Heitor Villa-Lobos - Music

Music

See also: List of compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos

His 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 technique. Some of these pieces are early examples of elements of importance throughout his œuvre. His attachment to the Iberian Peninsula is demonstrated in Canção Ibéria of 1914 and in orchestral transcriptions of some of Enrique Granados' piano Goyescas (1918, now lost). Other themes that were to recur in his later work include the anguish and despair of the piece Desesperança— Sonata Phantastica e Capricciosa no. 1 (1915), a violin sonata including "histrionic and violently contrasting emotions", 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.

Reconciling 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 it contains elements that were to resurface later. His three-movement String Quartet no. 1 (Suíte graciosa) of 1915 (expanded to six movements ca. 1947) 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 uirapuru 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. The latter piece includes the tempi and expression markings "vertiginoso e frenético", "infernal" and "mais vivo ainda" (faster still).

Carnaval das crianças of 1919–20 saw Villa-Lobos's mature style emerge; unconstrained by the use of traditional formulae or any requirement for dramatic tension, the piece at times imitates a mouth organ, children's dances, a harlequinade, and ends with an impression of the carnival parade. This work was orchestrated in 1929 with new linking passages and a new title, Momoprecoce. Naïveté and innocence is also heard in the piano suites A Prole do Bebê (The Baby's Family) of 1918–21.

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. Early works showing this influence were incorporated into the Suíte popular brasileira of 1908–12 assembled by his publisher, and more mature works include the Sexteto místico (ca. 1955, replacing a lost and probably unfinished one begun in 1917), and Canções típicas brasileiras of 1919. His guitar studies are also influenced by the music of the chorões.

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. It was perceived as an incongruity that his Brazilian impressionism should be expressed in the form of quartets and sonatas. He developed new forms to free his imagination from the constraints of conventional musical development such as that required in sonata 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 mamã for voice, flute, clarinet, and cello (1923). The extended Rudepoema for piano, written for Rubinstein, is a multi-layered work, often requiring notation on several staves, and is both experimental and demanding. Wright calls it "the most impressive result" of this formal development. 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 Chôros. 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 composed more backward-looking music such as the Missa São Sebastião of 1937, and published teaching pieces and ideological writings.

He also composed between 1930 and 1945 nine pieces he called Bachianas Brasileiras (Brazilian Bachian pieces). These take the forms and nationalism of the Chôros, and add the composer's love of Bach. Villa-Lobos's use of archaisms was not new (an early example is his Pequena suíte for cello and piano, of 1913). The pieces evolved over the period rather than being conceived as a whole, some of them being revised or added to. They contain some of his most popular music, such as No. 5 for soprano and eight cellos (1938–1945), and No. 2 for orchestra of 1930 (the Tocata movement of which is O trenzinho do caipira, "The little train of the Caipira"). They also show the composer's love for the tonal qualities of the cello, both No. 1 and No. 5 being scored for no other instruments. In these works the often harsh dissonances of his earlier music are less evident: or, as Simon Wright puts it, they are "sweetened". The transformation of Chôros into Bachianas Brasileiras is demonstrated clearly by the comparison of No. 6 for flute and bassoon with the earlier Chôros No. 2 for flute and clarinet. The dissonances of the later piece are more controlled, the forward direction of the music easier to discern. Bachianas Brasileiras No. 9 takes the concept so far as to be an abstract Prelude and Fugue, a complete distillation of the composer's national influences. Villa-Lobos eventually recorded all nine of these works for EMI in Paris, mostly with the musicians of the French National Orchestra; these were originally issued on LPs and later reissued on CDs. He also recorded the first section of Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 with Bidu Sayão and a group of cellists for Columbia.

During his period at SEMA, Villa-Lobos composed five string quartets, nos. 5 to 9, which explored avenues opened by his public music that dominated his output. He also wrote more music for Segovia, the Cinq préludes, which also demonstrate a further formalisation of his composition style. After the fall of the Vargas government, Villa-Lobos returned full-time to composition, resuming a prolific rate of completing works. His concertos— particularly those for the guitar, the harp, and the harmonica— are examples of his earlier poema form. The harp concerto is a large work, and shows a new propensity to focus on a small detail, then to fade it and bring another detail to the foreground. This technique also occurs in his final opera, Yerma, which contains a series of scenes each of which establishes an atmosphere, similarly to the earlier Momoprecoce.

Villa-Lobos's final major work was the music for the film Green Mansions (though in the end, most of his score was replaced with music by Bronislaw Kaper) and its arrangement as Floresta do Amazonas for orchestra, as well as 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". His Benedita Sabedoria, a sequence of a capella chorales written in 1958, is a similarly simple setting of Latin biblical texts. These works lack the pictorialism of his more public music.

Except for the lost works, the Nonetto, the two concerted works for violin and orchestra, Suite for Piano and Orchestra, a number of the symphonic poems, most of his choral music and all of the operas, his music is well represented on the world's recital and concert stages and on CD.