Heitor Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras

Intertextuality and Stylization

Norton Dudeque

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367340919
• eBook ISBN: 9781000452426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Heitor Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras demonstrates how the composer achieved his own Brazilian neoclassical style in a group of works, nine suites in total, that is arguably one of the best examples of homage to J.S. Bach's music in the twentieth century. In this book, the corpus of Bachianas Brasileiras is contextualized and critically examined according to its structure and intertextual aspects, as well as its relationship to Bach's music, Brazilian popular music, and other works by contemporaries of Villa Lobos. A range of musical examples illustrate instances of the selected topics in the works, encompassing urban Brazilian popular music such as the choro, Brazilian northeast and afro rhythms, and citation of folkloric melodies. Dudeque's comprehensive examination of the Bachianas Brasileiras will be invaluable for scholars and researchers of music theory and analysis.

Chapter 1

Bach’s music

From myth to universal inspiration

DOI: 10.4324/9780429323874-2

1.1 Introduction

Contextualizing the reception of J. S. Bach’s music during the late 1800s and early 1900s is key to understanding Villa-Lobos’s conception of the Bachianas Brasileiras. In their final form, these works are presented in nine suites that range from two to four movements each and from piano solo and chamber music to orchestral music. The type of music in these works is frequently associated with the 1920s trend of European neoclassicism. However, Villa-Lobos’s music certainly is a different type of neoclassicism than the usual European works at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, his pieces share a characteristic: the reinterpretation of the music from the past in terms of compositional techniques. This chapter offers viewpoints of different musicologists and theoreticians/composers who wrote about the music of J. S. Bach, either in historic-musicological terms or in technic-compositional observations. This is the concern of the first section in this chapter.

In his early career, Villa-Lobos received the support of Alberto Nepomuceno (1864–1920), one of the most important Brazilian composers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Between 1917 and 1919, Nepomuceno conducted at a series of concerts in Rio de Janeiro in which Villa-Lobos participated as a composer and conductor, sharing the podium with Nepomuceno. Among the works by Nepomuceno, there is Suite Antiga for piano, from 1893, where the stylization of Baroque music is present. Similarly, another relevant Brazilian composer, Leopoldo Miguez (1850–1902), also wrote a Suite Antiga Op. 25 for orchestra in 1892. Both works are examples of Baroque music’s reception (and stylization) in Brazilian Romanticism and models to be adapted and observed by later composers, including Villa-Lobos. His inheritance of nineteenth-century notions and conceptions about the music of J. S. Bach is revealed in his description of what type of composition the Bachianas Brasileiras is.

Furthermore, the mythification of the figure of J. S. Bach and the universality of his music are part of Villa-Lobos’s argument for the Bachianas. It seems evident that Villa-Lobos adhered to the neoclassicism tendency of the 1920s. Nevertheless, when mixing it with Brazilian popular music, he creates a unique type of neoclassicism. Perhaps, this is the most noticeable aspect of these works.

Finally, the Bachianas may have been a by-product of Villa-Lobos’s engagement with his Music Education project in Vargas’s government in the 1930s and 1940s. The most evident fact is that Bach’s music played a crucial role in this project; the arrangements of many works by Bach are evidence of Villa-Lobos’s desire to inform the uneducated Brazilian audience.

1.2 Aspects of J. S. Bach’s music reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Despite the vast literature on the reception of J. S. Bach’s works, there is still interest in how musicologists and composers perceived Bach’s works in terms of theoretical reflection and as an influence on their writings. Finscher discusses issues such as Bach’s influence, compositional and aesthetic allusions to Bach’s music, as well as aspects of theoretical and compositional technique (1998, pp. 1–21). He observes two distinct ways of speaking about Bach: the first, “creating an altogether mythological, cosmological, superhuman Bach,” the second, “speaking soberly in terms of musical craft,” i.e., to speak of Bach’s musical composition techniques rationally and consciously (p. 6).

An example of the first approach is Wagner’s declaration that the overture of his opera Die Meistersinger, is “applied Bach.” Wagner also associated the Well-Tempered Clavier “with a sphinx, with rotating planets and with the world before the dawn of mankind” (p. 6). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Reger also had a visionary image of Bach as “the beginning and end of all music, omnipotent father Bach, the godfather of music, father of harmony” (1982, p. 55; see Frisch, 2001, pp. 298–299). Among the many works by Reger that allude to Bach’s music are the Phantasie und Fuge über den Namen B-A-C-H Op. 46, for organ, Suite Op. 16, also for organ, and Chorale-Preludes, based on Bach’s organ chorales. Reger, in Frisch’s viewpoint, is the composer who most assimilated Bach’s music in his music. In fact, Frisch, argues that Reger’s reception of Bach is historically modern, that is, is imbued with the history that refers to Bach. Furthermore, Bekker (1923) argues that “Bach’s melodic art could show the way to a modern musical language, not by a mere imitation or ‘superficial’ adoption,” but utilizing a re-adaptation and recognition of stylistic elements of an older art. In this sense, Bekker does not refer to neoclassicism but to what Frisch calls Reger’s historicist modernism (Frisch, 2001, pp. 298–299).

This romantic view of Bach begins to take shape after Mendelssohn’s rediscovery of St Matthew Passion in 1829. Blume, who identifies two main tendencies, summarized this movement towards renewed interest in Bach’s music. He writes:

Even here we see a confluence of two expectations: the enlightened utilitarianism that is one of Romanticism’s ingredients looks for a reliable paragon, an infallible authority; and the tendency to take refuge in the established order looks for greatness in the past.

(Blume, 1964, p. 295)

For Dahlhaus, musical historicism in the nineteenth century may be understood from two dialectical tendencies: “tradition” and “restoration.” “Tradition presupposes seamless continuity, and is often likened to an unbroken chain in this respect; restoration, on the other hand, is an attempt to renew contact with a tradition that has been interrupted or has atrophied” (Dahlhaus, 1983, p. 67). Thus, during the nineteenth century, the music of Mozart and Beethoven was well-known and part of a living tradition, while Bach’s music, chronologically more distant, was an object of restoration. Therefore, Bach’s music became a necessary reference; despite his vocal and sacred music, it was his instrumental music that acquired prominence. According to Dahlhaus, this reinterpretation transmuted Bach’s works into models and paradigms of “pure instrumental music,” which the Romantic composers considered the essence of music per se (Dahlhaus, 1989, pp. 30–31), besides reaffirming their (aimed) musical inheritance from an authority of German music. An example of this reinterpretation and allusion to Bach’s music can be found in Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Op. 120. In this piece, references to Bach’s Goldberg Variations are perceptible in variation 31, which refers to variation 25 of Bach’s work, and variation 32 is a triple fugue and example of the learned style in Beethoven’s work.

The second way of speaking of Bach, according to Finscher, refers to his compositional practice and, by extension, to analytical observations of Bach’s music. The first example comes from Arnold Schoenberg, who declared his compositional inheritance from Brahms and Beethoven, but primarily from Mozart and Bach. From Bach, Schoenberg states to have inherited three main ideas:

1. Contrapuntal thinking; i.e. the art of inventing musical figures that can be used to accompany themselves.
2. The art of producing everything from one thing and of relating figures by transformation.
3. Disregard for the “strong” beat of the measure. (Schoenberg, 1975, p. 173)

In 1926, Besseler categorized two fundamental types of music: 1) an autonomous one, to be aesthetically listened to and appreciated—eingenständing Musik, and 2) a type of utilitarian and vernacular music—Gebrauchsmusik (or umgangsmäßige Musik). Later, Besseler redenominated these types as Darbietungsmusik (presentation music) and Umgangsmusik, respectively (Besseler, 1925, pp. 35–52). The association that immediately comes to mind is Paul Hindemith’s adoption of Bach’s music as a model for Gebrauchsmusik and the whole aesthetic tendency towards the adoption of neoclassicism in the 1920s. In Hindemith’s case, his Kammermusik no. 2 of 1924 introduces a neo-baroque approach to his music. The cycle of seven Kammermusik is designed as a variety of concertos for soloist and orchestra and represents an impulse towards neoclassicism in German music of the time. In Paris, the neo-baroque tendency was also present, but with a slogan that became an aesthetic statement: “Retour à Bach.” Between 1923 and 1925, Igor Stravinsky composed his Octour (1923), Sonate, for piano (1924), and Sérénade in A (1925). Taruskin observed that Stravinsky changes his focal point from national music to the universal tendency of the neoclassicism. As he writes, “the renunciation of national character in favour of a musical Esperanto with the lexicon heavily laced with the self-conscious allusions to Bach, the perceived fountain-head of ‘universal’ musical values” (Taruskin, 1996, p. 1607), is illustrative of the predominant view among composers in Paris, and the neoclassic tendency in music, at the time.

The analytical observations of Bach’s music are also noteworthy and have attracted the attention of many composers. For instance, Hindemith’s analysis of the three-part invention in F minor by Bach in Unterweisung im Tonsatz (1935–1937). Hindemith analyses the harmonic fluctuation in the piece, according to the theory he presented in the book (1942, pp. 207–209). A further example is Schoenberg, who stated that contrapuntal composition is characterized by a procedure called unraveling or unfolding. He saw that the thematic material of a contrapuntal composition is expressed as a re-assemblage of a basic configuration, which produces the necessary combinations for elaboration and development of the piece. Furthermore, the technique of developing variation may also be perceived as complementary to unfolding. Schoenberg observes that, at some time, J. S. Bach was able to practice both techniques, declaring that Bach was “the first to introduce just that technique so necessary for the progress of their New Music: the technique of ‘developing variation,’ which made possible the style of the great Viennese Classicists” (Schoenberg, 1975, p. 118).

The observations by Schoenberg on the procedure of unfolding, complemented by the technique of developing variation, may be part of the stylization of characteristic features of Bach’s music. In the case of Villa-Lobos, one of his main concerns with stylization is the association with neoclassicism. However, Villa-Lobos’s neoclassic music may be characterized by an approach distinct from the general characteristics of simplicity, youth, objectivity, and cultural elitism, as pointed by Messing:

1. Simplicity—the reaction against obscurity, density, and size; 2. Youth—the belief that spontaneity, freshness, and vigour could often be best characterized by evoking the childlike condition; 3. Objectivity—the response to the notion that intensely personal utterances led to either distortion or rank sentimentality; 4. Cultural elitism—the posture that the previous elements were all inherent in non-Germanic peoples.

(Messing, 1988, p. 89)

However, a clear definition of neoclassicism, and the characteristics listed by Messing, has been problematic in general. Antokoletz observes that

Some twentieth-century composers of the Neoclassical tradition have drawn not only from late eighteenth-century classical forms and tonality, but also from the contrapuntal linear textures and figurations of the baroque and the polyphonic forms and modalities of the Renaissance. However, if we rely on the concept of “return” to earlier principles of objectivity and control as well as established formal principles (sonata, suite, symphony, etc.), and procedures (canon, fugue, etc.) for subsuming a body of music under the Ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of examples
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Bach’s music: From myth to universal inspiration
• Chapter 2 The homage to J. S. Bach and elements of stylization
• Chapter 3 Intertextuality with Brazilian popular music
• Chapter 4 Analytical essays on intertextuality and intratextuality
• Chapter 5 Final remarks
• References
• Index