Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)
Alma Brasileira

Alma Brasileira (Brazilian Soul) was created in 1926, during the composer’s stay in Paris, more or less concurrently with the more famous Rudêpoema, written with Artur Rubinstein in mind.
Alma belongs to the cycle of fourteen Chôros for various instrumental ensembles, and the cycle’s mysterious title – according to Lobos's intent – was to mark the birth of a new musical genre, transforming – and treating equally – the achievements of folk counterpoint and modern composing techniques.
Somewhat in spite of the title, Alma Brasileira – the only one of the Chôros for piano solo – contains no revolutionary features. From a formal point of view, it is a very straightforward composition (of arch structure, ABA’), usually performed in less than six minutes. Its extremities clearly exhibit the national Brazilian artist’s attachment to the tradition of late Romanticism. These quasi-ostinato segments are in fact so barely idiomatic that their authorship could easily be attributed to Enrique Granados or even to Moritz Moszkowski. The short, dancing B segment – the suspected “hotspot” of the Brazilian soul – is an entirely different story. Although its initial energy does not last and the preceding theme quickly regains initiative, it is only here that, thanks to a choreic pulse, a small effort of imagination allows one to feel a little of the Carnival spirit emanating from the streets of Rio de Janeiro. At the same time, the characteristic entrancing motion of the same fragment echoes with Lobos’s Parisian experience. It is no wonder, then, that the capital of France that he got to know in the 1920's – a city then mad about the ballets russes of Diaghilev and Stravinsky – forced onto the composer’s mind things similar to the most “barbarian” fragments of The Rite of Spring or The Wedding.
In Alma Brasileira, Lobos created seeds of a multicultural blend, with which he was soon to experiment even more enthusiastically when he got the outlandish idea to combine his own country’s folklore with technical means modelled after Johan Sebastian Bach’s polyphony. Yet without this intermediate stage of Alma Brasileira, his later – and more renowned – Bachianas brasileiras now seem almost unthinkable.

Marcin Gmys