Charles De Gaulle once said that Brazil is a country of enormous potential—and always will be. The musical analog of that quip could well be the work of Heitor Villa-Lobos, Brazil’s greatest 20th-century composer. Not only did his music portray Brazil as a place of exciting potential, but the music itself promised greatness. Was it ever achieved? Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) was a musical tsunami that left in its wake anywhere from 1,400 to 2,000 works—creative profligacy on such a scale not seen since the Baroque era. There is something almost childlike in the heedlessness of his musical production.
At the time of the centennial of Villa-Lobos’s birth in 1987, however, there were recordings of only a score of his works available. How could the merits of his achievement possibly be judged on the basis of such a thin slice of his output? That task has become both easier and more difficult due to the profusion of Villa-Lobos recordings that now take up over two pages of the Schwann catalog. It is easier because there is more to judge; it is more difficult because the picture his works present is considerably more complex than an acquaintance with his few widely popular pieces would lead one to believe.
The general impression from what is now available of his huge body of work is one of marvelous musical mayhem. Pianist Arthur Rubinstein, one of the first to bring Villa-Lobos’s work to a wider audience, described his initial encounter with Villa-Lobos during a performance of Amazonas in a Rio de Janeiro cinema theater. He said of the music, “it was made up of Brazilian rhythms which I easily identified, but they were treated in a completely original way. It sounded confused, formless, but very attractive.” It was hard for Rubinstein to discern what was going on because Villa-Lobos’s music is a wild amalgamation of Brazilian rhythms, street and folk melodies, Baroque and modern musical techniques, and sheer noise.
The formlessness that Rubinstein detected was there, at least partially, by design. Villa-Lobos used it to depict nature in a wild, inchoate condition, as he experienced it in his youthful explorations of the untamed Brazilian jungle. Nature was sometimes idyllic and serene, sometimes punctuated by outbursts of spasmodic violence, but always teeming with life, including the call of the Araponga bird, the squawking of parrots, the buzzing and whirring of various insects, and other aural exotica. One writer said, “The sensitivity of Villa-Lobos’s ear is apparent to those who have experienced the perpetual sound—something between white noise and pandemonium, but always alive—of the rain forest.”
Villa-Lobos’s father, who died when Heitor was only twelve, taught him to play the cello. With his rudimentary education, Villa-Lobos joined the itinerant musicians in the streets and cafes of Rio de Janiero, occasionally earning enough to help his impoverished mother. He seemed to have a gift for melody and a natural ear for unusual and highly colorful sonorities; without anyone’s permission, he began writing music.
He was largely self-taught and the lessons he did take were seldom fruitful. A harmony teacher once tried to tell him how each chord must be resolved. After one chord, Villa-Lobos told him it could be resolved another way. The teacher refused to believe him until the following week Villa-Lobos produced a work by Bach that bore out his claim. His teacher’s response was, “Well, he’s another madman like you!” Since Bach was Villa-Lobos’s musical god, the compliment could not have been more flattering. It only reinforced his view that the musical academy was not only a waste of time but destructive.
“This is my conservatory,” Villa- Lobos once said, pointing to a map of Brazil. Villa-Lobos learned his craft not only by improvising with street and cafe musicians but by spending several years exploring the interior of Brazil, collecting folk tunes and Indian dance music, and creating outlandish stories for later use in Paris salons. (One of the best is that he was captured by cannibals but was able to escape, Orpheus- like, by enchanting the cannibals with his guitar music.) Villa-Lobos learned from the musical school of life—his music has dirt under its fingernails.
Aside from the strong Brazilian folkloric streak, the two clearest influences on Villa-Lobos’s music are French and Russian. He was exposed to both at Russian Ballet performances, directed by Fokine and Diaghilev, in Rio from 1913 to 1917. At the Russian Ballet, Villa-Lobos first heard the works of Debussy and Stravinsky. The impact of French impressionism can be heard in Villa-Lobos’s works of that time, especially his early chamber music, such as the piano trios, and other works. Reviewing a Rubinstein performance of Villa-Lobos’s A prole do bebe No. 1, a Rio critic said, “if the program had not told us who the composer was, we might have been tempted to say that here were some unpublished pages of Debussy, written in honor of Brazil.”
The influence of Stravinsky is prominent in Villa-Lobos’s ballets, such as Erosao, Amazonas, and Genesis, as well as in some of the wilder movements of the Choros and Bachianas brasileiras. Some of Villa-Lobos’s music sounds as if he had gotten hold of a giant Stravinsky machine (of the Rite of Spring era) and, without quite knowing what he was doing, began pushing buttons and pulling levers, producing a resounding racket. It is perhaps this hapless, awkward aspect of his work that led to Stravinsky’s acerbic remark: “Why is it whenever I hear a bad piece of music it is always by Villa-Lobos?” Despite its obvious influence on him, Villa- Lobos was equally dismissive of Stravinsky’s music.
If one were making fun of Villa-Lobos, one might say he sounds at times like a mix of Stravinsky and Xavier Cougat or the Rite of Spring danced by Carmen Miranda. The effect, if anything, is original. However, no less a composer than Olivier Messiaen considered Villa- Lobos a force of nature and the greatest orchestrator of the 20th century. One could probably hold all of these views of Villa- Lobos simultaneously due to the necessarily uneven quality of his huge body of work. Nonetheless, his best music bursts with life, expressing exuberance, joy, and a wistful melancholy.
No one in Rio knew quite what to make of Villa-Lobos early in his career. Disconcerted by certain gaucheries in his scores that they ascribed to a lack of formal education, his few wealthy patrons decided to ship him off to France to smooth over his rough edges. Villa-Lobos had an entirely different idea of the purpose of his sabbatical. Upon arrival in Paris, he announced, “I did not come to study with you; I came to show you what I’ve done.” Due to the French love of the exotic, he scored a major success. They were enthralled by his riotous explosions of color and rhythmic drive. The recognition he received in France during this and subsequent stays (from 1923 to 1930) was a springboard for Villa-Lobos’s serious consideration as a major talent in Brazil. It is ironic that Brazil, which later embraced him as its quintessential composer, did so only after he gained popularity in another country.
By the time Villa-Lobos returned to Brazil in 1930, he was on his way to becoming a national institution. This became almost literally the case when, under the nationalistic regime of Getulio Vargas, he became national superintendent of musical education. From that platform, he launched his own pedagogic system to teach the masses choral singing based on Brazilian folk songs. In 1935, in one of several such extraordinary demonstrations, he conducted 30,000 school children in four-part choral singing in a stadium in Rio.
Even the arduous task of organizing Brazil’s musical education system could not staunch the flow of compositions from Villa-Lobos, who said, “my music is natural, like a waterfall.” Until his death in 1959, he continued to pour forth works in every genre, producing 14 famous Choros, nine equally famous Bachianas brasileiras (Villa-Lobos’s attempt to demonstrate the natural affinity between Bach’s music and Brazilian folk music), twelve practically unknown symphonies, 17 quartets, numerous other chamber works, many concertos (including five for piano), operas, ballets, film scores, innumerable piano and guitar works, and songs.
One should begin by listening to Villa-Lobos’s most famous works. There are many very successful compilations available with selections from both the Choros and the Bachianas brasileiras. One of the newest and best is on an RCA disc from Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony. It contains exciting renditions of Bachianas brasileiras Nos. 4, 5, 7, and 9 and Choros No. 10, with Renee Fleming as the gorgeous soprano voice in No. 5. EMI offers an older but worthy recording of Bachianas brasileiras Nos. 1, 5, and 7, with Enrique Batiz, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and soprano Barbara Hendricks. A budget EMI Classics double-CD pack offers Bachianas brasileiras No. 3, Momoprecoce—Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, Fantasia for Soprano Saxophone and Chamber Orchestra, Concerto for Guitar and Small Orchestra, and various piano pieces. A Hyperion disc is dedicated to Villa-Lobos’s instrument, the cello, and features the Pleeth Cello Octet play, with very invigorating tempos, Bachianas brasileiras Nos. 1 and 5, and a selection of Villa Lobos’s transcriptions of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues for a cello orchestra.
These works display Villa-Lobos’s exotic evocations of local color but also amply demonstrate that his sensibility was fundamentally Romantic. He romanticized the Baroque and Bach throughout the Bachianas brasileiras. And no matter what formal designations he gave his compositions, they were essentially suites or fantasias. This is also true of his five piano concertos, available on a mid-priced London 2-CD set with Cristina Ortiz and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, under conductor Miguel Gomez-Martinez. Here Villa-Lobos sounds less like Stravinsky and more like a Brazilian Rachmaninov. One can also hear the Romantic strain in his Cello Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, and the Fantasia for Cello and Orchestra, newly available on Auvidis with cellist Antonio Menses and the Symphony Orchestra of Galicia, under Victor Pablo Perez.
The more raucous side of Villa-Lobos is available on a Marco Polo CD, featuring several ballets—Genesis, Erosdo, Amazonas, and Dawn in a Tropical Forest—bravely played by the Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, under Villa-Lobos specialist, Roberto Duarte. A very good mid-price recommendation of the boisterous Choros No. 8 and the ballet, Uirapuru, is on Delos, with the Symphony Orchestra of Paraiba, under Eleazar de Carvalho. This CD also contains a gorgeous performance of the Fantasia for Cello and Orchestra played by Janos Starker.
If anything can change the conventional view of Villa-Lobos, it is his chamber music. I knew there were hidden treasures from having listened to his Quintet for Harp, String Trio, and Flute (1957), which bears a close resemblance to and emerges favorably in comparison with works by Ravel and Roussel for similar ensembles. (Why isn’t this little masterpiece available on record?) His Quinteto em forma de choros for winds is also a gem. Anyone who thinks of Villa-Lobos as a second-rate Stravinsky of the jungle or an aimless note-spinner has yet to encounter his 17 string quartets. Villa-Lobos was a self-confessed “string quartet addict” and wrote these works throughout his career. It is ironic that, like Shostakovich’s quartets, they were the last part of his work to be recorded, though they contain some of his finest music.
We are beholden to the Marco Polo label and the magnificent Danubius Quartet for having finally given the world a complete traversal of Villa-Lobos’s quartets. These compositions show the quality of Villa-Lobos’s musical thinking denuded of the orchestral exotica of his symphonic works. The fertility of invention is extraordinary, especially in the beautifully lyrical and nostalgic slow movements. The quartets are not in conventional sonata form but are more like the “theme and variations” or free- flowing fantasies of Gianfranceso Malipiero in his quartets. The early works show the French impressionist influence, the middle quartets favor the distinctly Brazilian, and the later masterpieces express a spare eloquence all their own. There is no space to discuss the quartets individually, but start with No. 6, Quarteto Brasileiro, and see if you can resist it. It is apparent that there is more to Villa- Lobos than many suspected.