30 Facts About Heitor Villa-Lobos

Heitor Villa-Lobos was a Brazilian composer, conductor, cellist, and classical guitarist described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music".

Heitor Villa-Lobos's music was influenced by both Brazilian folk music and stylistic elements from the European classical tradition, as exemplified by his Bachianas Brasileiras and his Choros.

Heitor Villa-Lobos's father, Raul, was a civil servant, an educated man of Spanish extraction, a librarian, and an amateur astronomer and musician.

Heitor Villa-Lobos learned to play cello, clarinet, and classical guitar.

Around 1905 Heitor Villa-Lobos started explorations of Brazil's "dark interior", absorbing the native Brazilian musical culture.

Heitor Villa-Lobos played with many local Brazilian street-music bands; he was influenced by the cinema and Ernesto Nazareth's improvised tangos and polkas.

On November 12,1913, Heitor Villa-Lobos married the pianist Lucilia Guimaraes, ended his travels, and began his career as a serious musician.

That year Heitor Villa-Lobos met the French composer Darius Milhaud, who was in Rio as secretary to Paul Claudel at the French Legation.

Milhaud brought the music of Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and possibly Igor Stravinsky; in return Heitor Villa-Lobos introduced Milhaud to Brazilian street music.

In 1918, he met the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who became a lifelong friend and champion; this meeting prompted Heitor Villa-Lobos to write more piano music.

In February 1922, a festival of modern art took place in Sao Paulo and Heitor Villa-Lobos contributed performances of his own works.

The press were unsympathetic and the audience were not appreciative; their mockery was encouraged by Heitor Villa-Lobos's being forced by a foot infection to wear one carpet slipper.

In 1930, Heitor Villa-Lobos, who was in Brazil to conduct, planned to return to Paris.

In 1936, at the age of forty-nine, Heitor Villa-Lobos left his wife, and became romantically involved with Arminda Neves d'Almeida, who remained his companion until death.

Heitor Villa-Lobos dedicated a good number of works to her, including the Ciclo brasileiro and many of the Choros.

Heitor Villa-Lobos was the chair of a committee whose task was to define a definitive version of the Brazilian national anthem.

Heitor Villa-Lobos was able, after the end of the war, to travel abroad again; he returned to Paris, and made regular visits to the United States as well as travelling to Great Britain, and Israel.

Heitor Villa-Lobos received a huge number of commissions, and fulfilled many of them despite failing health.

In June 1959, Heitor Villa-Lobos alienated many of his fellow musicians by expressing disillusionment, saying in an interview that Brazil was "dominated by mediocrity".

Heitor Villa-Lobos is buried in the Cemiterio Sao Joao Batista in Rio de Janeiro.

Heitor Villa-Lobos's earliest published work Pequena suite for cello and piano of 1913 shows a love for the cello, but is not notably Brazilian, although it contains elements that were to resurface later.

Heitor Villa-Lobos included the urban street music of the choroes, who were groups containing flute, clarinet and cavaquinho, and often including ophicleide, trombones or percussion.

In Paris, his musical vocabulary established, Heitor Villa-Lobos solved the problem of his works' form.

Heitor Villa-Lobos developed new forms to free his imagination from the constraints of conventional musical development such as that required in sonata form.

Heitor Villa-Lobos described them as "a new form of musical composition", a transformation of the Brazilian music and sounds "by the personality of the composer".

Heitor Villa-Lobos composed between 1930 and 1945 nine pieces he called Bachianas Brasileiras.

Heitor Villa-Lobos eventually recorded all nine of these works for EMI in Paris, mostly with the musicians of the French National Orchestra; these were originally issued on LPs and later reissued on CDs.

Heitor Villa-Lobos recorded the first section of Bachianas Brasileiras No 5 with Bidu Sayao and a group of cellists for Columbia.

Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote more music for Segovia, the Cinq preludes, which demonstrate a further formalisation of his composition style.

Heitor Villa-Lobos's Bendita Sabedoria, a sequence of a cappella chorales written in 1958, is a similarly simple setting of Latin biblical texts.