Composer and conductor, born in Rio de Janeiro, SE Brazil. He studied at Rio and travelled widely in Brazil, collecting material on folk music. His many compositions include 12 symphonies, as well as operas, large-scale symphonic poems, concerti, and ballets. He is also known for the nine suites Bachianas Brasileiras (193045), in which he treats Brazilian style melodies in the manner of Bach. In 1932 he became director of musical education for Brazil.
Heitor Villa-Lobos (March 5, 1887 - November 17, 1959) was a Brazilian composer, possibly the best-known classical composer born in South America. His music was influenced by both
Brazilian folk music and by stylistic elements from the European classical tradition, as exemplified by his Bachianas brasileiras ("Brazilian Bach-pieces").
Biography
Youth and exploration
Heitor Villa-Lobos was born in Rio de Janeiro.
In Villa-Lobos's youth, Brazil underwent social revolution and modernisation, overthrowing its emperor Pedro II in 1889, and abolishing slavery with the enactment of "The Golden Law". 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.
Around 1900 Villa-Lobos started explorations of Brazil's "dark interior", absorbing the native Brazilian musical culture. It is assumed that Villa-Lobos's tales of the decade or so he spent on these expeditions, and about his capture and near escape from cannibals, are fabrications, or at least wild romanticisations.
He also played with street-music bands. For a time Villa-Lobos became a cellist in a Rio opera company, and is early compositions include attempts at Grand Opera.
Brazilian influence
In 1912 Villa-Lobos married the pianist Lucília Guimarães, and ended his journeyings, beginning a career as a serious musician.
The music presented at these concerts shows his coming to terms with the conflicting elements in his experience, and overcoming a crisis of identity: whether European or Brazilian music would dominate his style. These works drew from native Brazilian legends and the use of "primitive", folk material.
European influence did still inspire Villa-Lobos. 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 Debussy, Satie, and possibly Stravinsky: in return Villa-Lobos introduced Milhaud to Brazilian street music. 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 suite Carnaval das crianças ("Children's carnival") for two pianos of 1919-20, Villa-Lobos liberated his style altogether from European Romanticism.
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 not sympathetic, 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 A Prole do Bebê. 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" (Wright, 1992).
Rubinstein suggested that Villa-Lobos tour abroad, and in 1923 he set out for Paris.
In the 1920s Villa-Lobos also met the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, who commissioned a guitar study: the composer responded with a set of 12, each taking a tiny detail or figure from Brazilian chorôes and transforming it into a piece that is not merely didactic.
The Vargas era
In 1930 Villa-Lobos, who was in Brazil to conduct, planned to return to Paris. 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 Superindendência de Educação Musical e Artistica (SEMA), and his duties included arranging concerts including the Brazilian premieres of Ludwig van Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and Johann Sebastian Bach's B Minor Mass as well as Brazilian compositions.
Villa-Lobos's writings of the Vargas era include propaganda for Brazilian nationhood ("brasilidada"), and teaching and theoretical works. His music for the film O Descobrimento do Brasil ("The discovery of Brazil") 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.
In 1936 Villa-Lobos and his wife separated.
Villa-Lobos published A Música Nacionalista no Govêrno Getúlio Vargas in 1937, in which he characterised the nation as a sacred entity whose symbols (including its flag, motto and national anthem) 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 Nôvo period when Varga 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. 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 demagogue status damaged his reputation among certain schools of musicians, among them disciples of new European trends such as serialism— which 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.
Composer in demand
Varga fell from power in 1945. Villa-Lobos was able, after the end of the war, to travel abroad again: he returned to Paris, and also made regular visits to the United States as well as travelling to Great Britain, and Israel.
His music for the film Green Mansions starring Audrey Hepburn, commissioned by MGM in 1958, earned Villa-Lobos $25 000, and he conducted the soundtrack recording himself.
In June 1959 Villa-Lobos alienated many of his fellow musicians by expressing disillusionment, saying in an interview that Brazil was "dominated by mediocrity".
Music
See also: List of compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos and :Category:Compositions by Heitor Villa-LobosHis earliest pieces originated in guitar improvisations, for example Panqueca ("Pancake") of 1900.
The concert series of 1915-21 included first performances of pieces demonstrating originality and virtuosic techique. 1 (1915), a violin sonata including "histrionic and violently contrasting emotions" (Wright, 1992), the birds of L'oiseau blessé d'une flèche (1913), the mother-child relationship (not usually a happy one in Villa-Lobos's music) in Les mères of 1914, and the flowers of Suíte floral for piano of 1916-18 which reappeared in Distribuição de flores for flute and guitar of 1937.
Reconciiling European tradition and Brazilian influences was also an element that bore fruit more formally later. His earliest published work Pequena suíte for cello and piano of 1913 shows a love for the cello, but is not notably Brazilian, although Wright (1992) notes elements that were to surface later. 1 of 1915 is influenced by European opera, while Três danças características (africanas e indígenas) of 1914-16 for piano, later arranged for octet and subsequently orchestrated, is radically influenced by the tribal music of the Caripunas Indians of Mato Grosso.
With his tone poems Amazonas (1916, first performed in Paris in 1929) and Uirapurú (1916, first performed 1935) he created works dominated by indigenous Brazilian influences. The works use Brazilian folk tales and characters, imitations of the sounds of the jungle and its fauna, imitations of the sound of the nose-flute by the violinophone, and not least imitations of the uirapurú itself.
His meeting with Artur Rubinstein in 1918 prompted Villa-Lobos to compose piano music such as Simples coletânea of 1919— which was possibly influenced by Rubinstein's playing of Ravel and Scriabin on his South American tours— and Bailado infernal of 1920.
Carnaval des crianças of 1919–20 saw Villa-Lobos's mature style emerge;
Around this time he also fused urban Brazilian influences and impressions, for example in his Quarteto simbólico of 1921. He included the urban street music of the chorões, who were groups containing flute, clarinet and cavaquinho (a Brazilian guitar), and often also including ophicleide, trombones or percussion. Villa-Lobos occasionally joined such bands.
All the elements mentioned so far are fused in Villa-Lobos's Nonet. Subtitled Impressão rápida do todo o Brasil ("A brief impression of the whole of Brazil"), the title of the work denotes it as ostensibly chamber music, but it is scored for flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bassoon, celesta, harp, piano, a large percussion battery requiring at least two players, and a mixed chorus.
In Paris, his musical vocabulary established, Villa-Lobos solved the problem of his works' form.
The multi-sectional poema form may be seen in the Suite for Voice and Violin, which is somewhat like a triptych, and the Poema da criança e sua mama for voice, flute, clarinet, and cello (1923).
The Ciranda, or Cirandinha is a stylised treatment of simple Brazilian folk melodies in a wide variety of moods. A ciranda is a child's singing game, but Villa-Lobos's treatment in the works he gave this title are sophisticated.
Another form was the Chôro. Villa-Lobos composed more than a dozen works with this title for various instruments, mostly in the years 1924-1929. He described them as "a new form of musical composition", a transformation of the Brazilian music and sounds "by the personality of the composer".
After the revolution of 1930, Villa-Lobos became something of a demagogue.
He also composed between 1930 and 1945 nine pieces he called Bachianas brasileiras ("Brazilian Bach pieces"). Villa-Lobos's use of archaisms was not new (an early example is his Pequena suíte for cello and piano, of 1913).
The transformation of Choros into Bachianas brasileiras is demonstrated clearly by the comparison of No.
During his period at SEMA, Villa-Lobos composed five string quartets, nos.
After the fall of the Vargas government, Villa-Lobos returned full-time to composition, resuming a prolific rate of completing works.
Villa-Lobos's final major work was the music for the film Green Mansions, and its arrangement as Floresta do Amazonas for orchestra, and some short songs issued separately.
In 1957, he wrote a 17th String Quartet, whose austerity of technique and emotional intensity "provide a eulogy to his craft" (Wright 1992).
Except for the lost works, the Nonetto and the operas, his music is well represented on the world's recital and concert stages and on CD.
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