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Son of Noêmia Villa-Lobos, a housewife, and Raul Villa-Lobos, employee of the National Library and amateur musician, Heitor Villa-Lobos was born on March 5, 1887 in the neighborhood of Laranjeiras, Rio de Janeiro. Besides residing in the city of Rio, Villa-Lobos also lived with his family in cities in the interior of Rio de Janeiro State (Sapucaia) and of Minas Gerais (Cataguazes and Bicas) between the years of 1892 and 1893. During those stays, he became familiar with back-country music and guitar players who make up part of the musical folklore that later would be universalized in his work.
Back in Rio, the Villa-Lobos family turned their house into a meeting place for respectable people of the time. There they would gather every Saturday to play until the wee hours of the morning. This custom, which lasted many years, decisively influenced Villa-Lobos’ musical education, and he began at a very early age. At six, he learned from his father to play clarinet and cello (this on a specially adapted viola). Raul Villa-Lobos subjected him to demanding music perception exercises, including recognition of musical notes and sounds, type, style, character and origin of music.
It was also at this time, thanks to his aunt Fifinha, who introduced him to the Preludes and Fugues of the "Well-Tempered Clavier" that Tuhu (his childhood nickname) became fascinated with the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer who was to be the source of inspiration for the creation of one of his most important cycles, the nine "Bachianas Brasileiras".
Contact With the Chorões
Upon returning to Rio de Janeiro, he began to be captivated by the type of music that was played in the streets and squares of the town. This was the choro, composed and played by chorões, groups of musicians who got together regularly for the pleasure of playing, and also to play at parties and during Carnival. This interest led him to study the guitar unbeknownst to his parents, who did not approve of their son’s association with composers of that type of music, who were considered delinquents.
In the beginning of the 20s, as a result of his involvement with the choro, he began to compose a cycle of fourteen works for many different types of ensembles called "Choros". Thus was born a new musical form, where urban music merged with modern composition techniques.
Travels Through BrazilFrom 1911 to 1912, he set off on another trip - an excursion through the interior of states in the North and Northeast of Brazil It was on this trip he is supposed to have visited the Amazon - a fact not yet in evidence - an event which would have left a profound influence on his work. Returning to Rio, he met the woman he would marry in 1913 - Lucília Guimarães.
The Artist's Coming of Age
1915 was the year when Villa-Lobos first appeared officially as a composer in a series of concerts in Rio de Janeiro. At that time, married to pianist Lucília Guimarães, he earned his living playing cello in orchestras in the theaters and cinemas of Rio while at the same time writing his own music. Newspapers published negative reviews on the modernity of his music. Years later, the composer insisted on explaining:
"I don’t write dissonant pieces to be modern. Absolutely not. The way I write is a cosmic consequence of the studies I’ve done, of the synthesis I’ve arrived at to mirror a Brazilian nature. When I sought to develop my culture, guided by my own instincts and experience, I realized that I could only come to a conclusion of conscious knowledge researching and studying works which, on the surface, were not musical. So my first book was a map of Brazil, the Brazil which I combed through, town by town, state by state, forest by forest, scrutinizing the soul of the land. Then, the character of the people of this land. Then, the natural wonders of this land. I went on, comparing my studies with foreign compositions, and I sought something to support and strengthen my personalism and the inalterability of my ideas."
The Week of Modern Art
In Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century, European (more specifically French) influence and the permanence of the conservative fin-de-siècle spirit were beginning to bother young people, and they started to oppose all of that. Thus was born the so-called Modernist movement, which was formalized in the city of São Paulo in February, 1922 as the Week of Modern Art. Examples from several fields of artistic endeavor were presented at the Municipal Theater there. Invited by Graça Aranha (Brazilian writer and diplomat), Villa-Lobos agreed to participate in three shows in "the Week", presenting, among other works, his "Danças Características Africanas" ("Characteristic African Dances").
First Travels in Europe
Already well-known in Brazilian music circles, Villa-Lobos was encouraged to go to Europe by friends who presented a bill before the City Council to finance his travels to Paris. Although the measure drew some protest, the proposal was approved, and Villa-Lobos left in 1923 on what would be his first trip to the Old Continent. When he arrived, Debussy - on of his great inspirations - was no longer in the vanguard, and artists and intellectuals in the French capital turned their sights and ears to Russian composers like Igor Stravinksy, who wrote original, modern and characteristically national music.
Unknown, Villa-Lobos had his entrée into the Parisian artistic environment through Tarsila do Amaral and other Brazilian painters; Arthur Rubinstein - who had already met him in Brazil - and soprano Vera Janacopulos, publicized his work at recitals in several countries. As a result of a drastic cut in the budget he originally sought, and in spite of the financial support of a group of friends and patrons, Villa-Lobos was forced to return to Rio de Janeiro in 1924. Upon his return, he was thus saluted by the poet Manuel Bandeira:
"Villa-Lobos has just returned from Paris. You expect whoever has just returned from Paris to be full of Paris. However, Villa-Lobos has come back full of Villa-Lobos. Nevertheless, one thing seriously shook him: Stravinsky’s "Rite of Spring". It was, he confessed to me, the greatest musical emotion of his life..."
In 1927, the composer returned to Paris for a three-year stay, this time accompanied by Lucília Villa-Lobos, to organize concerts and publish several works with Max-Eschig Publishers, to whom he had been presented on his first trip to Paris. He made many friends, and many renowned artists such as Magda Tagliaferro, Leopold Stokowski, Maurice Raskin, Edgar Varèse, Florent Schmitt and Arthur Honneger would frequent his house and participate in the Sunday feijoadas (a typical Brazilian dish of black beans and dried and smoked meats).
During this second stay in the French capital, he gained international prestige, performing his compositions at recitals and conducting orchestras in the principal European capitals, always making an impact on audiences and the critics while at the same time provoking controversy because of his musical daring. In the second half of 1930, Villa-Lobos was invited to do a concert in São Paulo. Little did he imagine that this brief visit to Brazil would ring in a new chapter in his life
The Educator
Villa-Lobos was concerned with the neglect with which music was treated in Brazilian schools, and presented a revolutionary plan for Music Education to the Department of Education of the State of São Paulo. The approval of his plan led him to move back to Brazil for good. In 1931, he organized a choral group, called "Civic Exhortation" from among representatives of all of São Paulo’s social classes, nearly twelve thousand voices strong.
After two years’ work in São Paulo, Villa-Lobos was officially invited by the Secretary of Education of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Anísio Teixeira, to organize and direct the SEMA (Superintendency of Artistic and Musical Education), which introduced the study of Music and Choral Singing into the school curriculum. As a consequence of his educational work, he traveled to Europe in 1936, representing Brazil at the Congress of Musical Education in Prague. On returning to Brazil that same year, he forms a liaison with his secretary, Arminda Neves d’Almeida.
With the support of then-president Getúlio Vargas, he organized grandiose choral groups, some with as many as 40,000 school children, and in 1942, he founded the Conservatório Nacional de Canto Orfeônico (National Conservatory for Choral Singing), whose objectives were to train candidates for choral teaching in primary and secondary schools, to study and draw up policies for teaching Choral Singing in Brazil, to promote Brazilian musicology, to make phonographic records, etc.
Villa-Lobos in the USA
"I will go to the United States only when the Americans wish to receive me as they would a European artist, that is, because of my own qualities and not because of political considerations...". In spite of his initial resistance (this was the time of the US "Good Neighbor Policy" in relation to its American allies during World War II), he was convinced by maestro Leopold Stokowski and accepted the invitation of the American maestro Werner Janssen to do a tour of the US in 1944.
From that moment on, he returned several times to the US, where he conducted and recorded his works, received awards and commissions for new pieces, and had contact with the greatest people in American music, thus completing the cycle of international acclaim. Villa-Lobos died of cancer on November 17, 1959 in Rio de Janeiro.
http://www.museuvillalobos.org.br/
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