Heitor Vila-Lobos: A Life (1887-1959). (Book Reviews: Composers).(Book Review)

Heitor Vila-Lobos: A Life (1887-1959). By David P. Appleby. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002. [xx, 201 p. ISBN 0-8108-4149-5. $39.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

"Tupi or not Tupi?" So queried the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade in his "Anthropophagous Statement" of 1928, which held that Brazilians should not merely imitate European culture but digest it on their own terms, like the Tupi Indians who ate their European prisoners so as to absorb their power (cited in John King, Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and Its Role in the Development of a Culture, 1931-1970 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19861, 19). Heitor Villa-Lobos's long career can be seen as a multifaceted response to Andrade's quip. Highly regarded in Paris and the United States, Villa-Lobos took the lead in defining Brazilian art music both through his prolific, if uneven, output and, from 1930, his service in the Ministry of Education under Getulio Vargas. A flamboyant personality, the composer has been the subject of several books, including those by Vasco Mariz (Heitor Villa-Lobos, compositor brasileiro, 11th ed. (Belo Horizonte: Itataia, 1989]) and, from beyond Brazil, by Li sa M. Peppercorn (Villa-Lobos [New York: Omnibus Press, 1989]; Villa-Lobos: The Music: An Analysis of His Style (London: Kayn & Averill, 1991]), Simon Wright ( Villa-Lobos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992]), and Gerard Behague (Heitor Villa-Lobos: The Search for Brazil's Musical Soul (Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1994]).

David P. Appleby, an experienced interpreter of Villa-Lobos's music and a three-time Fulbright Fellow in Brazil, offers an antidote to studies drawn largely from anecdotes and the composer's own fanciful accounts. Rather, his book is "primarily based on interviews, letters written by and to the composer, and documents provided by the two principal repositories of scores and memorabilia, the Museu Villa-Lobos and the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio" (p. xiv). In many respects, his study is appropriately scaled to the reader seeking an introduction to Villa-Lobos, for it provides a panoramic view of the main historical and artistic events in twentieth-century Brazil, including the Semana de Arte Moderna, held in Sao Paulo in 1922, in which VillaLobos and other central figures in Brazilian culture participated. (Especially handy are the programs for the first three festivals, pp. 55-57.) The same reader will also find helpful Appleby's overview of Villa-Lobos's more significant works, not an easy selection given his vast output. Readers in the United States will surely appreciate Appleby's account (chapter 5) of the composer's reception there, which includes the reactions of critics Olin Downes and Oscar Thompson, details of Villa-Lobos's United States tour of 1944-45, and a summary of his relationship with New York City, which from 1944 until his death in 1959, he "increasingly regarded as his home" (p. 155).

In other ways, however, Appleby's book leaves many questions in the reader's mind. Anyone interested in the new-found interviews, letters . . . and documents" may be surprised that the endnotes for each chapter include only one or two sources not already in print (such as chapter 1, note 24, a letter from Vasco Mariz to the author). How, then, are the new sources incorporated? The author explains that "essential notes acknowledging sources of quotations appear at the end of the book" (p. xiv). Since "the end of the book" contains the normal backmatter (index and bibliography), one assumes Appleby means the list "Interviews" on pages 188-89, even though no quotations are explicitly "acknowledged" there. (Missing from this list, incidentally, is an interview with Floriano Braga cited in chapter 2, ...