Villa-Lobos, Brazilian modernism, and Antropofagia

During his second sojourn in Paris (1927–30), Villa-Lobos attained significant success among his Brazilian peers and European audiences. By incorporating into his compositions elements of Brazilian regional folklore to develop what could be perceived as a national style – as in much of the series of Choros – he was able to please his Parisian audiences. On the one hand, his music fulfilled the expectations about the ‘imaginary Brazil of the Parisians’; on the other, it fitted a broader intellectual project to give an aesthetic form to Brazil as a nation.Footnote ⁵ In 1929, the compatriot critic Mário Pedrosa praised what he called Villa-Lobos's ‘primitivism’ as a perfect representation of their country:

Pedrosa's claim of a more ‘authentic’ primitivism, in contrast to the modernist European trend to transform sonic Otherness into avant-garde compositions, put Villa-Lobos into a privileged position in relation to these two audiences: the Brazilian artistic community, which sought in his music a representation of its national identity, and the local audiences eager for works steeped in exoticism and difference. In discussing Villa-Lobos's Três poemas indígenas (1927), a composition for voice and orchestra performed in Paris, Chelsea Burns highlights this dual character: commercial viability within larger artistic movements and the ‘exotic nationalism – a project in which exoticist stereotypes define the nation in terms recognizable by the global and domestic cultural elite’.Footnote ⁷ As Anaïs Fléchet succinctly explains, when the composer crosses the Atlantic in the 1920s, ‘he discovers Paris and he is discovered’.Footnote ⁸

In the French capital, Villa-Lobos was part of a Brazilian community formed by a number of intellectuals and artists, including the writer Oswald de Andrade and the painter Tarsila do Amaral. This couple was at the core of a group of modernists who pursued the creative representations of Brazil's national identity in the 1920s. Their theoretical framework was cast as Antropofagia. The image of an intuitive albeit innovative composer that Pedrosa presented in his 1929 review was closely connected to this construction of a modernist cultural cannibalism, which is expressed in one of the aphorisms of the Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto), published in 1928, which takes the Tupi, one of the most populous indigenous people in Brazil before colonization, as a stand-in: ‘Tupi, or not Tupi, that is the question.’Footnote ⁹ The idealized evocation of the territory's original inhabitants was not a new national project. It had its roots as far back as the Brazilian romanticism during the nineteenth century, which finds a musical representation in Carlos Gomes's nativist operas. To suggest, however, that the absorption of foreign influences happens through the ‘savage’ act of ingestion complicates the division between the national and the foreign, or the Self and the Other. As Bernardo Ricupero writes: ‘In contrast with the denunciation of ideas and institutions produced in Europe, since they would be inadequate to our conditions, the act of devouring what comes from outside becomes a defining mark to country like Brazil.’Footnote ¹⁰

This interplay between the colonizer and the colonized – one that dissolves differences rather than maintains them – offered a powerful solution for the problem posed by the binary construction of the authentic and the appropriated. It was presented as a process through which any hierarchy of values connected to artistic practices and knowledge emanating from Europe could disappear. ‘Devouring’ different cultural forms and transforming them through this process into something singular, Brazilian modernists suggested, carried the possibility of transgressing a colonial past while in the process catapulting their nation into the future or at least a shared present with contemporary (European) peers. One aspect of this subversive tactic was to reinterpret the colonial encounter in the Americas from the cannibal's perspective: ‘The goal of the anthropophagic rebellion is to replace a European simulacrum with native originality. Because Antropofagia presents itself as a route to decolonization through symbolic and irreversible acts of mixture between autochthonous Brazil and its arriving Europeans, it signifies yet another stage in their long-standing symbiotic interdependence.’Footnote ¹¹ One of the contradictions of Antropofagia as a postcolonial theory is that it preserves colonial hierarchical structures, at least in terms of who eats and who is eaten. Yet when emplaced in the colonial past, the perspective of the indigenous cannibal who consumes the colonizers’ culture seems to be productive for imagining an alternative history.

Two important assumptions lie behind this kind of optimistic view on the resistance to the colony: first, the primitivist view of Brazil as an untouched paradise that was contaminated only by the landing of the Portuguese caravels crossing the Atlantic; and second, the notion that human movement – and thus culture – flows unidirectionally from Europe to the Americas. Several authors, including Roberto Schwarz, Bernardo Ricupero, and Rafael Cardoso, have pointed to the contradictions within the Antropofagia as a political and literary project as it attempts to mediate the division between the local and the foreign in forging the cultural foundation of the nation.Footnote ¹² One of the aspects that I want to emphasize, building on Florencia Garramuño, is the static configuration of the colonial encounter in Brazil in this representation: the imagined colonial encounter happens in a Brazilian territory that is visited by European travellers.Footnote ¹³ What is important here is that Europeans are the ones who are active travellers, while local inhabitants await passively. Although Antropofagia's recounting of Brazilian colonial history within its borders – one that emphasizes the hierarchy between the active imposing of foreign values and the passive, if resistant, assimilation of an autochthonous dormant culture – works as a myth for the nation, it is not completely effective for the metaphorical cultural cannibalism of the twentieth century. Indeed, Villa-Lobos was in Europe during a good part of the 1920s, actively pursuing a market for his music, which included his absorbing of the contemporary music he encountered there.Footnote ¹⁴ In this sense, Antropofagia needs to be understood as a transnational and historical idea rather than a fixed view on a static national image. As Garramuño writes: ‘In that sense, it is not only necessary to incorporate the avant-garde voyages as founding moments in that definition [of a national autochthonous character], but also to identify in the transformations of those languages’ forms the operations whereby these trajectories leave their imprint on the form itself.’Footnote ¹⁵ To focus on Villa-Lobos as a traveller means to engage with the transnational exchange that formed part of the struggle defining what was national in Brazilian music.

The few times Villa-Lobos travelled abroad in the 1930s – to conduct concerts in Argentina in 1935 and to represent Brazil at meetings in Europe in 1936 – limited his application of the ‘cultural cannibal traveler’ model from the 1920s. There are two interrelated reasons that explain the decline in the frequency of his international travels: first, the decrease in patronage from the financial elite related to the coffee-export industry, given the fall of the commodity prices following the 1929 financial crisis; and second, the composer's steady rise through the ranks of music educators during President Getúlio Vargas's government, which started after the 1930 Revolution and which put an end to Brazil's First Republic, much of which had been controlled by the same ‘coffee barons’.Footnote ¹⁶ Adapting to the changing sociopolitical conditions during the 1930s also prompted a considerable shift in the style and scale of Villa-Lobos's compositions. As Manoel Aranha Corrêa do Lago points out, Villa-Lobos composed almost no new orchestral music until 1937, and much of his work was dedicated to compiling and arranging music for pedagogical use in the manner of Carl Orff, Paul Hindemith, and Zoltan Kodály, including the ten volumes of the Guia prático.Footnote ¹⁷ Contrary to many authors who interpreted Villa-Lobos's compositional periods as mirroring Igor Stravinsky's career – a neoclassical shift after a period steeped in the French primitivist avant-garde – Corrêa do Lago suggests that the years between 1930 and 1936 presented a moment of reorientation, at least as regards compositions using new materials.Footnote ¹⁸

Corrêa do Lago's reading of this compositional gap is based on a careful and detailed analysis of the compositional origin of the most celebrated of Villa-Lobos's compositions: the Bachianas brasileiras. Rather than trusting the composer's words that this nine-work cycle was composed between 1930 and 1945 – the period of the Vargas's regime – Corrêa do Lago shows that with the exception of the second and third movements of Bachianas brasileiras no. 1, all the other pieces within the sequence were composed after 1936 (and even the complete version of no. 1 with its added first movement was only performed in 1938). Villa-Lobos's claim seems to have been an attempt to cover up the creative gap in his compositional output. This is typical of the many instances when he manipulated information for his own benefit, such as changing the composition dates of older works so as to hide other influences, or creating the fanciful narratives that seasoned his concerts with an exotic flavor.Footnote ¹⁹

Retelling the travel itinerary

One of the challenges of reconstructing the route which Villa-Lobos took to Europe in 1936 lies in the archival sources for this trip. The composers’ own reports about the trip and the press coverage present a carefully curated account of a well-organized, coherent, and successful journey to Europe. However, there are significant differences between the actual travel itinerary and the narration of the travel experiences (Table 1). Uncovering these inconsistencies is more than just a matter of biographical detail because these discrepancies point to a rich nexus of travel-related benefits for the composer and reveal Villa-Lobos's retooling of Antropofagia for musical practices during a period of dictatorship.

Table 1 Villa-Lobos's travel itinerary

What I call the ‘official’ narrative about the trip is the version that circulated during Villa-Lobos's journey and immediately after his return. On 17 June 1936, he submitted a report to Minister of Education Gustavo Capanema, which provided a brief account of the activities accomplished in Europe supported by additional documents.

Among the document appended to this report – which included letters attesting his activities in Europe and the text of his speech in Prague – there is the transcription of an interview for the Hora do Brasil, the official radio programme of Brazilian government.Footnote ²⁰ The same text also circulated in other newspapers and provides details about Villa-Lobos's account for the trip.Footnote ²¹ The interviewer asked about each visited location and for purposes of organization I follow this structure discussing each of the excerpts.

Berlin

Upon my arrival in Berlin, I was contracted by Professor Dr. von Westermann, General Director of the Reichs-Rundfunk, to organize three performances of my works.Footnote ²⁹ For this reason I was interviewed by several German journalists, who already knew about the formidable victory of our music education's orientation, in a popular system, with the three main goals that characterize it: discipline, civic engagement, and art through music.Footnote ³⁰

Although there was no mention of Berlin as a possible destination when Villa-Lobos set out across the Atlantic, this was the place where the composer spent most of his time during his European trip.Footnote ³¹ The absence of the German capital from his original itinerary seems less of a deliberate omission than an indication of a last-minute decision to settle in that city after he was already on the move. He only started negotiating performance opportunities in May, when he was already in Berlin.Footnote ³² To understand the composer's detour to Berlin, it is helpful to explore the itinerary of Villa-Lobos's travel companion, Antônio Sá Pereira (Figure 1).

Figure 1 (Colour online) Photograph sent from Antônio Sá Pereira to his mother. Maria Tesesa Moura private collection.

At the time of the 1936 trip, Sá Pereira was a professor at the Instituto National de Música and recognized as an innovative music pedagogue. With an extensive number of publications on music education to his name – including a series of articles in Ariel, a music magazine he edited with Mário de Andrade in 1923 and 1924, and the influential piano method, Ensino moderno de piano (Modern Piano Teaching), which was published in 1933 – he was an easy choice to serve as a delegate to the Prague conference.Footnote ³³ In these texts, Sá Pereira applies many of the ideas he encountered in his studies in Europe from 1900 to 1917, mostly in Germany and Switzerland. In this sense, the adjective ‘modern’ to qualify a musical pedagogy in Brazil meant not only ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’, as proposed in the German manuals on which he based his writings, but also ‘European’ and ‘cosmopolitan’.Footnote ³⁴ According to one of his students, he was ‘a European born in Bahia’ and a ‘professor in the highest sense of the word, his purpose was to transplant to here [Brazil] the sum of overseas cultural knowledge, while preserving a Brazilian identity, a form of safeguarding strongly connected to intellectual growth’.Footnote ³⁵ This description of a transnational cultural mediator who could cross borders with the goal to improve their nation's musical knowledge applied similarly to many of the other men who participated in the congress, including its organizers, Edward J. Dent and Leo Kestenberg.Footnote ³⁶

Besides his participation in the congress, Sá Pereira had additional tasks while in Europe. Since 1935, he had been part of a planning committee for the University of Brazil led by Minister Gustavo Capanema.Footnote ³⁷ As part of his trip, Sá Pereira was tasked to collect information on the organization of university campuses across Europe and to identify instructors who could be part of a future exchange programme. Sá Pereira's first stop in this mission was Berlin, and he stayed there until October 1936.Footnote ³⁸ Like many, Sá Pereira had an ambiguous relationship with the Nazi regime. On the one hand, he had previously expressed his concerns about its anti-Semitism, particularly regarding music, and warned about the violence of the regime against its opposition.Footnote ³⁹ On the other, he admired Nazi Germany's bureaucratic structure, which he described in detail to Capanema. Such esteem for state control over one's population resonated between the rising authoritarianism in Vargas's regime and Hitler's Germany, and some of its principles are outlined in Villa-Lobos's characterization of the Brazilian music-education system as ‘discipline, civic engagement, and art through music’.

It is likely that Villa-Lobos followed Sá Pereira to Germany to fill the gap in his schedule between the Prague congress and his later commitments in Barcelona and Vienna. Sá Pereira's fluency in German proved to be an opportunity for advertising his music in that country.Footnote ⁴⁰ Villa-Lobos also had the support of the Brazilian diplomat in charge of the Berlin legation, Joaquim Moniz de Aragão, ‘an anti-Semitic and anticommunist’ admirer of Hitler, who most likely enabled the long stay in Germany and facilitated the composer's access to the Nazi bureaucracy.Footnote ⁴¹ In contrast to the multicultural and multiracial construction of Brazil among modernist artists, Moniz de Aragão defended a purely European cultural origin for his nation that aligned with Nazi Germany's racial politics.

In his letter to Capanema, Sá Pereira mentions that, upon his arrival in Berlin, he was promptly received by Moniz de Aragão, who put him in contact with upper echelons of the Nazi Party, especially in the Office of Foreign Policy (Außenpolitisches Amt) and the Work Front (Arbeitsfront).Footnote ⁴² Villa-Lobos used these same diplomatic connections to propose the following initiatives to present his music:

1. 1. Broadcast to Brazil of a programme of regional artistic music performed by German radio artists.

2. 2. The recording of three discs of Brazilian music for small instrumental ensembles by Telefunken.

3. 3. A festival of symphonic works by H. Villa-Lobos performed by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by the composer.Footnote ⁴³

Although none of these activities would actually take place in this format, Villa-Lobos had several opportunities to have his music performed and broadcast in Berlin, which is significant given the short time available to organize the events. Indeed, the composer sent the first proposal on 7 May, and less than two weeks later, he performed his music on two occasions: on 20 May, he conducted a concert of his works broadcast by the German short-wave radio, and on 25 May, he played the piano in a song recital that included his compositions.Footnote ⁴⁴ This efficiency to accommodate a foreign visitor such as Villa-Lobos in conjunction with the use of diplomatic channels reveals a strong investment in what Misha Aster has called Kulturaustausch (‘cultural exchange’): the inclusion of foreign musicians and music in the programme of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and other major state institutions. ‘For propagandistic, but also ideological purposes not entirely anathema to contemporary ideas about the universality of music and the value of cultural exchange, the orchestra participated in a number of concerts in the spirit of “friendship between nations”, not only with Axis partners’.Footnote ⁴⁵ For his part, Villa-Lobos reciprocated this musical friendship between Germany and Brazil in a set of new compositions that carry in their sonic material the traces of this encounter.

Barcelona

From artistic and educational point of view, I can tell the following: on 12 May, I arrived in Barcelona to fulfil the contract with my manager Clemente Lozano. I informed myself about the results of the Musicology Congress that took place here, and to which I had the honour of being invited.Footnote ⁴⁶

Villa-Lobos's visit to Barcelona differs from the other locations discussed so far because he made no public appearances.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, his account of the visit included some imprecisions and omissions that are worthy of comment. First, his reference to Clemente Lozano as his manager is suspicious if we follow other archival documents. Lozano was a composer and conductor who directed the Concerts Catalònia (later Concerts Iberia), a concert agency founded in 1925.Footnote ⁴⁸ As the director of the company, he engaged such musicians as Bela Bartók and Alfredo Casella to perform concerts in Barcelona. Lozano, who had met Villa-Lobos during his previous visit to the city in 1929, wrote a letter with the goal to reconnect with the Brazilian composer on 14 January 1936 (Figure 2).

Figure 2 (Colour online) Clemente Lozano, Letter to Heitor Villa-Lobos, 14 January 1936. Acervo Museu Villa-Lobos/IBRAM, Correspondência, Concertos Iberia 1 FE 1902.

In the letter, Lozano asks Villa-Lobos whether he had plans to come to Europe and, if that was the case, under what conditions he would conduct a concert featuring his music. Whereas the letter suggests a speculative approach, Villa-Lobos publicized this ‘invitation’ to perform in Europe as a fact to some Brazilian newspapers.Footnote ⁴⁹ ‘The recent success by maestro Villa-Lobos echoed in Europe with an ample repercussion … The national composer just received an honorable invitation by the Concerts Catalonia, based in Barcelona, Paris, Vienna, and London to conduct a series of concerts in the first of those cities’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The archives of the Villa-Lobos Museum hold dozens of letters between the composer and the Catalan manager, but with the exception to the one mentioned here, all others date from the late 1940s and 1950s. This gap and the information on the 1936 introductory letter suggest that at the time of the travels, there were no immediate plans for either a concert or a partnership.

Villa-Lobos's reference to the Congress of the International Musicological Society (IMS) that took place in Barcelona from 18 to 25 May also raises questions. It is very likely that Villa-Lobos had received an invitation to attend the conference since many of the participants also had taken part in the Prague Conference. Not only is there an odd wording when he mentions that he ‘informed’ himself about the conference and its outcomes, but he also omits to mention that it was a joint event with the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Among all the professional organizations in the field of music, the ISCM is the one that might have seemed best to fit Villa-Lobos's main occupation as a composer. Indeed, even though he was not at the 1925 meeting of the ISCM in Venice, his Epigramas ironicos e sentimentais was performed there by the Canadian-American soprano Éva Gauthier.Footnote ⁵¹ However, Villa-Lobos was never a member of any international musical organization – neither of musicologists nor of composers – and he participated only sporadically in their events, and only when he could draw some benefit.

Internationalism, music education, and the Brazilian presence in Prague

During the 1934 ISCM meeting in Florence, Leo Kestenberg approached Edward Dent, then-president of the society, with the proposal of founding an international society for music education. As Frederic B. Stiven, the US delegate at the 1936 congress, summarized: ‘the purpose of this proposed society was to become acquainted with the trends of musical education in other countries, to foster all worthy means of furthering musical interests, and to create a central bureau for the gathering and dissemination of materials, advice, and information which were to be placed at the disposal of anyone interested in the problems of musical education’.Footnote ⁵⁶ After leading the German music education during the Weimar Republic, Kestenberg had returned to Prague in 1933. With local support, mainly from Kamil Krofta, the Czech minister of foreign affairs, he conveyed the new organization and, later, the first conference in 1936.Footnote ⁵⁷ The plan, approved by ISCM constituents in 1934, echoes the general discussion of internationalism in music led by Dent, one of the British delegates to the 1936 congress in Prague and president of both the IMS and the ISCM, for whom internationalism meant a fine balance between an aspiration for musical universalism and the belief in individuals’ ability of crossing borders.Footnote ⁵⁸

Internationalism was a shared value among participants in these networks, particularly as a form of resistance against what Benjamin George Martin called the ‘New Order for European culture’, which represented not only the ‘soft power of Nazi and fascist imperialism’ but also a threat to the liberal international order.Footnote ⁵⁹ Order – which means both organization and hierarchy for Martin – is the keyword to understanding the contradictions of the international institutions that pursued an opposition to the highly hierarchical and organized Nazi cultural system. Anne C. Shreffler characterizes the political stakes of the 1935 ISCM meeting (also hosted in Prague) and highlights that international musical institutions had found their limit as a resistance space in the ‘chimera of political neutrality’ enshrined in their very organizational structure.Footnote ⁶⁰

The solution sought by the Society for Music Education and its 1936 congress was to preserve the internationalist goals of the ISCM while changing its focus from music composition to education. This change allowed for the inclusion of a broad range of musical styles and projects. Rather than pursuing the different ways of articulating politics and differences among musical idioms, it expanded the modes of presentation, ranging from demonstrations of pedagogical methods by way of children's choruses to discussions of the role of contemporary music in general education. The inclusion of many different contributions in a multilingual event – with presentations in French, German, English, and Czech – contributed to a more expansive (if not global) scope of the event, especially in comparison to similar initiatives in the past that were circumscribed by linguistic barriers, such as the Anglo-American conferences in 1929 and 1931.Footnote ⁶¹

Christiane Sibille offers a model to represent the various viewpoints of actors in international networks of musical organizations. She proposes a two-axes rhombus, ‘with nationalization and internationalization as its vertical and politization and standardization as its horizontal axis’.Footnote ⁶² This model is useful not only for understanding the general goals of musical international organizations during the 1930s, but also for explaining the unique participation of Brazil in the event. On the one hand, Brazil was the only nation from the southern hemisphere to participate in the congress, and one of the few non-European nations to be represented in the event. On the other hand, Villa-Lobos, the nation's musical figurehead, missed the congress altogether, requiring an extra-official event to accommodate his participation. In this sense, the inclusion of Brazil in the event was beneficial for its internationalist purposes, even if its participation differed from others and required specific accommodations. The preface to the edited volume of the texts read at the International Congress of Music Education explained the inclusion of Villa-Lobos's speech, read on 25 April, more than two weeks after the conclusion of the event – even inventing (or replicating) the excuse of a damaged airship:Footnote ⁶³

The exceptional character of Brazil's inclusion in the volume is reflected in the tone of the article. As Arnaldo Contier argues, ‘only Villa-Lobos['s text] preached an alliance between choral singing and politics as a strategy to promote to large human concentrations the notions of civism and discipline’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In contrast with the internationalism advocated in the congress, with delegates using their own national education system to establish dialogues among each other, Villa-Lobos intended not only to offer a portrait of his project for Brazilian musical education, but also to demonstrate that it was (the most) effective. The conditions for this demonstration were ideal: more than just words, his address included the playback of recordings, slide projections, the demonstration of educational methods for conducting children's choirs, and the performance of his music.

Martha Krásová, a soprano from Prague's National Opera, sang arrangements of songs accompanied by Villa-Lobos, who wrote short descriptions for each of the songs, emphasizing its ethnic origins:

• ‘Itabayana’ (melody from northern Brazil. Indigenous influence).

• ‘Guriatan do coqueiro’ (popular song from Pernambuco. Indigenous-African influence).

• ‘Um canto que saiu da senzala’ (Black song from Bahia).

• ‘Nhapopé’ (lyrical song from Rio de Janeiro, Italian influence from the nineteenth century).

• ‘A cobra e a rolinha’ (children's song from the countryside of Maranhão).

• ‘Pobre peregrino’ (children's ronda, sentimental genre).

• ‘Minha gatinha parda’ (children's ronda, happy genre).

• ‘Xango’ (mestizo's fetishism from Rio de Janeiro).Footnote ⁶⁶

The variety of genres and origins of the songs portrays the heterogeneous ethnic makeup of the country's population, appealing to the internationalist goals of the conference with music examples that might represent the combination of the diverse identities – racial, ethnic, regional, national – as embodying a nation.Footnote ⁶⁷ It is not hard to imagine the enthusiastic reception of Villa-Lobos's presentation in the face of the exclusionary identity politics of the Third Reich. This idea of Brazil as a modern nation able to find harmony between past and present racial relations through a process of heterogeneous cultural miscegenation, later known as the ‘myth of racial democracy’, has reverberated through the country's foreign policy since the 1920s and was brought about by Villa-Lobos in the internationalist context of the congress.Footnote ⁶⁸ The presentation featured Brazil as the very embodiment of internationalist principles without sacrificing national unity. Brazil's path showed the way of the future.

Adapting the narrative for the audience: from Prague to Berlin

Arnaldo Daraya Contier points out that out of all the texts published in the volume, Villa-Lobos's proposal was the only one to merge choral singing and politics strategically to promote civic responsibility and national unity.Footnote ⁶⁹ On a conceptual level, Villa-Lobos relied on the notion of music education as a ‘civic-artistic education’: ‘Civic, because through music we awaken a broader interest in the folk, for the love of the homeland and humanity, and we discipline the many social layers to better understand the artistic music.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Villa-Lobos's celebration of Brazilian music education centred on choral singing is based on two supplementary assumptions: first, the artistic value of music contains an intrinsic element that can be extended to all humanity; and second, music always has the power to enhance national values, as it relates to specific local goals. Rather than a contradiction, this dual mode is framed as an idealist solution for the antagonistic disputes among nations: ‘The importance of music … will only be understood when its place as a vital element of social, civic, and artistic cooperation for the progress of nations is established.’Footnote ⁷¹ In the composer's mind, one of the consequences of this mediation of music and civic engagement through music education was an interdependent relationship between singing and citizenship: since everyone could learn music through singing – as he had demonstrated with the children's performance – and music was necessarily related to civic duties, so music education was a powerful tool to lead to (Brazilian) national progress.

One might argue that Villa-Lobos's passionate defence of the nation as the central unit for humanity's progress presents a naïve view of the contemporary tensions between internationalism and (authoritarian) nationalism. In that case, Brazil's geographical distance from (European) diplomatic spheres could be a justification for this lack of awareness. This argument, however, is difficult to sustain when the presentation in Prague is compared with his view on Brazilian music as expressed in Berlin, where the discourse moved from a perspective of future progress to one of a shared musical past.

During Villa-Lobos's stay in Berlin, Die Musik-Woche – a German periodical aligned with the Nazi Party – conducted an interview with the Brazilian composer.Footnote ⁷² In contrast to the internationalist view that characterized Brazil as a model for a multicultural society, the emphasis in this article is on an imagined common origin of a folk music that could connect German and Brazilian pasts. When asked about music education in Brazil, Villa-Lobos mentioned its basis in choral singing, but rather than exemplifying his points with Brazilian music, as he did in Prague, he used as his examples successful performances in Brazil of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and Bach's B minor Mass. The focus on choral compositions by two canonical German composers does more than serve as just a diplomatic act of establishing connections: it considerably subverts the meaning of the whole project of universal music education by focusing on a national style that expresses a national history. The German journalist who conducted the interview summarized Villa-Lobos's use of his Bachianas brasileiras as an example of the imaginary historical and stylistic entanglement between Brazil and Germany:Footnote ⁷³

The rhetorical strategy of associating Bach with Brazil allowed Villa-Lobos to earn cultural capital in multiple fields: on the one hand, he inscribed himself into a canonical tradition of Western music; on the other, he obtained the sympathy of German audiences both by agreeing on the national project of building on a folkloric past and by elevating Germanness as a transnational cultural value.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Prague, Villa-Lobos had framed the collective singing as a path towards Brazilian national progress, which would accelerate its modernization; in Berlin, he claimed that Brazil was already modern because it shared a musical origin with Germany via Bach.

In the article published in Die Musik-Woche, the contention that Bach could have visited Brazil looks like a whimsical anecdote. However, for Villa-Lobos, this was an opportunity to explore this imagined encounter creatively. He had already devised the title Bachianas brasileiras for what would be the first in the sequence of compositions. The positive response in Germany to this scheme might have catalysed the transformation of the singular into a multiplicity, from the prelude and fugue into a suite, and from one composition into a series.

Expanding the Bachianas brasileiras, or how to make Bach Brazilian

Upon his return to Brazil, Villa-Lobos not only continued his activities as music educator but also returned to the frenetic rhythm of composition that had characterized his pace in the 1920s. The series of nine Bachianas brasileiras are the most representative works of this period, being extensively performed all over the world and consolidating the composer's reputation abroad. A text in Villa-Lobos's catalogue, presumably written under the supervision of the composer in 1947, after all the pieces had been completed, tries to explain the unusual combination between Bach's universalism and local folklore:

When Villa-Lobos evokes Bach's universality and associates it with an atemporal idea of folklore, he suggests a musical connection that works outside of history and politics. This kind of mythical narrative serves not only as a marketing strategy for commercial purposes but also suggests that Villa-Lobos himself – as the discoverer of this connection in his compositions – inhabits the same out-of-time and out-of-place location. The corollary: if Bach's music is universal and the national folklores are local expressions of this universalism, then Villa-Lobos, through his unification of Bach's ‘musical atmosphere’ with his own Brazilian folk music, ‘is bound to become universal’. Norton Dudeque succinctly affirms this procedure in Villa-Lobos's musical procedures in his Bachianas brasileiras: ‘By reinterpreting Bach's technical procedures, Villa-Lobos legitimized his own compositions’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Yet as the materials I have uncovered in this article reveal, Villa-Lobos's grounded travel experience in Europe in 1936 is foundational for his new compositional style. The interview in Berlin is the first document to mention this heterological merging between Bach and Brazilian folk song. If the story of Bach visiting Brazil sounds unbelievable, Villa-Lobos acts to represent it musically to make it credible. Furthermore, after his compositional alchemy, he can then use his own music as proof in reconfiguring history. In this sense, the Bachianas brasileiras turn into sound the principles of Antropofagia entangled in the rhombus of international networks as presented by Sibille, where national and international axes intersect with the personal and political.

Not so different from the strategies deployed in telling his trip to Europe, where all the narrated activities are plausible and not completely wrong, Villa-Lobos works with viable possibilities in the aesthetic manoeuvres that frame his compositional developments. Regarding the use of the dance suite as a form that connects Bach and Brazil, he follows the canonical Ensaio sobre música brasileira (Essay on Brazilian Music), published in 1928 by musicologist Mário de Andrade.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the chapter about form, Andrade criticizes the use of the term ‘brasileiro’ for any music intended to make a national reference and instead suggests the adoption of Brazilian folk dances organized as suites to mark Brazilianness. He provides an example of what such a suite might look like:

• • Ponteio (prelude in any metric or movement);

• • Cateretê (fast binary);

• • Coco (slow binary), (choral polyphony), (substitute to the Sarabande);

• • Moda or Modinha (ternary or quaternary), (substitute to the antique Aria);

• • Cururu (to use an Amerindian motif), (we can imagine an African dance to employ an Afro-Brazilian motif), (without predetermined movement);

• • Dobrado (or Samba, or Maxixe); (fast binary or imponent end).Footnote ⁷⁹

Villa-Lobos follows and slightly transforms Andrade's formula for his new version of the Bachianas brasileiras no. 1. The 1938 version adds a newly composed introduction that received a subtitle inspired by a Brazilian folk genre ‘Introdução (Embolada)’, and subtitles for the previously existing movements ‘Prelúdio (Modinha)’ and ‘Fuga (Conversa)’ (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3 Announcement of the first performance of the first version of the Bachianas brasileiras (No. 1), Diário de Notícias, 11 September 1932, 12. Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira, Fundação Biblioteca Nacional – BNDigital.

Figure 4 Announcement of the first integral performance of the Bachianas brasileiras (No. 1). Diário de Notícias, 10 November 1938. Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira, Fundação Biblioteca Nacional – BNDigital.

In the Bachianas brasileiras no. 4, Villa-Lobos uses a similar principle of combining pre-existing music and newly composed pieces. It is also structured as suite form, with each of the movements expressing the juxtaposition of a double title: ‘Prelúdio (Introdução)’, ‘Coral (Canto do Sertão)’, ‘Ária (Cantiga)’, and ‘Dança (Miudinho)’.

One of the differences between the first and the fourth Bachianas brasileiras is that the music Villa-Lobos uses had no apparent connection to Bach. The third movement quotes almost literally ‘Itabayana’, an unpublished song performed during his lecture in Prague.Footnote ⁸⁰ The song, which in Prague was described as a ‘melody from Northern Brazil’ of ‘indigenous influence’, becomes, with minor adaptations, the A section of the ‘Ária (Cantiga)’.Footnote ⁸¹ The added B section where the first motif is played faster and in staccato has no explicit reference to Bach. Although the origins of the melody and the text are unclear – perhaps the attribution of an indigenous origin was another labelling strategy employed by Villa-Lobos in Prague – the removal of the lyrics and the transformation of the title from ‘Itabayana’ (which probably refers to the region where the song was collected) to an unmarked ‘aria’ suggests the deterritorialization of the song and is part of this process of cannibalization employed by Villa-Lobos. The year 1935 that appears as the composition date in its first publication in 1941 accuses the permanence of the original material for the song, while being imprecise about the date of adaptation to the new version.

If the third movement was primarily a folk song rearranged, the first movement portrays Villa-Lobos using a theme inspired by Bach. In the ‘Prelúdio (Introdução)’, he uses an ascending arpeggio that seems to stem directly from the ‘Ricercar a 6’ that opens Bach's Musikalisches Opfer, BWV 1079 (Examples 1 and 2).

Example 1 Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bachianas brasileiras no. 4 (1941), ‘Prelúdio (Introdução)’, bb. 1–4.

Example 2 Johann Sebastian Bach, Musical Offering, BWV 1979 (1747), ‘Ricercar a 6’, bb. 1–9 (adapted).

Music analysts agree that in this movement, Villa-Lobos draws on stylistic techniques derived from Bach's music, such as the use of tonal tension as a dramatic gesture and the employment of a counterpoint between the soprano and bass voices.Footnote ⁸² However, there is no agreement about any specifically Brazilian technique; at best there are vague suggestions that the bass line works contrapuntally in a similar way as it works in the popular style of choro.

If we take the Bachianas brasileiras no. 1 and no. 4, the first two to be completed after the composer's return from Europe, as models for this assemblage between Bach and Brazilian folk music, the method used seems to be the juxtaposition of works within a suite that are unified by the names of each of the movements as pairs of baroque and Brazilian musical genres or dances. This loose association was noticed by contemporary critics. After the first performance of the complete version of the Bachianas brasileiras no. 1, Mário de Andrade questioned the ambiguity of Villa-Lobos's claim that Bach was related to Brazilian folk music:

A few years later, in 1943, the journalist Lisa Peppercorn was also suspicious of the procedure of imposing Bach as a kind of programmatic music, and shared her concerns with international audiences:

These critical comments uncovering the composer's procedures that at times clashed with his discourses were harmless for his reputation. As a good and experienced ‘cultural cannibal’, Villa-Lobos consumed whatever he had available and transformed himself, his music, and his biography to accommodate the different situations. Although his cannibalism had no clear method – the way that the consumed what would be embodied and transformed varied according to each occasion – there seems to be a procedure related to travel that allowed him to change skins. Similar to the colonial explorer who visited the Other and was ‘inspired’ by the cultural encounter, Villa-Lobos always found different ways to resignify himself while visiting different places. However, the location of the encounter – on both sides of the Atlantic – is important because it subverts the usual relationship between European colonizer and colonized Other.

Villa-Lobos's chameleonic personality, which expresses musically what Gerard Behágue pointed to as a ‘national eclecticism’, requires a multicentred approach to understand his ambivalent position that alternates between colonizer and colonized.Footnote ⁸⁵ In his travel to Europe in 1936, rather than acting as the normative antropophagist, in which the colonized by consuming the colonizer is no longer colonized, he radicalizes this position by acting as if this division at the same time never existed and was always and already there. This meant the composer could insert himself into a modernist present built on shared, seemingly universalist concepts of national identity.