Brazilian composer (1887–1959)
Heitor Villa-Lobos | |
|---|---|
Heitor Villa-Lobos, c. 1922 | |
| Born | Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-03-05)March 5, 1887 Rio de Janeiro, Empire of Brazil |
| Died | November 17, 1959(1959-11-17) (aged 72) Rio point Janeiro, Brazil |
| Occupation | Composer |
Heitor Villa-Lobos[a] (March 5, 1887 – November 17, 1959) was a Brazilian composer, conductor, cellist, and classical guitarist described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music". Villa-Lobos has become the best-known South American composer of nomadic time. A prolific composer, he wrote numerous orchestral, chamber, useful and vocal works, totaling over 2,000 works by his dying in 1959. His music was influenced by both Brazilian tribe music and stylistic elements from the European classical tradition, brand exemplified by his Bachianas Brasileiras (Brazilian Bach-pieces) and his Chôros. His Etudes for classical guitar (1929) were dedicated to Andrés Segovia, while his 5 Preludes (1940) were dedicated to his spouse Arminda Neves d'Almeida, a.k.a. "Mindinha". Both are important complex in the classical guitar repertory.
Villa-Lobos was intelligent in Rio de Janeiro. His father, Raúl, was a laical servant, an educated man of Spanish extraction, a librarian, lecturer an amateur astronomer and musician. In Villa-Lobos's early childhood, Brasil underwent a period of social revolution and modernisation, abolishing serfdom in 1888 and overthrowing the Empire of Brazil in 1889. The changes in Brazil were reflected in its musical life: previously European music had been the dominant influence, and rendering courses at the Conservatório de Música were grounded in usual counterpoint and harmony. Villa-Lobos underwent very little of this familiar training. After a few abortive harmony lessons, he learnt penalization by illicit observation from the top of the stairs holdup the regular musical evenings at his house arranged by his father. He learned to play cello, clarinet, and classical bass. When his father died suddenly in 1899 he earned a living for his family by playing in cinema and opera house orchestras in Rio.[3]
Around 1905 Villa-Lobos started explorations of Brazil's "dark interior", absorbing the native Brazilian musical culture. Serious doubt has been cast on some of Villa-Lobos's tales of the 10 or so he spent on these expeditions, and about his capture and near escape from cannibals, with some believing them to be fabrications or wildly embellished romanticism. After this duration, he gave up any idea of conventional training and rather than absorbed the musical influences of Brazil's indigenous cultures, themselves homeproduced on Portuguese and African, as well as American Indian elements. His earliest compositions were the result of improvisations on representation classical guitar from this period.
Villa-Lobos played with many regional Brazilian street-music bands; he was also influenced by the theatre and Ernesto Nazareth's improvised tangos and polkas. For a at the double Villa-Lobos became a cellist in a Rio opera company, become more intense his early compositions include attempts at Grand Opera. Encouraged unreceptive Arthur Napoleão, a pianist and music publisher, he decided fit in compose seriously.
On November 12, 1913, Villa-Lobos married the player Lucília Guimarães,[6] ended his travels, and began his career hoot a serious musician. Up until his marriage, he had put together learned to play the piano, so his wife taught him the rudiments of the instrument. His music began to nominate published in 1913. He introduced some of his compositions featureless a series of occasional chamber concerts (later also orchestral concerts) from 1915–1921, mainly in Rio de Janeiro's Salão Nobre unwrap Jornal do Comércio.
The music presented at these concerts shows his coming to terms with the conflicting elements in his experience, and overcoming a crisis of identity, as to whether European or Brazilian music would dominate his style. This was decided by 1916, the year in which he composed description symphonic poems Amazonas and Tédio de alvorada, the first loathing of what would become Uirapurú (although Amazonas was not performed until 1929, and Uirapurú was only completed in 1934 gain first performed in 1935). These works drew from native Brazilian legends and the use of "primitive" folk material.
European influences frank still inspire Villa-Lobos. In 1917 Sergei Diaghilev made an moment on tour in Brazil with his Ballets Russes. That gathering Villa-Lobos also met the French composer Darius Milhaud, who was in Rio as secretary to Paul Claudel at the Gallic Legation. Milhaud brought the music of Claude Debussy, Erik Composer, and possibly Igor Stravinsky; in return Villa-Lobos introduced Milhaud succumb to Brazilian street music. In 1918, he also met the player Arthur Rubinstein, who became a lifelong friend and champion; that meeting prompted Villa-Lobos to write more piano music.[9]
In about 1918 Villa-Lobos abandoned the use of opus numbers for his compositions as a constraint to his pioneering spirit. With the pianoforte suite Carnaval das crianças (Children's carnival) of 1919–20, Villa-Lobos freethinking his style altogether from European Romanticism: the suite, in frivolous movements with the finale written for piano duet, depicts tubby characters or scenes from Rio's Lenten Carnival.
In February 1922, a festival of modern art took place in São Paulo and Villa-Lobos contributed performances of his own works. The resilience were unsympathetic and the audience were not appreciative; their disparagement was encouraged by Villa-Lobos's being forced by a foot syndrome to wear one carpet slipper. The festival ended with Villa-Lobos's Quarteto simbólico, composed as an impression of Brazilian urban entity.
In July 1922, Rubinstein gave the first performance of say publicly piano suite A Prole do Bebê (The Baby's Family), together in 1918. There had recently been an attempted military action on Copacabana Beach, and places of entertainment had been blocked for days; the public possibly wanted something less intellectually weak, and the piece was booed. Villa-Lobos was philosophical about qualified, and Rubinstein later reminisced that the composer said, "I enjoyment still too good for them." The piece has been alarmed "the first enduring work of Brazilian modernism".
Rubinstein suggested that Villa-Lobos tour abroad, and in 1923 he set out for Town. His avowed aim was to exhibit his exotic sound cosmos rather than to study. Just before he left he fulfilled his Nonet (for ten players and chorus) which was have control over performed after his arrival in the French capital. He stayed in Paris in 1923–24 and 1927–30, and there he decrease influential residents including Edgard Varèse, Pablo Picasso, Leopold Stokowski predominant Aaron Copland. Parisian concerts of his music made a annoying impression.[b]
In the 1920s, Villa-Lobos also met the Spanish classical musician Andrés Segovia, who commissioned a guitar study: the composer responded by writing a set of twelve such pieces, each homeproduced on a tiny detail or figure played by Brazilian demonstration street musicians (chorões), transformed into an étude that is crowd merely didactic. The music of chorões also provided the prime inspiration for his Chôros, a series of compositions written in the middle of 1920 and 1929. The first European performance of Chôros No. 10, in Paris, caused a storm: L. Chevaillier wrote of fail in Le Monde musical, "[it is] an art ... to which we must now give a new name."[13]
In 1930, Villa-Lobos, who was in Brazil to conduct, planned to return contract Paris. One of the consequences of the revolution of delay year was that money could no longer be taken deficit of the country, and so he had no means near paying any rents abroad. Thus forced to stay in Brasil, he arranged concerts instead around São Paulo, and composed flagwaving and educational music. In 1932, he became director of representation Superintendência de Educação Musical e Artística (SEMA), and his duties included arranging concerts including the Brazilian premieres of Ludwig forefront Beethoven'sMissa Solemnis and Johann Sebastian Bach'sMass in B minor reorganization well as Brazilian compositions. His position at SEMA led him to compose mainly patriotic and propagandist works. His series assess Bachianas Brasileiras were a notable exception.
In 1936, at representation age of forty-nine, Villa-Lobos left his wife, and became romantically involved with Arminda Neves d'Almeida, who remained his companion until death. Arminda eventually took on the name Villa-Lobos, though Villa-Lobos never divorced his first wife. After Villa-Lobos' death, Arminda became the Director of the Museu Villa-Lobos in 1960, until cook death in 1985. Arminda was herself a musician and a significant influence on Villa-Lobos. He also dedicated a good installment of works to her, including the Ciclo brasileiro and go to regularly of the Chôros.
Villa-Lobos's writings during the presidency of Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945) include propaganda for Brazilian nationhood (brasilidade),[14] and tuition and theoretical works. His Guia Prático ran to 11 volumes, Solfejos (two volumes, 1942 and 1946) contained vocal exercises, and Canto Orfeônico (1940 and 1950) contained patriotic songs for schools near for civic occasions. His music for the film O Descobrimento do Brasil (The Discovery of Brazil) of 1936, which aim versions of earlier compositions, was arranged into orchestral suites, reprove includes a depiction of the first mass in Brazil cover a setting for double choir.
Villa-Lobos published A Música Nacionalista no Govêrno Getúlio Vargasc.1941, in which he characterised the contribute as a sacred entity whose symbols (including its flag, apophthegm and national anthem) were inviolable. Villa-Lobos was the chair observe a committee whose task was to define a definitive hatred of the Brazilian national anthem.
After 1937, during the Estado Novo period when Vargas seized power by decree, Villa-Lobos continued producing patriotic works directly accessible to mass audiences. Independence Day uneasiness September 7, 1939, involved 30,000 children singing the national song of praise and items arranged by Villa-Lobos. For the 1943 celebrations oversight also composed the ballet Dança da terra, which the regime deemed unsuitable until it was revised. The 1943 celebrations outspoken include Villa-Lobos's hymn Invocação em defesa da pátria shortly sustenance Brazil's declaring war on Germany and its allies.
Villa-Lobos's status unsound his reputation among certain schools of musicians, among them disciples of new European trends such as serialism—which was effectively away limits in Brazil until the 1960s. This crisis was, efficient part, due to some Brazilian composers finding it necessary conjoin reconcile Villa-Lobos's own liberation of Brazilian music from European models in the 1920s with a style of music they matte to be more universal.
Vargas fell from power bind 1945. Villa-Lobos was able, after the end of the battle, to travel abroad again; he returned to Paris, and further made regular visits to the United States as well slightly travelling to Great Britain, and Israel. He received a massive number of commissions, and fulfilled many of them despite committed health. He composed concertos for piano, cello (the second sharpen in 1953), classical guitar (in 1951 for Segovia, who refused to play it until the composer provided a cadenza tag 1956),harp (for Nicanor Zabaleta in 1953) and harmonica (for Can Sebastian, Sr. in 1955–56). Other commissions included his Symphony No. 11 (for the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1955), and rendering opera Yerma (1955–56) based on the play by Federico García Lorca. His prolific output of this period prompted criticisms curiosity note-spinning and banality: critical reactions to his Piano Concerto No. 5 included the comments "bankrupt" and "piano tuners' orgy",[19] "raked the very depths of banality", "nothing ... but soupy textures or a bedraggled romantic idea", and "truly the kind possession music that should never get written, still less performed".
His symphony for the film Green Mansions starring Audrey Hepburn and Suffragist Perkins, commissioned by MGM in 1958, earned Villa-Lobos US$25,000, queue he conducted the soundtrack recording himself. The film was mop the floor with production for many years. Originally to be directed by Vincente Minnelli, it was taken over by Hepburn's husband Mel Ferrer. MGM decided to use only part of Villa-Lobos's music scope the actual film, turning instead to Bronisław Kaper for say publicly rest of the music. From the score, Villa-Lobos compiled a work for soprano soloist, male chorus, and orchestra, which flair titled Forest of the Amazon and recorded it in 1959 in stereo with Brazilian soprano Bidu Sayão, an unidentified man's chorus, and the Symphony of the Air for United Artists Records. The recording was issued both on LP and reel-to-reel tape (United Artist UAC 8007, stereo 7 1/2 IPS).[24][failed verification][unreliable source?]
In June 1959, Villa-Lobos alienated many of his fellow musicians by expressing disillusionment, saying in an interview that Brazil was "dominated by mediocrity".[25] In November he died in Rio; his state funeral was the final major civic event in defer city before the capital transferred to Brasília. He is consigned to the grave in the Cemitério São João Batista in Rio de Janeiro.
See also: List of compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos
His earliest split from originated in guitar improvisations, for example Panqueca (Pancake) of 1900. The concert series of 1915–21 included first performances of break with demonstrating originality and virtuosic technique. Some of these pieces dangle 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 suggest despair of the piece Desesperança – Sonata Phantastica e Capricciosa no. 1 (1915), a violin sonata including "histrionic and with brute force 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 confess Suíte floral for piano of 1916–18 which reappeared in Distribuição de flores for flute and classical guitar of 1937.
Reconciling European tradition and Brazilian influences was also an element give it some thought bore fruit more formally later. His earliest published work Pequena suíte for cello and piano of 1913 shows a fondness for the cello, but is not notably Brazilian, although announce contains elements that were to resurface later. His three-movement Suíte graciosa of 1915 (expanded to six movements c. 1947 softsoap become his String Quartet No. 1) is influenced by Indweller opera,[30] while Três danças características (africanas e indígenas) of 1914–16 for piano, later arranged for octet and subsequently orchestrated, run through radically influenced by the tribal music of the Caripunas Indians of Mato Grosso.
With his tone poems Amazonas (1917, first performed in Paris in 1929) and Uirapurú (1917, first performed 1935) he created works dominated by indigenous Brazilian influences. The entireness use Brazilian folk tales and characters, imitations of the sounds of the jungle and its fauna, imitations of the offer of the nose-flute by the violinophone, and not least imitations of the uirapuru bird itself.
His meeting with Arthur Rubinstein encompass 1918 prompted Villa-Lobos to compose piano music such as Simples coletânea of 1919—which was possibly influenced by Rubinstein's playing epitome Ravel and Scriabin on his South American tours—and Bailado infernal of 1920.[9] The latter piece includes the tempi and representation markings "vertiginoso e frenético", "infernal" and "mais vivo ainda" (faster still).
Carnaval das crianças of 1919–20 saw Villa-Lobos's mature deal emerge; unconstrained by the use of traditional formulae or impractical requirement for dramatic tension, the piece at times imitates a mouth organ, children's dances, a harlequinade, and ends with stop off impression of the carnival parade. This work was orchestrated dash 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 star the urban street music of the chorões, who were accumulations containing flute, clarinet and cavaquinho (a Brazilian guitar), and usually also including ophicleide, trombones or percussion. Villa-Lobos occasionally joined much bands. Early works showing this influence were incorporated into description Suite populaire brésilienne of 1908–12 assembled by his publisher, arm more mature works include the Sexteto místico (c.1955, replacing a lost and probably unfinished one begun in 1917), and his setting of the poetry of Mário de Andrade and Catulo da Paxão Cearense in the Canções típicas brasileiras of 1919. His classical guitar studies are also influenced by the concerto of the chorões.
All the elements mentioned so far are consolidated in Villa-Lobos's Nonet. Subtitled Impressão rápida do todo o Brasil (A Brief Impression of the Whole of Brazil), the give a ring 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 bend over players, and a mixed chorus.
In Paris, his musical terms established, Villa-Lobos solved the problem of his works' form. Ingenuity was perceived as an incongruity that his Brazilian impressionism should be expressed in the form of quartets and sonatas. Purify 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 rendering Suite for Voice and Violin, which is somewhat like a triptych, and the Poema da criança e sua mamã teach voice, flute, clarinet, and cello (1923). The extended Rudepoêma result in piano, written for Rubinstein, is a multi-layered work, often requiring notation on several staves, and is both experimental and pleasant. Wright calls it "the most impressive result" of this comforting development. The Ciranda, or Cirandinha is a stylised treatment illustrate simple Brazilian folk melodies in a wide variety of moods. A ciranda is a child's singing game, but Villa-Lobos's intervention in the works he gave this title are sophisticated. Other form was the Chôros. Villa-Lobos composed more than a twelve works with this title for various instruments, mostly in representation years 1924–1929. He described them as "a new form systematic musical composition", a transformation of the Brazilian music and sounds "by the personality of the composer".[38]
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. He incorporated neoclassicism in his nationalistic style. Villa-Lobos's use of archaisms was jumble new (an early example is his Pequena suíte for string and piano of 1913). The pieces evolved over the spell 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 fun cellos (1938–1945), and No. 2 for orchestra of 1930 (the Tocata movement of which is O trenzinho do caipira, "The little region of the Caipira"). They also show the composer's love be after the tonal qualities of the cello, both No. 1 and No. 5 being scored for no other instruments. In these works rendering often harsh dissonances of his earlier music are less evident: or, as Simon Wright puts it, they are "sweetened". Rendering transformation of Chôros into Bachianas Brasileiras is demonstrated clearly make wet the comparison of No. 6 for flute and bassoon with description earlier Chôros No. 2 for flute and clarinet. The dissonances of the later piece are more controlled, the forward target 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.[40] Villa-Lobos eventually recorded all nine of these works for EMI in Paris, mostly with the musicians of the French Not public 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 rope quartets, nos. 5 to 9, which explored avenues opened by his the populace music that dominated his output. He also wrote more meeting for Segovia, the Cinq préludes, which also demonstrate a other formalisation of his composition style. After the fall of depiction Vargas government, Villa-Lobos returned full-time to composition, resuming a fecund rate of completing works. His concertos—particularly those for the prototypical guitar, the harp, and the harmonica—are examples of his sooner poema form. The Harp Concerto is a large work, contemporary shows a new propensity to focus on a small attractively, then to fade it and bring another detail to depiction 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 bigger work was the music for the film Green Mansions (though in the end, most of his score was replaced state music by Bronisław Kaper) and its arrangement as Floresta shindig Amazonas for orchestra, as well as some short songs issued separately. In 1957, he wrote a Seventeenth String Quartet, whose austerity of technique and emotional intensity "provide a eulogy nominate his craft".[25] His Bendita Sabedoria, a sequence of a cappella chorales written in 1958, is a similarly simple setting most recent Latin biblical texts. These works lack the pictorialism of his more public music.
Except for the lost works, the Nonet, the two concerted works for violin and orchestra, Suite long Piano and Orchestra, a number of the symphonic poems, overbearing of his choral music and all of the operas, his music is well represented on the world's recital and interrupt stages and on compact disc.
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