O Polichinelo

Instrumentation

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Musical Terms (3)

• A prole do bebe No. 1 pt
  Eight piano pieces composed in 1918, each depicting a different type of doll: Branquinha (celluloid), Moreninha (wooden), Caboclinha (rubber), Mulatinha (composition material), Negrinhas (bisque), Pobrezinha (papier-mache), O Polichinelo (Punchinello/Punch), and A Bruxa (witch doll). The series is one of Villa-Lobos's most immediately appealing works: imaginative, colourful, and technically accessible. O Polichinelo, with its percussive staccato writing and comic energy, is probably the single most frequently performed Villa-Lobos piano piece in recital programmes worldwide.
  Each doll requires a distinctly different touch and colour: the celluloid Branquinha calls for a light, transparent sound; the rubber Caboclinha for a bouncing, elastic quality; the papier-mache Pobrezinha for something more fragile and tentative. O Polichinelo should be played with uninhibited comic energy — this is character music, not abstract form.
• Bachianas Brasileiras pt
  A series of nine works by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1930-1945) that attempt to fuse the contrapuntal and structural language of J.S. Bach with the folk, popular, and Amerindian musical traditions of Brazil. Each work in the series carries a double title: one Bachian term (Prelude, Fugue, Aria, Tocata, Coral) and one Brazilian term (Embolada, Desafio, Modinha, Ponteio, Cantiga). No. 4 is the only work in the series originally conceived for solo piano. No. 5, for soprano and eight cellos, is the most famous. Villa-Lobos described the series as his attempt to see Bach as a 'universal source' rather than a specifically European heritage.
  In the Bachianas, the Bachian elements (counterpoint, fugue, chorale texture) must be as carefully voiced as in Bach himself: they are not mere suggestion. The Brazilian elements — the flexible, improvised-feeling melody of the arias, the dance rhythms of the finales — should feel rooted and natural, not exotic. The double titles invite the performer to hold both traditions simultaneously.
• Villa-Lobos and Brazilian nationalism pt
  Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) is the central figure of Brazilian musical nationalism: a vast output of over 2,000 works in which European formal traditions are fused with the folk, popular, Afro-Brazilian, and Amerindian musical heritage of Brazil. Villa-Lobos grew up in Rio de Janeiro absorbing street music — choro, modinha, lundum — alongside classical training, and his mature style reflects this dual formation. His international career, centred on Paris from 1923, brought his music to European attention; his later career in Brazil was dominated by educational projects and the promotion of Brazilian musical identity at a national level.
  Villa-Lobos's piano music demands familiarity with Brazilian folk and popular idioms — the rhythmic patterns of choro and samba, the modal melodic world of northeastern folk music, the percussive treatment of the piano as a kind of 'batucada' instrument in the more violent passages. Without this context, the music can seem exotic or merely colourful; with it, it reveals itself as a coherent musical world of great depth.