Heitor Villa-Lobos

Heitor Villa-Lobos grew up with two musical traditions: the European repertoire he studied privately, and the chorões of Rio, whose guitars and improvised counterpoint he learned by sitting in with them. Accounts of his journeys into the Brazilian interior include an unconfirmed visit to the Amazon. His music drew on Brazilian traditions and on Bach, Debussy and Stravinsky. Long spells in Paris during the 1920s brought the Choros to international notice; the later Bachianas Brasileiras set Brazilian melody and rhythm inside Bachian counterpoint, and the fifth is scored for soprano and eight cellos. His guitar works include twelve Études and five Preludes. As director of music education in Rio from the 1930s he organised choral singing on a national scale, conducting massed gatherings of many thousands of schoolchildren. Born in Rio de Janeiro, he died there in 1959, leaving a catalogue of about a thousand works. Born in 1887, he had his first teacher in his father, an official of the Brazilian National Library and an amateur cellist who died when the boy was twelve, leaving a mother who hoped for a medical career; at sixteen he was engaged as a cellist in a theatre orchestra, and part of his father's library was sold to pay for the first journey inland. He enrolled at the National Institute of Music and soon left it. The guitar Études of 1929 carry a dedication to Andrés Segovia, the five Preludes of 1940 one to his companion, Arminda Neves d'Almeida. In 1945 he founded the Brazilian Academy of Music.