When the great Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein, as a young man, first played in Brazil, musicians in Rio de Janeiro told him about a musical genius who had never been able to complete studies in music because it bored him to follow the academic rules. This man relied entirely on his creative instincts and was earning his living playing the cello in a movie theatre, where Rubinstein was taken to hear him.
According to Rubinstein’s account, he heard music by this composer which made him prick up his ears: the form was hard to grasp, but the music spoke a new language of great originality and power. The music was Amazon, a Chôros for orchestra, and the musician was Heitor Villa-Lobos.
On being introduced to Rubinstein, he was rude; ‘pianists’, he told him, ‘have no use for composers. All they want is success and money.’ Rubinstein was surprised, after this first encounter, to be woken next morning by a group of ten or so musicians, Villa-Lobos at their head, who wanted to play for him in his hotel room. This was to be the beginning of a firm friendship, and Rubinstein became Villa-Lobos’s leading international champion – he persuaded a Brazilian businessman to put up the money to help Villa-Lobos realise his cherished desire to go to Paris, and the grateful composer dedicated to Rubinstein his Rudepoêma, a portrait of Rubinstein in music, one of the most titanically difficult, and emotionally prodigal of all solo piano pieces.
‘…a prodigiously natural composer…’
Villa-Lobos was the most important Latin-American composer of his generation (he was born in 1887), and perhaps the most prolific composer of the 20th century. Some put the total of his compositions above 2000. Others, more soberly, admit over 1000. This uncertainty is typical of knowledge about Villa-Lobos, as we shall see. His works range over every genre of composition, in addition to the series of Bachianas brasileiras and Chôros for which he is best known. Only a prodigiously natural composer could have managed such an output in a lifetime of 72 years - Villa-Lobos often said that for him composing music was a biological necessity. He once composed a piece called New York Skyline, using a photograph and a ‘graphic’ method of composition. An experimenter, an original: no wonder he offended the academics at the Conservatorium!
Villa-Lobos also rebelled against his parents, who were unhappy that he hung out with popular musicians. His father taught him the cello, which remained his main instrument, and features in his most famous work, Bachianas brasileiras No.5 for soprano and eight cellos. After his father’s early death, Villa-Lobos’s mother wanted him to become a medical doctor, but he soon gave up those studies, and his academic musical studies as well. In music he was virtually self-taught – his real schooling was gained playing in nightclubs, theatres and bars, meeting the renowned popular artists and absorbing their style. A year before his death, Villa-Lobos reminisced about those days before the turn of the century, and tried to define what he meant by Chôros, the name of this music, and the title of some of his most typical works:
The Chôros was popular music. In Brazil it’s musicians playing – good ones, bad ones, playing as they liked for the love of it, often at night; improvising, and using that to show off their musicality and their technique. And it’s always very sentimental – that’s the point.
So the music Villa-Lobos absorbed as a young man was the popular Brazilian urban music with its improvised synthesis of simple, sentimental melodies and Afro-Brazilian rhythms – music which was to become a world-wide craze a little later: samba, batuque, maxixe.
A spirit absorbed from Brazil itself
Villa-Lobos also learnt from his fatherland, Brazil itself, whose spirit he absorbed and presented to the world through his music: ‘I am folklore’, he claimed, ‘my melodies are just as authentic as those which originate from the souls of the people’. But Villa-Lobos’s brand of musical nationalism met a hostile reception from Brazil’s musical establishment – oriented, as a provincial culture, towards European fashions. The composer’s conceit was no help. One prominent Brazilian musician told Rubinstein derisively ‘He already thinks he’s Brazil’s greatest ever composer’.
Descriptions of Villa-Lobos by people who knew him well agree on his radiant charm, after initial shyness was overcome, on his studiedly casual dress – single-breasted sack coats, checkered coloured shirts, and outrageous ties.
Villa-Lobos, c.1922. Public Domain
He was lively, quick to anger, and sometimes rude, as with Rubinstein. He insisted he was totally misunderstood by the conservative public in Brazil, and indeed Rubinstein was booed there for playing Villa-Lobos’s music, whereas in Paris he got an excited response from musicians when he played them pieces such as the first suite A Prole do Bebê (The Baby’s Family). Telling Villa-Lobos this whetted his appetite for Paris and for appreciation.
Periods in Paris
Villa-Lobos spent two periods in Paris in the 1920s. His first visit, in 1923-24 brought him to the attention of some leading French musicians, and exposed him to musical experiences which bore fruit on his return to Brazil. On his return to Paris in 1927 he had a growing portfolio of typical works, including several of the Chôros series, some of them already performed in Brasil. This time, Villa-Lobos really caught the attention of his French hosts, not least for his studied eccentricity. French composer Florent Schmitt described the Brazilian as ‘three-fourths God with burning eyes and crocodilian teeth’. Villa-Lobos played up to this image by telling fantastic stories: about his experiences with native tribes in Brazil’s interior, how he was captured by cannibals whose music he memorised while he waited to be eaten; how his gramophone was destroyed by Indians when he played them consonant western music; how he found his wife among tribal Indians. When these stories, told to scandalise his hosts - Villa-Lobos loved to épater les bourgeois - filtered back to the press in Brasil, Villa-Lobos’s countrymen felt he had caused embarrassment. The extensive journeys he described through the jungles in the hinterland of Brazil mainly took place in the composer’s fertile imagination.
Throughout his life Villa-Lobos embellished facts and dates: even his date of birth was for long uncertain. He liked to be thought original and unique. His attitude to folk music was certainly not that of the systematic collector, like Bartók, but his intuitive grasp of Brazil’s popular idioms is reflected in all his work. His comprehensive view of his country is summed up in The Discovery of Brazil (1937), originally a film score, whose movements include the crossing of the Atlantic by the Portuguese caravels, Moorish and Iberian impressions, Festivities in the Forest (with exotic Brazilian percussion instruments), Indian chants, a Procession of the Cross, and a tremendous finale with choir, The First Mass in Brazil, where the female voices sing native melodies while the male voices sing Gregorian chant.
The years 1927 to 1929, which Villa-Lobos spent in Paris, saw his first wide acceptance as a significant composer, and European audiences were exposed for the first time to some of the most durable and interesting works of his huge output. These were the years of a vogue for Latin-American music partly inspired by Darius Milhaud, who had befriended Villa-Lobos during World War I, which Milhaud spent in Rio as secretary to the writer-diplomat Paul Claudel at the French Embassy. Milhaud’s own Saudades do Brasil, Scaramouche, and La Création du monde show the influence of Brazil’s music.
A serious and important creator
Villa-Lobos was a modish, flavour-of-the-month composer for the French, one who blended the fashionable cult of primitive exoticism with European sophistication. But his friendship with serious musicians, including Edgard Varèse, and artists such as Picasso and Fernand Léger, shows that he was recognised as a serious and important creator, even when his admirers were puzzled by his unevenness and the sheer originality of his style. Pierre Vidal, who described Villa-Lobos as the artist who had made the strongest impression on him, hailed him as an instinctive genius, in love with life and little burdened with formulas; a joyful Pantheist contemplating the universe.
Returning to Brasil in 1930, his European success behind him, Villa-Lobos became an admired artist of the nationalist regime then in power. Surprisingly, he was transformed into an official musician, and devoted himself to musical education for the masses and for young people. He travelled widely as a conductor of his own music, which became well-known, especially in the USA after 1945. To the post World War II period belong many of his concertos written on commission for famous performers, and concerned with instrumental virtuosity. Generally these late works are less highly regarded by authorities on Villa-Lobos’s music than he pre-war production – though as with most prolific and intuitive creators, there was always a considerable amount of chaff to be accepted with the wheat.
Gerard Béhague, in his admirable Music in Latin America: An Introduction, sums up Villa-Lobos as a Brazilian composer:
In many ways, his personality, his career, and his production reflect typical Brazilian traits such as grandeur, flamboyance, restlessness, lack of organic unity, disparity, and gaudiness, along with others such as individuality, spontaneity, allurement and sophistication.
These words focus the experience of music lovers who most likely fell under Villa-Lobos’s spell through hearing the Bachianas brasileiras No.5, and were inclined to explore further…