Villa-Lobos: Sinfonietta No. 1
Lakeview Orchestra will perform Villa-Lobos’s Sinfonietta on February 11th, 2020 at the Athenaeum Theatre.
Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 – 1959)
Sinfonietta No. 1
Eminent ethnomusicologist Gerard Béhague (1937 – 2005) wrote, “Villa-Lobos stands as the most significant creative figure in 20th century Brazilian art music. This significance stems from his achievement in creating unique compositional styles in which contemporary European techniques and [Brazilian] national music is combined.” To fully appreciate the scope of Béhague’s accolades for Villa-Lobos, we must first appreciate the scope and variety of Brazil. Recall that Brazil is the most biodiverse country in the world, as well as the fifth largest country in terms of both population and land mass. The demographic variety of Brazil’s population is as notable as its sheer size. In the 19th and 20th centuries, large numbers of Italian, German, Jewish, Arab, and Japanese citizens immigrated to Brazil, creating South America’s most ethnically diverse population. Yet one statistic stands head over shoulders with respect to population: There are more people of African descent living in Brazil today than in any other county in the world, bar Nigeria. From 1525 to 1866, an estimated 4.9 million humans were forcibly relocated from Africa to Brazil and treated as private property, and then used to support a wickedly evil system of enterprise and commerce. Due to many factors, African influence on Brazil’s culture has remained much more prominent than African influence on North American culture, especially with respect to music.
The music of Brazil encompasses an extraordinary variety of regional styles, which were mostly created through the synthesis and interaction of various types of African, Amerindian, and European music. Some styles, like samba, are still quite pure, as the drumming of Carnival sambas is almost as African as the Angolans who brought it to Brazil centuries ago. From his earliest years, Villa-Lobos was enthralled with the diversity and span of the indigenous and immigrant melodies and rhythms of his native land. With little formal training, Villa-Lobos began his career as a guitarist and traveled across much of Brazil, guitar in hand, to learn and assimilate the local music in an ongoing search for his own identity as a Brazilian classical musician.
Eventually turning to orchestral composition, Villa-Lobos incorporated traditional compositional techniques with native Brazilian melodies and rhythms. One such first attempt, written early in his career, is Sinfonietta No. 1, “A Memoria de Mozart” (1916). Villa-Lobos based the piece on two unspecified themes from Mozart, describing one as “delicate and subtle suggest[ing] the European aristocratic elegance of the 18th century,” and the other as “violent, deep and mysterious present[ing] the characteristics of German genius.” He elaborated that the intent of the work was to “describe the conflict between culture, represented by the scholastic prejudices and rules, and the temperament of the free, spontaneous artist, independent of any theory.” The music itself is buoyant and melodious but almost untouched by the Brazilian influences that he was then absorbing into his musical sphere. With its largely traditional melodic and harmonic idioms and rhythms, the Sinfonietta’s tribute to Mozart is in gesture rather than in emotional content.
A prolific composer, Villa-Lobos turned out over 2,000 works in almost every conceivable genre from opera to film scores, from ballets to orchestral tone poems, and from symphonies, concerti, string quartets to solo piano and solo guitar pieces. Villa-Lobos summarized his creative philosophy in an interview with the New York Times, stating that he did not think of music as “culture, or education, or even as a device for quieting the nerves, but as something more potent, mystical and profound in its effect. Music has the power to communicate, to heal, to ennoble, when it is made part of man’s life and consciousness.”
Program Notes by Luke Smith.
Lakeview Orchestra will perform Villa-Lobos’s Sinfonietta on February 11th, 2020. Your Evening Awaits >>>