As a contribution to the Oxford Studies of Composers series, Simon Wright offers this compact study of the compositions of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). Villa-Lobos wrote prolifically, producing an impressive and appealing output numbering more than one thousand pieces over more than half a century. In six chapters, Wright focuses chronologically on a few dozen compositions he considers the most significant. His selections emphasize the unique contributions the Brazilian master made to music; they celebrate national, truly Brazilian themes. A musical pioneer, “Villa-Lobos spearheaded the inception of musical nationalism in Brazil” (pp. 138-39).
During the first decade of this century, Villa-Lobos traveled throughout Brazil, absorbing folk and regional influences. Shaping his social and musical outlook, these influences inspired him for the rest of his life. From the beginning, he drew from Brazil’s rich European, African, and native American diversity: “the vast loneliness and epic scale of the Brazilian scene, in all its variety, surging splendour, and exquisite detail, had deeply impressed him, and it was always these factors which motivated his work” (p. 5). By 1917, Villa-Lobos was evoking an unmistakable Brazilian landscape, as evinced in two haunting symphonic poems, Amazonas and Uirapurú. These represent a maturation of innovations already notable in Três danças características (africanas e indígenas) (1914-16).
To fuse the duality of traditional European musical influences with fresh Brazilian insights challenged Villa-Lobos. His Nonet: Impressão rápida de todo o Brasil (1923) first reconciled them. Wright describes it as his most sophisticated work to that date. Between 1924 and 1930, Villa-Lobos composed all but one of his Choros, a musical form “which would eventually accommodate not only popular elements, but also stylizations of Indian and black music, and of natural sounds” (p. 61). Between 1930 and 1945, he wrote his masterpieces, the nine Bachianas brasileiras, the supreme fulfillment of that admirable reconciliation: “classicism inextricably fused with the Brazilian identity” (p. 81). Wright believes that these magnificent compositions “reflect the successful application of nationalist principles to concert music” (p. 107). In short, Villa-Lobos achieved with brilliant success the fusion, the blend of duality, he sought. Moreover, within the vast and varied musical legacy of Brazil’s foremost composer, the author detects a transcendental, omnipresent theme: “mankind living and moving in vast, untamed tropical landscapes, and encountering dangers physical, magical, and spiritual” (p. 99). If so, then Villa-Lobos provides the musical dimension of a monumental Latin American epic also represented in art and literature.
Historians will find this thoughtful essay an informative introduction to the works of a Latin American musical genius, a worthwhile addition to the study of cultural history, and specifically an important lesson in the successful infusion of nationalism into music to give it both local resonance and international significance.
