Heitor Villa-Lobos

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Heitor Villa-Lobos (b. 1887–d. 1959) is unquestionably the dominant figure in Brazilian 20th-century music, and one of the most celebrated composers of his generation. Championed during his lifetime by noted performers such as Leopold Stokowski, Arthur Rubinstein, and Andrés Segovia, Villa-Lobos was best known for compositions imbued with strong “primitivist” traits, displayed in works such as Noneto, the series of fourteen Choros, Amazonas, and Uirapurú, and for correlating Brazilian music with Baroque stylistic features in his world-famous series of nine Bachianas Brasileiras. After his death, his compositions for guitar gained prominence, somewhat eclipsing the rest of a production encompassing all genres: opera, oratorio, symphonic and concertante works, choral, chamber, and pieces for solo instruments. Only in more recent years have his series of seventeen string quartets and the cycles of symphonies and concertante works returned to the concert hall and are systematically being studied. The striking originality of his music results from an unusual combination of experiences: a classical training developed alongside an early immersion into the world of popular music as an accomplished guitar player and as a noted improviser in Rio de Janeiro choro circles. Thus, in his formative years and unlike his European contemporaries, Villa-Lobos acquired a double fluency in the fields of classical and popular music. In his twenties, moreover, his travels across geographically distant regions of Brazil, notably the Amazon, would leave a lasting imprint on his imagination and would prompt him to declare, in later years, that “his first book was the map of Brazil.” Villa-Lobos’s early fascination with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier started at home, where he was also introduced to the cello by his father. He was a dedicated student of Vincent d’ Indy’s Traité de composition, and, though not formally enrolled in Rio’s Instituto Nacional de Música, he received regular advice from the institution’s most progressive faculty, notably Francisco Braga (b. 1868–d. 1945). In the latter’s orchestra, as a professional cellist, Villa-Lobos acquired familiarity with the symphonic repertoire and with orchestral resources. As with Schoenberg, who characterized himself as self-taught in an interview, a lack of formal training did not prevent Villa-Lobos from acquiring a solid though highly personal technique, as expressed upon arriving in Paris in 1923: “I have not come to study but to show my music.” Music education would remain one of his lifelong concerns, materialized in the 1930s and 1940s through the implementation of his “Orpheonic Singing” project in Brazilian public schools and in the confection of remarkable pedagogic materials, notably the Guia Prático. Villa Lobos died in Rio de Janeiro in 1959, having lived through the many transformations of a period spanning from the last years of the Empire of Brazil to those of the Bossa Nova and the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961), marked by the foundation of the country’s new capital, Brasília, and by the ultimate triumph of a brand of Brazilian Modernismo of which Villa-Lobos had been one of the main early exponents.