Heitor Villa-Lobos

Brazilian composer

• Born: March 5, 1887
• Birthplace: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Died: November 17, 1959
• Place of death: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Villa-Lobos’s compositions number more than two thousand in authentic Brazilian style, which he cultivated and popularized throughout the world. He has also been a champion of Brazilian folk melodies, traveling through all areas of Brazil in search of melodies and rhythms that he has published and used as bases for compositions.

Early Life

Heitor Villa-Lobos (AY-tohr vee-yah-LOH-bohsh) showed great interest in music as a young child and enjoyed sitting quietly as he listened to simple songs long before he could speak. At the age of six, Villa-Lobos began studying cello with his father as teacher. He held great interest in the sounds and technique of all musical instruments and learned throughout his life to play most, if not all, of the instruments commonly used in the symphony orchestra. Villa-Lobos attended school as a child in Rio de Janeiro, working on his music training after school with his father and anyone else he could find to teach him.

Tragedy struck the Villa-Lobos family when in 1898 Heitor’s father died. The family was forced to find small jobs to provide income in a very depressed economy. Young Villa-Lobos, being only eleven years old, was forced to quit his formal schooling and perform in café and theater orchestras that were small and amateur. Rehearsal times made it impossible for Villa-Lobos to attend school, and he continued to study on his own, in what spare time he could find.

During this financially strained period of time, music became more of a means of survival than a course of study to Villa-Lobos, and, except for a few lessons in harmony and counterpoint from Agnello Franca and Francisco Braga, Villa-Lobos became a self-instructed musician and composer, as he spent many hours after his local jobs poring over borrowed scores and music texts. Because of his lack of training in traditional methods, Villa-Lobos ventured into his own realm of music construction. His originality and impatience with accepted harmonic rules manifested themselves very early in his career.

Life’s Work

In 1905, the interest that Villa-Lobos had found in Brazilian folk music led him on an extended trip through the northern states of Brazil, collecting popular folk songs and rhythmic patterns. Finally, in 1907, the financial position of his family had settled somewhat so that he could again enter school. Villa-Lobos began music composition studies at the National Institute of Music, where he studied intently with Frederico Nascimento. In between his studies, he continued to travel throughout Brazil in search of new songs and techniques.

In 1912, Villa-Lobos undertook his fourth and longest expedition deep into the interior of Brazil, accompanied by another musician named Gaetano Donizetti. During their three-year journey, they gathered a rich collection of folk songs from deep within the country, where the natives provided them with all the music they could gather. This experience in the Indian and Negro music forces influenced Villa-Lobos in many of his later compositions as he was able to call on these remembered experiences for an almost unending source of musical suggestions. Returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1915, after three years of travel, Villa-Lobos presented a concert of his music on November 13, creating a sensation throughout the audience by the exuberance of his melodies and rhythms and the radical character of his idiom.

An ardent patriot of his homeland, Villa-Lobos resolved from his earliest steps in composition to use Brazilian song materials as the source of his thematic inspiration. Occasionally he used actual quotations from folk songs. Much more often, however, he used the folk songs as thematic germs, or suggestions, from which he wrote melodies in an authentic Brazilian style but of his own invention. In his desire to relate Brazilian folk resources to universal values, he wrote a unique series of compositions entitled Bachianas brasileiras , which consists of five suites. Number one is for the very unexpected instrumentation of eight celli; number two is for eight celli and soprano voice. Number three reaches the largest use of forces as it is composed for solo piano and orchestra, and number four begins to decline in numbers again, as it employs solo voice and small chamber orchestra. Number five, the last of the suites, returns to the use of eight celli and voice. Starting small, peaking in the middle, and shrinking to the end, these pieces are a fine example not only of Villa-Lobos’s imagination but also of his orchestral techniques. Writing for eight celli is a challenge that Villa-Lobos completed very successfully. This set of five suites features Brazilian melo-rhythms being treated by almost Bach-like traditional counterpoint, which creates a sensation of exciting dance rhythms with flowing accompaniments.

In 1916, Villa-Lobos met the famous and artistically perfect pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who became his ardent admirer. Rubinstein subsequently performed many of Villa-Lobos’s pieces at concerts throughout Europe and the United States, including the very difficult composition Rudepoema , which Villa-Lobos had dedicated to Rubinstein. Through the worldwide success of Rubinstein, the compositions of Villa-Lobos began to have an impact on the international scene and were no longer kept within the borders of Brazil.

The five-year period from 1916 to 1921 saw the creation of Villa-Lobos’s first six symphonies. The first three are written for traditionally organized symphony orchestra, while the fourth adds to the orchestra a large chorus. Symphony no. 5 employs the orchestra, chorus, and symphonic band. Symphony no. 6 is known as the Montanhas do Brasil, or The Mountains of Brasil.

In 1923, Villa-Lobos was surprised to receive a stipend from the Brazilian government to study abroad. This government-sponsored opportunity was almost unheard of in most parts of the world and especially in Brazil, but with the surprise came an opportunity that Villa-Lobos had long secretly awaited: to study in Europe. His visit to Europe extended to nearly four years; he lived in Paris but enjoyed many excursions to London, Vienna, Lisbon, and Berlin. His main source of inspiration came through the French Impressionist musician Darius Milhaud, who introduced him to many other European composers.

A purely Brazilian form that Villa-Lobos successfully cultivated is the choros, a popular dance marked by incisive rhythm and songful balladlike melody. Villa-Lobos expanded the choros to embrace a wide variety of forms, from a solo instrumental to a large orchestral work with chorus. Villa-Lobos wrote his fourteen choros pieces between 1920 and 1929. According to Villa-Lobos, choros means “serenade,” and is a synthesis of the various elements in Brazilian music, Indian, African, and popular folk melody, in which the harmonic treatment represents a stylization of the original material. These striking compositions are rhapsodic and free in structure.

Villa-Lobos returned home to Rio de Janeiro in 1926, determined to continue his career in composition with his newfound love of Impressionism. Composition had to take a backseat for some time, however, as he was engaged as director of musical education for the São Paulo public school system in 1930. After two successful years in this position, he assumed the important post of superintendent of musical and artistic education in Rio de Janeiro. In these positions he introduced bold innovations of using the cultivation of Brazilian songs and dances as the basis of music study in the public schools.

In 1929, after many careful years of study and categorization of pieces, Villa-Lobos published a book of Brazilian folk music under the title Alma do Brasil . He also compiled a selection of folk songs arranged for chorus, entitled Guia Pratico , which has been widely used in the public school system of Brazil and teaches music basics to students, while introducing them to their homeland culture.

An experimenter by nature, Villa-Lobos devised a graphic method of composition, using as material geometrical contours of drawings, shapes, structures, and the like. In 1940, Villa-Lobos used this method as he composed The New York Skyline for the World’s Fair, in which he used as his source of inspiration a photograph of the city, from which he devised his melodic material.

In 1944, Villa-Lobos made his first tour of the United States, conducting many of his own works. During this period of personal unrest as well as world unrest, Villa-Lobos established the Brazilian Academy of Music in Rio de Janeiro in 1947. With this establishment came the desire to make Rio his permanent home, from which he continued to venture out on conducting tours but to which he always returned.

Between 1945 and 1956, Villa-Lobos wrote six more symphonies. His Seventh Symphony was premiered in 1945. Villa-Lobos received praise throughout the United States when his Eleventh Symphony was premiered in Boston on March 2, 1956, with Villa-Lobos conducting. His last symphony, no. 12, followed close behind with the premiere performance at the American Music Festival in Washington, D.C., April 20, 1958.

An exceptionally prolific composer, Villa-Lobos also wrote many operas, ballets, chamber pieces, choruses, piano works, solo songs, and instrumental solo pieces. His list of works numbers more than two thousand, and many of his most popular compositions are for massive and diverse musical forces. Villa-Lobos holds the record for the largest performance at any one time as he conducted more than forty thousand voices in a stadium outside Rio de Janeiro. For one composer to run the gamut of solo music to vast combinations of performers is remarkable enough but to be successful and competent in this endeavor is left to only a few composers, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Gustav Mahler, and Villa-Lobos.

In addition to his work as a composer and conductor, Villa-Lobos was a champion of music education. He organized the Orfeao de Professores, a training school for teachers through which his system of music education has been carried throughout the nation of Brazil. He made enormous and exhaustive collections of folk and popular Brazilian music and arranged, classified, and traced to their original sources these melodies. Because of his care and interest in national musical pride, Villa-Lobos represented Brazil at the 1936 International Congress for Music Education in Prague, where he was honored for his nationalistic efforts. His music has long been known in Europe, and two festivals of his works were given in Paris in 1927 in conjunction with the Concerts Lamoureaux, and another concert was given in 1929. In 1938, Villa-Lobos was represented at the sixth International Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice.

Significance

Villa-Lobos was one of the most original and imaginative composers of the twentieth century. His lack of formal academic training never was considered a detriment to his work but rather the element that compelled him to create a technique all his own, curiously eclectic yet admirably suited to his musical ideas. In the ever-changing patterns and styles of the chaotic twentieth century, it takes a determined artist to know what he or she wants to achieve and to know what to take from the popular society and what to discard to fulfill his or her purposes. Villa-Lobos was such an artist.

Bibliography

Appleby, David P. Heitor Villa-Lobos: A Life, 1887-1959. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002. Charts Villa-Lobos’s musical development from his early career struggles until he attained wide recognition for his work. Analyzes Villa-Lobos’s influence on other composers.

Austin, William W. Music in the Twentieth Century: From Debussy Through Stravinsky. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. This source discusses the vast amount of music composed by Villa-Lobos and describes in detail some of his most famous works.

Chase, Gilbert. The Music of Spain. 2d ed. New York: Dover, 1959. This book provides a lengthy bibliography for further study into the life of Villa-Lobos and Spanish music in general.

Ewen, David. David Ewen Introduces Modern Music. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1962. Ewen provides an interesting life sketch and a chronological list and description of Villa-Lobos’s works. Good reading for younger students.

Mariz, Vasco. Heitor Villa-Lobos. 2d rev. ed. Washington, D.C.: Brazilian American Cultural Institute, 1970. This book discusses the life and works of the great composer, providing insights, explanations, and detail from a Brazilian point of view.

Myers, Rollo H., ed. Twentieth Century Music. New York: Orion Press, 1968. A discussion of the various instruments and sounds needed to produce Villa-Lobos’s music. It also discusses score techniques and musical comparisons to the works of other composers.

Salzman, Eric. Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. This text compares Villa-Lobos’s Brazilian nationalism with his studies in French Impressionism, providing a brief summary of the subject.

Slonimsky, Nicolas. Music of Latin America. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972. This book provides interesting reading about the sources of inspiration for much of Villa-Lobos’s music as well as details into the composer’s life that endear him to the reader.