Heitor Villa-Lobos
“Bachianas brasileiras” No. 5 for soprano and orchestra of cellos
HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on March 5, 1887, and died there on November
17, 1959. He composed the series of nine “Bachianas brasileiras” between 1932 and 1948; No. 5 was
composed in 1938 (“Aria”) and 1945 (“Dança”). The “Aria” was first performed on March 25, 1939, in Rio de
Janeiro, sung by Ruth Valadares Corrêa; with the “Dança” added, the complete work was performed on
October 10, 1947, in Paris, sung by Hilda Ohlin.
THE SCORE OF THE WORK calls for solo soprano and an “orchestra of cellos.”
The three passions of Villa-Lobos’s life come together in this work: Bach, Brazil, and the cello. No wonder
that he struck gold with this elegant, evocative piece, which combines all three and has earned a more secure
place in the repertoire than anything else he ever wrote. He was a prolific composer and he lived a full life,
traveling widely, on close terms with the leading musicians of three continents, and long recognized as
Brazil’s leading composer, an honor that is still unchallenged today.
His love of the cello came early, for he was instructed at a young age in both cello and clarinet by his father,
who took his family away from Rio de Janeiro when he lost his job as a librarian. They lived for a few years in
rural Brazil, where the small towns were full of guitars and homemade instruments playing rhythms the boy
had never heard before. Brazilian folksong echoed in his ears all his life, along with the more sophisticated
dance music he heard in Rio streets on the family’s return. As a teenager he longed to be part of the chorões
that improvised for parties and dances, and also to be good enough on the cello to play in orchestras. He was
writing music in great quantities without much technical background, but he was refused admission to the
Instituto Nacional de Música. Undaunted, he studied composition from Vincent d’Indy’s textbook and
acquired any extra knowledge he needed from listening, playing, and studying scores, especially the newest
pieces coming from Europe by Stravinsky, Milhaud, and others.
Villa-Lobos married an excellent pianist, Lucília, and together they made a modest living as musicians. With a
government grant and some help from friends he went to Paris in 1923, a momentous time to be in that city.
While acquiring a circle of notable friends, not all musicians, he remained more conscious than ever of his
roots. In the 1920s he composed a dozen or more works entitled Chôros, implying a lament in Portuguese but
actually ranging widely in mood and content. They vary in instrumentation too, from solo guitar to full
orchestra.
A series of twelve Studies for solo guitar, written soon after for Segovia, is primarily an exploration of
Brazilian popular guitar technique, but a secondary flavor is clearly that of Bach. It is often the composers
who escape formal musical education who later place the most emphasis on traditional technique, of which
Bach’s great fugues stand at the summit. Rimsky-Korsakov might be so classed, and Villa-Lobos, also a great
teacher, heard a strong resonance in Bach’s textures. He was not aping Baroque music, as many of the
neoclassicists did at that time; he was working with modern idioms, many of them of Brazilian origin, with
Bach’s processes and textures in mind.
So it was natural that the series of Studies was to be followed by the sequence of Bachianas brasileiras, the
first of which was composed in 1930 after the composer’s return to Brazil. The Bachian sounds are sometimes
superficial, sometimes more deeply threaded into Villa-Lobos’s style: more Brazilian than Bachian, in effect.
He expected, without specific planning, that this title would embrace a series of compositions written, like the
chôros, for different combinations of voices and instruments. Eventually there were nine. No. 1 in the series is
written for an “orchestra of cellos.” In 1921 he had arranged one of the fugues from Bach’s Well-tempered
Clavier for eight cellos, and the first of the Bachianas brasileiras echoed that sound in two movements
entitled “Preludio (Modinha)” and “Fugue (Conversa),” Bach’s titles glossed with Brazilian counterparts.
When he came to write the fifth in the series, in 1938, he returned to the “orchestra of cellos,” its double title
being “Aria (Cantilena).” In this piece Villa-Lobos reveals that the divine properties of the cello’s cantabile
voice are magnificently enhanced when paired with a wordless soprano voice an octave higher. This is a
vocalise, comparable to Rachmaninoff’s famous solo for wordless soprano, also working its magic by
supporting a long gorgeous melody with an intricate underpinning. For the return of the tune Villa-Lobos
directs the voice to be produced bouche fermée (“with mouth closed”), like a haunting memory.
Having added a singer to his orchestra of cellos, he gave her a middle section almost entirely without melody,
in contrast, singing a brief poem by Altimarando de Souza, after which the Aria returns. This was recorded
and performed in Rio de Janeiro in March 1938, sung by Ruth Valadares Corrêa. Two months later the
Brazilian conductor Walter Burle-Marx took two programs of Brazilian music to the World’s Fair in New
York and included the Aria, this time sung by Bidu Sayão, who later made a famous recording of it. Because
of a copyright problem, a new poem invoking the serenity of twilight and written by Ruth Valadares Corrêa
was sung for the middle section; this is the version always performed today.
Like many fertile composers Villa-Lobos would always prefer to write a new piece than revise an old one.
Nevertheless he was in the habit of extending his earlier works, and so it was that in 1945 he decided to add a
movement to the beautiful Aria. This is the Dança (Martelo), a setting of a poem by Manoel Bandeira, a
prominent Brazilian poet and a friend. The pulsating rhythm and harmonic sequences hint at Bach, but the
spirit is Brazilian, with twists and turns in the voice to suggest the exotic birds of the Brazilian interior that the
poem celebrates. It was composed in 1945 and performed for the first time as a sequel to the Aria in 1947.
Villa-Lobos later made arrangements of the two pieces for voice and piano and for voice and guitar.
Villa-Lobos visited the United States for the first time in 1944, conducting his works in Los Angeles, followed
by visits to New York and then Boston at the invitation of Serge Koussevitzky. In February 1945 he
conducted BSO concerts in Cambridge and Boston, prompting the Boston Herald to declare him “the most
intensely creative man in music today.” The success of this visit was such that for the remaining fourteen
years of his life he visited the States at least once a year, along with regular trips to Paris. New York became
his principal home. He never abandoned Brazil, but his music took on a more cosmopolitan character: his
symphonies 7 through 12 and string quartets 9 through 17 belong to this final phase of his life. He composed
his Symphony No. 11 on commission from the BSO, to mark the orchestra’s 75th anniversary, and led the
orchestra in the world premiere performances on March 2 and 3, 1956, at Symphony Hall.
Hugh Macdonald
HUGH MACDONALD, for many years Avis Blewett Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis,
has written extensively on music from Mozart to Shostakovich and is a frequent guest annotator for the BSO.
His most recent books are “Bizet” (Oxford University Press, 2014) and “Music in 1853” (University of
Rochester Press, 2012).
THE FIRST AMERICAN PERFORMANCE OF THE ARIA FROM “BACHIANAS BRASILIERAS” No. 5
took place at the New York World’s Fair on May 4, 1939, sung by Bidu Sayão.
THESE ARE THE FIRST BSO PERFORMANCES OF THE “BACHIANAS BRASILEIRAS” No. 5. For his
1945 concerts with the BSO, Villa-Lobos led a program consisting entirely of his own music (see page 36), the
only other occasion on which he conducted the orchestra being the aforementioned premiere of his Symphony
No. 11 in 1956. Between 1941 and 1950, Serge Koussevitzky and the Brazilian conductor Eleazar de Carvalho
also led the BSO in works by Villa-Lobos, after which Charles Munch led the Symphony No. 11 in New Haven
and New York in March 1956 following the composer-led premiere in Boston. Since then, the only conductor
to program music of Villa-Lobos with the BSO has been Marcelo Lehninger, who led his “Momoprecoce,”
Fantasy for piano and orchestra, on July 27, 2012, at Tanglewood, with soloist Nelson Freire.
HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS
“Bachianas brasileiras” No. 5
Aria
Tarde, uma nuvem rosea lenta e transparente,
Sobre o espaço sonhadora e bela!
Surge no infinito a lua docemente,
Enfeitando a tarde, qual meiga donzela
Que se apresta e alinda sonhadoramente,
Em anseios d’alma para ficar bela,
Grita ao céo e a terra, toda a Natureza!
Cala a passarada aos seus tristes queixumes
E reflete o mar toda a sua riqueza...
Suave a luz da lua desperta agora
A cruel saudade que ri e chora!
Tarde uma nuvem rósea lenta e transparente,
Sobre o espaço sonhadora e bela!
Ruth Valadares Corrêa
As evening falls, a rosy, translucent cloud
Covers the sky, dreamlike and beautiful.
From the horizon the moon gently rises,
Adorning the evening, as a young girl
Decks herself out in a dreamy longing
To make her very soul beautiful,
Calling to heaven and earth and all nature!
The birds leave off their melancholy song,
The sea reflects its treasure.
Moonlight coolly awakens a cruel yearning
That both laughs and cries.
As evening falls, a rosy, translucent cloud
Covers the sky, dreamlike and beautiful.
Dança
Irerê, meu passarinho do Sertão do Cariri,
Irerê, meu companheiro, cadê vióla?
Cadê meu bem? Cadê Maria?
Ai triste sorte a do violeiro cantadô!
Ah! Sem a vióla em que cantava o seu amô,
Ah! Seu assobio é tua flauta de irerê:
Que tua flauta do Sertão quando assobia,
Ah! A gente sofre sem querê!
Ah! Teu canto chega lá do fundo do sertão,
Ah! Como ˜ua brisa amolecendo o coração,
Ah! Ah!
Irerê, Solta teu canto! Canta mais! Canta mais!
Pra alembrá o Cariri!
Canta, cambaxirra! Canta, juriti!
Canta, Irerê! Canta, canta sofrê
Patativa! Bemtevi! Maria acorda que é dia
Cantem todos vocês
Passarinhos do sertão!
Bemtevi! Eh! Sabiá!
La! liá! liá! liá! liá! liá!
Eh! Sabiá da mata cantadô!
Lá! liá! liá! liá! liá! liá!
Eh! Sabiá da mata sofredô!
O vosso canto vem do fundo do sertão
Como uma brisa amolecendo o coração.
Irerê, meu passarinho do Sertão do Cariri,
Irerê, meu companheiro, etc.
Manoel Bandeira
My little duckling from the wilds of Cariri,
Little duck, my dear companion, where’s the guitar?
Where’s my beloved, where’s Maria?
O, how unfortunate to want to sing!
O, how can one sing of love without a guitar?
O, that whistling is your wild duck’s flute.
Your flute may sometimes whistle from the wilds,
O, for people who suffer without longing!
O, your song came from the depths of the forest,
O, like a breeze to comfort the heart.
Ah! Ah!
Little duck, let us hear your song! Sing on! Sing on!
All the way to Cariri!
Sing, little wren! Sing, pretty dove!
Sing, my duck, sing, my oriole,
Seedeater, flycatcher, tell Maria that it’s day,
Sing with all the little birds’ voices
From the depths of the woods.
Flycatcher! Hey, thrush!
La, la, la, la, la, la, la!
Hey, thrushes singing in the woods!
La, la, la, la, la, la, la!
Hey, thrushes in the mournful woods!
Your songs come from the depths of the forest
Like a breeze to comfort the heart.
My little duckling from the wilds of Cariri
Little duck, my dear companion, etc.