HeitorVilla-⁠Lobos

Heitor Villa-⁠Lobos was born in Rio de Janeiro on 5 March 1887. His father, Raul, was an official at the National Library and an amateur cellist who gave him ear training and cello lessons, at first on a viola. Raul died of smallpox in 1899 and the family had little money; his mother, Noemia, took in laundry. The boy, called Tuhú at home, was put into classes meant to prepare him for medicine, missed school to spend nights with the chorões, and went to live with an aunt who played preludes and fugues from Bach’s Well-⁠Tempered Clavier on the piano.

1913–⁠23Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo

He married the pianist Lucília Guimarães on 12 November 1913 and gave his first concerts in 1915. Darius Milhaud arrived at the French embassy in 1917 and encouraged him to find his own way. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein, whom he met in 1918, played his music on tours and spoke for him to wealthy Brazilians.

The Semana de Arte Moderna filled the Theatro Municipal in São Paulo on 13, 15 and 17 February 1922 with lectures, poetry and music. Villa-⁠Lobos, then thirty-four, supplied about twenty pieces over the three evenings and conducted two of the largest, the Quarteto simbólico and the Danças características africanas. He appeared in a tailcoat and slippers; an article by Sesc São Paulo, citing historical research, attributes the slippers to an attack of gout.

1923–⁠30Paris

Rubinstein’s recommendation helped him obtain funds from the Guinle family for a first stay in Paris in 1923. His Nonet, for winds, harp, celesta, piano, a large percussion section and chorus, was first performed there on 30 May 1924. He went back in 1927 and stayed until 1930. At the Salle Gaveau on 24 October 1927 the Concerts Colonne orchestra gave the first performance of Chôros No. 8, for two pianos and orchestra. In November 1929 the critic Mário Pedrosa wrote in La Revue musicale that Villa-⁠Lobos had “the artless and total sincerity of a mountain torrent.”

1920–⁠29The Chôros

The Chôros, numbered 1 to 14, take their name from the street musicians of Rio. No. 1 is for solo guitar and is dedicated to Ernesto Nazareth. No. 2 is a duet for flute and clarinet, the two instruments favoured by the chorões. No. 3 is for male chorus and winds, No. 10 for orchestra, mixed chorus and a battery of Brazilian percussion, and No. 11, for piano and orchestra, lasts more than an hour. Villa-⁠Lobos called No. 11 “strong, big and robust, like an elephant.”

Chôros No. 3 uses melodies of the Pareci people recorded by the anthropologist Edgar Roquette-⁠Pinto. Manuel Bandeira reviewed a performance conducted by the composer and judged its unity doubtful, in part because of the chorus’s closing shout of “Brazil!”: “Villa needed a word – any word – ending in ‘il’.”

Chôros No. 10, first performed in Rio on 11 November 1926, includes the melody of Yará, a schottische by Anacleto de Medeiros that the poet Catulo da Paixão Cearense had turned into a song, Rasga o coração. Catulo’s heirs sued over the use of his words. Villa-⁠Lobos replaced them with a vocalise, and the second edition of the score dropped both the words and the subtitle.

1930–⁠45Vargas and the Bachianas

Villa-⁠Lobos went to Brazil in 1930 to conduct, intending to go back to Paris. The revolution of October brought Getúlio Vargas to power and barred payments abroad; Villa-⁠Lobos could not pay the rent on his Paris apartment and was evicted in his absence, together with his belongings. Among them were the autograph scores of Chôros Nos. 13 and 14, which are lost; a short-score fragment of No. 13 survives. In 1932 the Federal District of Rio put him at the head of a new department for music education, and in the same decade he presented the Brazilian premières of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and Bach’s B minor Mass. The mass choral concerts known as canto orfeônico, held in football stadiums with the government’s support, drew more than thirty thousand performers.

In April 1936 he flew to Europe on the Graf Hindenburg as Brazil’s delegate to the Prague congress on music education, and went on to Berlin. Eduardo Sato reads the trip as the start of a phase that culminated in the Bachianas Brasileiras. The nine works date from 1930 to 1945. Most movements have two titles, one from Bach’s world (Prelúdio, Fuga, Toccata, Ária) and one Brazilian. Simon Wright quotes the composer’s description of Bach as “a universal folkloric source”.

The Ária of No. 5, for soprano and cellos, was written in 1938 to words by Ruth Valadares Corrêa, who sang it at the first performance in Rio on 25 March 1939 with the composer conducting. Bidú Sayão sang it at the World’s Fair Hall in New York on 4 May 1939, the first performance in the United States, and later recorded it for Columbia with Villa-⁠Lobos conducting. The second movement, the Dansa (Martelo), to verses by Manuel Bandeira about the birds of the north-eastern sertão, was added in 1945.

1944–⁠59The last years

Villa-⁠Lobos first visited the United States in 1944. A New Yorker profile in the issue of 10 February 1945 found him at the Waldorf, speaking French, credited with some fifteen hundred works and conducting the Philharmonic that week. He founded the Academia Brasileira de Música in 1945 and presided over it until his death. In 1948 he was diagnosed with bladder cancer; he continued to travel.

Late commissions included concertos for harp, cello and guitar. The Guitar Concerto, written for Segovia in 1951, was first played in Houston on 6 February 1956 with the composer conducting; Segovia had refused to play it until Villa-⁠Lobos added a cadenza. In his review of the concert the Houston Post critic Hubert Roussel wrote that the composer “bears a striking resemblance to the contemporary sketches of the later Beethoven.” In 1959 United Artists issued Forest of the Amazon, excerpts from his score for the MGM film Green Mansions, with Sayão and the Symphony of the Air under the composer’s baton. He died in Rio de Janeiro on 17 November 1959.