. Recognised early as a prodigy, he later studied North Indian classical music at the Bhatkhande Music Institute in Lucknow, India, returning with a formal grounding in raga that he would spend the rest of his life adapting to Sinhala material.
Amaradeva first entered film work as a violinist before establishing himself as a singer and music director in his own right. His enduring partnership with the poet Mahagama Sekara produced some of the most quoted lines in Sinhala song, and his settings of folk forms gave the radio repertoire of the 1960s and 1970s its distinctive shape. Lyrics-lk hosts a deep catalogue of his recordings, from devotional and patriotic pieces to intimate love songs and lullabies.
Amaradeva worked largely with traditional instruments, the sitar, tabla, and harmonium, alongside his own violin, and he is credited with devising a hybrid instrument he called the mando-harp. His method of building a song around Sinhala folk cadence rather than imitating Indian film music shaped a whole generation that followed, among them Victor Rathnayake, Sanath Nandasiri, Sunil Edirisinghe, and T. M. Jayarathne.
His work was recognised at home and abroad: the President’s Kala Keerthi award (1986), the Deshamanya title (1998), the Philippine Ramon Magsaysay Award (2001), and India’s Padma Shri (2002). He composed the music for the national anthem of the Maldives in 1972. Amaradeva died on 3 November 2016, and Sri Lanka’s highest civilian honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, was conferred on him the following year. For listeners across the Sinhala diaspora, the songs of Amaradewa still carry the sound of home, which is why this catalogue presents his lyrics in Sinhala script with English transliteration and meaning.
Every Sinhala lyric, composition, and song credit by Amaradeva.
Performed by: Amaradeva (අමරදේව W.D.)
Performed by: Amaradeva (අමරදේව W.D.)
Performed by: Amaradeva (අමරදේව W.D.)