Heitor Villa-Lobos
Heitor Villa-Lobos was a Brazilian composer, conductor, cellist, and classical guitarist described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music". Villa-Lobos has globally become one of the most recognizable South American composers in music history. A prolific composer, he wrote many orchestral, chamber, instrumental and vocal works, totaling over 2,000 works by his death in 1959. His music was influenced by both Brazilian folk music and stylistic elements from the European classical tradition, as exemplified by his Bachianas Brasileiras and his Chôros. His Etudes for classical guitar, dedicated to Andrés Segovia, and his 5 Preludes, dedicated to his spouse Arminda Neves d'Almeida, a.k.a. "Mindinha", are important works in the classical guitar repertory.
Biography
Youth and exploration
Villa-Lobos was born in Rio de Janeiro. His father, Raúl, was a civil servant, an educated man of Spanish extraction, a librarian, and an amateur astronomer and musician. In Villa-Lobos's early childhood, Brazil underwent a period of social revolution and modernisation, abolishing slavery in 1888 and overthrowing the Empire of Brazil in 1889. The changes in Brazil were reflected in its musical life: previously European music had been the dominant influence, and the courses at the Conservatório de Música were grounded in traditional counterpoint and harmony. Villa-Lobos underwent very little of this formal training. After a few abortive harmony lessons, he learnt music by illicit observation from the top of the stairs of the regular musical evenings at his house arranged by his father. He learned to play cello, clarinet, and classical guitar. When his father died suddenly in 1899 he earned a living for his family by playing in cinema and theatre orchestras in Rio.Around 1905 Villa-Lobos started explorations of Brazil's "dark interior", absorbing the native Brazilian musical culture. Serious doubt has been cast on some of Villa-Lobos's tales of the decade or so he spent on these expeditions, and about his capture and near escape from cannibals, with some believing them to be fabrications or wildly embellished romanticism. After this period, he gave up any idea of conventional training and instead absorbed the musical influences of Brazil's indigenous cultures, themselves based on Portuguese and African, as well as American Indian elements. His earliest compositions were the result of improvisations on the classical guitar from this period.
Villa-Lobos played with many local Brazilian street-music bands; he was also influenced by the cinema and Ernesto Nazareth's improvised tangos and polkas. For a time Villa-Lobos became a cellist in a Rio opera company, and his early compositions include attempts at Grand Opera. Encouraged by Arthur Napoleão, a pianist and music publisher, he decided to compose seriously.
Brazilian influences
On November 12, 1913, Villa-Lobos married the pianist Lucília Guimarães, ended his travels, and began his career as a serious musician. Up until his marriage, he had not learned to play the piano, so his wife taught him the rudiments of the instrument. His music began to be published in 1913. He introduced some of his compositions in a series of occasional chamber concerts from 19151921, mainly in Rio de Janeiro's Salão Nobre do Jornal do Comércio.The music presented at these concerts shows his coming to terms with the conflicting elements in his experience, and overcoming a crisis of identity, as to whether European or Brazilian music would dominate his style. This was decided by 1916, the year in which he composed the symphonic poems Amazonas and Tédio de alvorada, the first version of what would become Uirapurú. These works drew from native Brazilian legends and the use of "primitive" folk material.
European influences did still inspire Villa-Lobos. In 1917 Sergei Diaghilev made an impact on tour in Brazil with his Ballets Russes. That year Villa-Lobos also met the French composer Darius Milhaud, who was in Rio as secretary to Paul Claudel at the French Legation. Milhaud brought the music of Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and possibly Igor Stravinsky; in return Villa-Lobos introduced Milhaud to Brazilian street music. In 1918, he also met the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who became a lifelong friend and champion; this meeting prompted Villa-Lobos to write more piano music.
In about 1918 Villa-Lobos abandoned the use of opus numbers for his compositions as a constraint to his pioneering spirit. With the piano suite Carnaval das crianças of 191920, Villa-Lobos liberated his style altogether from European Romanticism: the suite, in eight movements with the finale written for piano duet, depicts eight characters or scenes from Rio's Lenten Carnival.
In February 1922, a festival of modern art took place in São Paulo and Villa-Lobos contributed performances of his own works. The press were unsympathetic and the audience were not appreciative; their mockery was encouraged by Villa-Lobos's being forced by a foot infection to wear one carpet slipper. The festival ended with Villa-Lobos's Quarteto simbólico, composed as an impression of Brazilian urban life.
In July 1922, Rubinstein gave the first performance of the piano suite A Prole do Bebê, composed in 1918. There had recently been an attempted military coup on Copacabana Beach, and places of entertainment had been closed for days; the public possibly wanted something less intellectually demanding, and the piece was booed. Villa-Lobos was philosophical about it, and Rubinstein later reminisced that the composer said, "I am still too good for them." The piece has been called "the first enduring work of Brazilian modernism".
Rubinstein suggested that Villa-Lobos tour abroad, and in 1923 he set out for Paris. His avowed aim was to exhibit his exotic sound world rather than to study. Just before he left he completed his Nonet which was first performed after his arrival in the French capital. He stayed in Paris in 192324 and 192730, and there he met influential residents including Edgard Varèse, Pablo Picasso, Leopold Stokowski and Aaron Copland. Parisian concerts of his music made a strong impression.
In the 1920s, Villa-Lobos would cross paths with one of the most well-known and influential classical guitar performers in history, Andrés Segovia, to work on a commissioned guitar composition. Villa-Lobos responded by writing a set of twelve such pieces, each based on a tiny detail or figure played by Brazilian itinerant street musicians, transformed into an étude that is not merely didactic. Over time, this collection of etudes has gone on to become one of the integral sets in the modern classical guitar repertoire, seen as higher level studies guitarists will have to play at some point or another during their careers. The music of chorões also provided the initial inspiration for his Chôros, a series of compositions written between 1920 and 1929. The first European performance of Chôros No. 10, in Paris, caused a storm: L.Chevaillier wrote of it in Le Monde musical, " an art ... to which we must now give a new name." Though he not as well known for his guitar compositions, everything he wrote for the instrument is considered standard repertoire and is regarded with utmost importance.
Vargas era
In 1930, Villa-Lobos, who was in Brazil to conduct, planned to return to Paris. One of the consequences of the revolution of that year was that money could no longer be taken out of the country, and so he had no means of paying any rents abroad. Thus forced to stay in Brazil, he arranged concerts instead around São Paulo, and composed patriotic and educational music. In 1932, he became director of the Superintendência de Educação Musical e Artística, and his duties included arranging concerts including the Brazilian premieres of Ludwig van Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in B minor as well as Brazilian compositions. His position at SEMA led him to compose mainly patriotic and propagandist works. His series of Bachianas Brasileiras were a notable exception.In 1936, at the age of forty-nine, Villa-Lobos left his wife, and became romantically involved with Arminda Neves d'Almeida, who remained his companion until death. Arminda eventually took on the name Villa-Lobos, though Villa-Lobos never divorced his first wife. After Villa-Lobos' death, Arminda became the Director of the Museu Villa-Lobos in 1960, until her death in 1985. Arminda was herself a musician and a significant influence on Villa-Lobos. He also dedicated a good number of works to her, including the Ciclo brasileiro and many of the Chôros.
Villa-Lobos's writings during the presidency of Getúlio Vargas include propaganda for Brazilian nationhood, and teaching and theoretical works. His Guia Prático ran to 11volumes, Solfejos contained vocal exercises, and Canto Orfeônico contained patriotic songs for schools and for civic occasions. His music for the film O Descobrimento do Brasil of 1936, which included versions of earlier compositions, was arranged into orchestral suites, and includes a depiction of the first mass in Brazil in a setting for double choir.
Villa-Lobos published A Música Nacionalista no Govêrno Getúlio Vargas 1941, in which he characterised the nation as a sacred entity whose symbols were inviolable. Villa-Lobos was the chair of a committee whose task was to define a definitive version of the Brazilian national anthem.
After 1937, during the Estado Novo period when Vargas seized power by decree, Villa-Lobos continued producing patriotic works directly accessible to mass audiences. Independence Day on September 7, 1939, involved 30,000 children singing the national anthem and items arranged by Villa-Lobos. For the 1943 celebrations he also composed the ballet Dança da terra, which the authorities deemed unsuitable until it was revised. The 1943 celebrations did include Villa-Lobos's hymn Invocação em defesa da pátria shortly after Brazil's declaring war on Germany and its allies.
Villa-Lobos's status damaged his reputation among certain schools of musicians, among them disciples of new European trends such as serialismwhich was effectively off limits in Brazil until the 1960s. This crisis was, in part, due to some Brazilian composers finding it necessary to reconcile Villa-Lobos's own liberation of Brazilian music from European models in the 1920s with a style of music they felt to be more universal.