Heitor Villa-Lobos biography

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Villa-Lobos's father was a librarian and an amateur musician. Under the influence of his father's weekly musical get-togethers, the boy became interested in music. He learned to play cello (actually a modified viola) at age six and was inspired by music from J.S. Bach's A Well-Tempered Clavier given to him by an aunt. While traveling with his family to various regions of the vast country, he also developed an interest in native Brazilian folk music. When they returned to Rio, Villa-Lobos began associating and performing with the city's popular musicians. He learned to play the guitar. He left home at age 18 because his widowed mother opposed his “delinquent” friends and wanted him to become a doctor. Instead he became a musical vagabond, playing cello and guitar to support himself while traveling throughout the states of Espírito Santo, Bahia, and Pernambuco, absorbing Brazilian folk music and composing his own pieces.

During this period Villa-Lobos enrolled briefly at the Instituto Nacional de Msica in Rio, but he was to continue his travels for three years. He returned to Rio with a large group of manuscripts and an intimate knowledge of the Afro-Brazilian music of the North and Northeast. He began a serious study of the works of Bach, Richard Wagner, and Giacomo Puccini, whose influence can be noted in his compositions. In 1915 a concert in Rio featured his compositions, and his career was given a vital boost that same year, when the firm of Artur Napoleo began publishing his music. Although many critics initially attacked the dissonance and modernity of his work, he persisted in his efforts to merge Western music and the Brazilian vernacular. In 1919 he met the pianist Artur Rubinstein, who helped advance Villa-Lobos's reputation by playing his music in concerts throughout the world. He composed ceaselessly (about 2,000 works are credited to him in all), and by the time of his first trip to Europe in 1923, he had produced a long list of compositions in every form, from solo pieces for guitar to trios, quartets, concerti, vocal music, and symphonies. The success of his first trip—he made Paris his home base for the remainder of the 1920s—encouraged him to organize and perform in a number of concerts; during this period he published more of his work and solidified an international reputation.

In Brazil for a performance in 1930, Villa-Lobos presented