The military coup of 1926 installed in Portugal a dictatorship (self-called Estado Novo, "the new state") which would condition the Portuguese life for near half century. The concept of culture is substituted, in the mainstream of European fascisms, by the concept of propaganda. This propaganda had its maximum height at the Nationality Centenary in 1940; the S. Carlos Theatre was then reopened after a restoration with an opera by the regime semi-official composer Ruy Coelho. Curiously, the most important figure of Portuguese musical life in that period is a composer who openly contested the régime and its aesthetic orientations and who, consequently, was forced to do his entire activity outside the institutional circuits: Fernando Lopes Graça.