Heitor Villa-Lobos was born on March 5, 1887, and died on November 17, 1959. He was a Brazilian composer, conductor, cellist, and classical guitarist. He is known as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music." Villa-Lobos is one of the most well-known South American composers in music history. He wrote many types of musical works, including orchestral, chamber, instrumental, and vocal pieces. By the time he died in 1959, he had created over 2,000 works. His music was influenced by Brazilian folk music and styles from European classical traditions. Examples of his work include the Bachianas Brasileiras (Brazilian Bach-pieces) and the Chôros. His Etudes for classical guitar (1929) were dedicated to Andrés Segovia, and his 5 Preludes (1940) were dedicated to his wife, Arminda Neves d'Almeida, also known as "Mindinha." These pieces are important parts of the classical guitar collection.

Biography

Heitor Villa-Lobos was born in Rio de Janeiro. His father, Raúl, worked as a government employee, a librarian, and an amateur astronomer and musician. During Villa-Lobos’s childhood, Brazil experienced major changes, including ending slavery in 1888 and removing the Empire of Brazil in 1889. These changes influenced Brazil’s music, which had previously focused on European styles taught at the Music Conservatory. Villa-Lobos received little formal training in music. After a few failed lessons on harmony, he learned by secretly watching musical events at his home. He taught himself to play the cello, clarinet, and classical guitar. When his father died suddenly in 1899, Villa-Lobos supported his family by playing in cinema and theatre orchestras in Rio.

Around 1905, Villa-Lobos began exploring Brazil’s remote regions, learning about the country’s traditional music. Some people question the truth of his stories about these trips, including claims of being captured by cannibals. After this time, he stopped formal training and focused on Brazil’s indigenous musical traditions, which combined Portuguese, African, and American Indian influences. His earliest compositions came from improvisations on the classical guitar during this period.

Villa-Lobos played in local Brazilian street-music bands and was influenced by cinema and the music of Ernesto Nazareth, who played tangos and polkas. For a time, he worked as a cellist in a Rio opera company and wrote early attempts at Grand Opera. With the help of Arthur Napoleão, a pianist and music publisher, Villa-Lobos decided to compose seriously.

On November 12, 1913, Villa-Lobos married the pianist Lucília Guimarães, ended his travels, and began his career as a serious musician. Before marriage, he had never learned to play the piano, so his wife taught him the basics. His music was first published in 1913. He introduced his works in a series of chamber concerts (later also orchestral concerts) from 1915 to 1921, mostly in Rio de Janeiro’s Salão Nobre do Jornal do Comércio.

The music performed at these concerts showed Villa-Lobos working through the conflict between European and Brazilian influences in his style. By 1916, he decided Brazilian music would shape his work. That year, he composed the symphonic poems Amazonas and Tédio de alvorada, the first version of what would become Uirapurú (though Amazonas was not performed until 1929, and Uirapurú was completed in 1934 and first performed in 1935). These works used Brazilian legends and folk music.

European composers still influenced Villa-Lobos. In 1917, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes toured Brazil, making an impact. That same year, Villa-Lobos met Darius Milhaud, a French composer, who introduced him to the music of Debussy, Satie, and Stravinsky. In return, Villa-Lobos shared Brazilian street music with Milhaud. In 1918, he met pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who became a lifelong friend and supporter. This meeting encouraged Villa-Lobos to write more piano music.

Around 1918, Villa-Lobos stopped using opus numbers for his compositions. His piano suite Carnaval das crianças (Children’s Carnival), written between 1919 and 1920, marked a break from European Romanticism. The suite, with eight movements and a finale for two pianists, depicted scenes from Rio’s Lenten Carnival.

In February 1922, a modern art festival in São Paulo included Villa-Lobos’s performances. The audience and press were unkind, possibly because Villa-Lobos wore a carpet slipper due to a foot infection. The festival ended with his Quarteto simbólico, a piece inspired by Brazilian city life.

In July 1922, Rubinstein performed A Prole do Bebê (The Baby’s Family), a piano suite Villa-Lobos wrote in 1918. The piece was booed, possibly because the public wanted something less complex. Villa-Lobos remained calm, and Rubinstein later said he believed the composer felt “too good for them.” The piece is now seen as a key work of Brazilian modernism.

Rubinstein encouraged Villa-Lobos to tour abroad, and in 1923, he went to Paris. His goal was to share Brazil’s unique music, not to study. Before leaving, he completed his Nonet (for ten players and a chorus), which was first performed in Paris. He lived in Paris from 1923–24 and again from 1927–30, meeting influential figures like Edgard Varèse, Pablo Picasso, and Aaron Copland. His Parisian concerts impressed audiences.

In the 1920s, Villa-Lobos worked with Andrés Segovia, a famous classical guitarist, to write a set of twelve guitar pieces. Each piece was based on small musical ideas from Brazilian street musicians, transformed into études. These works became important in classical guitar education. The same street music inspired his Chôros, a series of compositions written between 1920 and 1929. The first European performance of Chôros No. 10 in Paris caused a strong reaction, with critics calling it a new kind of art. Though not as well known for guitar music, all his guitar works are considered essential in the classical guitar repertoire.

In 1930, Villa-Lobos planned to return to Paris but could not leave Brazil due to a new law preventing money from being taken out of the country. He stayed in Brazil, arranging concerts in São Paulo and composing patriotic and educational music. In 1932, he became director of the Superintendência de Educação Musical e Artística (SEMA), overseeing concerts like the Brazilian premieres of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Bach’s Mass in B minor.

Music

His earliest works began with guitar improvisations, such as Panqueca (Pancake) from 1900. A concert series from 1915–21 included first performances of pieces showing originality and highly skilled technique. Some of these works are early examples of musical elements important throughout his body of work. His connection to the Iberian Peninsula is shown in Canção Ibéria from 1914 and in orchestral versions of some of Enrique Granados’s piano piece Goyescas (1918, now lost). Other themes that later appeared in his music include the sadness and despair in Desesperança – Sonata Phantastica e Capricciosa no. 1 (1915), a violin sonata with "dramatic and strongly different emotions," the birds in L'oiseau blessé d'une flèche (1913), the mother–child relationship (often not happy in his music) in Les mères from 1914, and the flowers in Suíte floral for piano from 1916–18, which later appeared in Distribuição de flores for flute and classical guitar from 1937.

Combining European musical traditions with Brazilian influences became more formal in his later works. His earliest published work, Pequena suíte for cello and piano from 1913, shows a love for the cello but is not clearly Brazilian, though it includes elements that later reappeared. His three-movement Suíte graciosa from 1915 (later expanded to six movements around 1947 to become his String Quartet No. 1) was influenced by European opera, while Três danças características (African and Indigenous) for piano from 1914–16, later arranged for octet and orchestrated, was strongly influenced by the tribal music of the Caripunas Indians of Mato Grosso.

His tone poems Amazonas (1917, first performed in Paris in 1929) and Uirapurú (1917, first performed in 1935) were dominated by indigenous Brazilian influences. These works used Brazilian folk tales and characters, imitations of jungle sounds and animals, imitations of the nose-flute by the violinophone, and especially the sound of the uirapuru bird itself.

His meeting with Arthur Rubinstein in 1918 led Villa-Lobos to compose piano music such as Simples coletânea from 1919 (possibly influenced by Rubinstein’s performances of Ravel and Scriabin on his South American tours) and Bailado infernal from 1920. The latter piece includes tempo and expression markings such as "vertiginoso e frenético" (dizzying and frantic), "infernal" (hellish), and "mais vivo ainda" (even faster).

Carnaval das crianças from 1919–20 marked the emergence of Villa-Lobos’s mature style. The piece sometimes imitates a mouth organ, children’s dances, a harlequinade (a type of theatrical performance), and ends with an impression of a carnival parade. It was later orchestrated in 1929 with new linking passages and a new title, Momoprecoce. Naïveté and innocence are also heard in the piano suites A Prole do Bebê (The Baby’s Family) from 1918–21.

Around this time, he also blended urban Brazilian influences and impressions, such as in his Quarteto simbólico from 1921. He included the urban street music of the chorões, groups that played flute, clarinet, and cavaquinho (a Brazilian guitar), and sometimes ophicleide, trombones, or percussion. Villa-Lobos occasionally joined such bands. Early works showing this influence were included in the Suite populaire brésilienne from 1908–12, assembled by his publisher, and more mature works include the Sexteto místico (c. 1955, replacing a lost and likely unfinished one from 1917) and his settings of poetry by Mário de Andrade and Catulo da Paxão Cearense in Canções típicas brasileiras from 1919. His classical guitar studies were also influenced by the music of the chorões.

The 12 guitar etudes commissioned by Andrés Segovia in the 1920s show Villa-Lobos’s ability to create meaningful music for many instruments. Each piece focuses on developing different guitar skills while representing sounds and techniques from Brazilian street performers, blending his nationalistic style with a more technical, study-based approach. This is seen in the first etude of his collection, which features an almost entirely arpeggiated piece with a unique right-hand pattern.

All these elements are combined in Villa-Lobos’s Nonet, subtitled Impressão rápida do todo o Brasil (A Brief Impression of the Whole of Brazil). Though titled as chamber music, the work is scored for flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bassoon, celesta, harp, piano, a large percussion section requiring at least two players, and a mixed chorus.

In Paris, after establishing his musical style, Villa-Lobos solved the problem of how to structure his works. It was seen as unusual that his Brazilian impressionism should be expressed in forms like quartets and sonatas. He developed new forms to free his creativity from traditional structures, such as sonata form. The multi-sectional poema form appears in the Suite for Voice and Violin, somewhat like a triptych (three-part artwork), and in Poema da criança e sua mamã for voice, flute, clarinet, and cello (1923). The extended Rudepoêma for piano, written for Rubinstein, is a complex and demanding work, often requiring notation on several staves. Wright called it "the most impressive result" of this formal development. The *Cir

Recordings

• Villa-Lobos plays Villa-Lobos (SCSH 010, SanCtuS Recordings) (audio)
• Villa-Lobos par lui-même (EMI Classics 0077776722924) (from an archive dated September 26, 2011, accessed on November 19, 2015).
• Villa-Lobos: Bachianas Brasileiras Numbers 1, 2, 5, and 9 (Angel 0724356696426; EMI Classics CD 724356696457) (from an archive dated September 26, 2011, accessed on November 19, 2015). (EMI Classics)
• A database of available Villa-Lobos recordings (from an archive)