Heitor Villa-Lobos

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) was a Brazilian composer whose work brought the rhythms, harmonies, and folk material of Brazil into the concert tradition. Born in Rio de Janeiro, he learned cello and guitar from his father and as a young man travelled extensively through the Brazilian interior, absorbing regional songs, dances, and Indigenous music that would feed his later writing.

In the 1920s he spent time in Paris, where his music drew the attention of musicians including Arthur Rubinstein, Edgard Varèse, and Florent Schmitt. He returned to Brazil in 1930 and turned increasingly to musical education, organising mass choral programmes in São Paulo and later in Rio under the patronage of President Getúlio Vargas.

His best-known cycle is the Bachianas Brasileiras, nine suites composed between 1930 and 1945 that fuse the contrapuntal manner of Johann Sebastian Bach with Brazilian melodic and rhythmic idioms. The fifth suite, for soprano and an ensemble of eight cellos, is among the most performed Brazilian works of the twentieth century.

He also wrote the long series of Chôros, twelve symphonies, sixteen string quartets, several concertos, and the operatic and orchestral works that filled a catalogue of more than a thousand compositions. In 1945 he founded the Brazilian Academy of Music and served as its first president. He died in Rio de Janeiro in 1959.

The given name Heitor is the Portuguese form of Hector, from the Greek Hektōr, meaning holding fast or defender. Used for boys in Portuguese-speaking countries, it carries a classical resonance, and he wore it through a life devoted to defining a national musical voice.