A Guide to the Latin American Art Song Repertoire: An Annotated Catalog of Twentieth-Century Art Songs for Voice and Piano

3 Brazil

59 3 Brazil Stela M. Brandão According to Maria Sylvia Pinto, the Brazilian art song has existed since at least the eighteenth century.1 The roots of Brazilian art song date from colonial times, when two original matrices developed from opposite streams. One, of European origin, stemmed from the Portuguese moda, favored at the aristocratic salons of Lisbon. Transported to Brazil by the end of eighteenth century, the moda transformed into the modinha, a style of romantic sentimental song in vernacular Portuguese , cultivated at first by the elite and the aristocracy. The other matrix was the lundu (or londu, landu, lundum, londum, landum), and it originated in African dances brought to Brazil by African slaves. The lundu is a direct descendent of African batuques, percussion music performed by slaves in the back yards of plantation houses or in the clearings of the forests.2 Little by little, the sensual and humorous lundu transformed into a solo song with syncopated melodic lines no longer accompanied by drums and clapping, but by guitar, clavier , and piano. The lundu was the first Black musical manifestation to be accepted by Brazilian society. The first classical composer to use a popular Brazilian lundu theme was Sigismund Neukomm, the pupil of Haydn who lived in Rio de Janeiro from 1816 to 1821. In 1819, he wrote the piece “O Amor Brasileiro (The Brazilian Love)—caprice pour le Pianoforte sur un Londû brésilien,” whose manuscript is kept in the Paris Conservatory Library. This is the oldest record of a Brazilian popular theme being used in a composition of a classical nature.3 a guide to the latin ­american art song repertoire 60 These two opposite matrices, in spite of their social antagonism, developed intimately together in Brazilian homes, influencing each other and crossing class borderlines. While the syncopated lundu climbed the social scale and reached the bourgeois salons, thus influencing the modinha, the sentimental modinha descended from aristocracy, exchanging the piano for the guitar as an accompanying instrument, to become a popular genre of national scope. Both types were sung in the vernacular language of Portuguese. The lundu and the modinha represent the main pillars over which the framework of Brazilian popular music was built. Although these two genres constituted the quintessential national expression in song and almost all composers used them, the cultural establishment did not consider them to be truly artistic or serious enough for the concert stage. The Portuguese language itself was also not respected as an idiom for cultivated and educated musical expression. This sentiment, coupled with the tremendous influence of Italian opera , led the majority of nineteenth-century Brazilian classical composers to favor Italian texts. Antonio Carlos Gomes (1836–1896), the most important Brazilian composer of that period, lived most of his life in Italy and wrote in the purest Italian operatic style of his time. He also wrote songs with Portuguese texts, and was the author of one of the most celebrated Brazilian modinhas of all times, “Quem sabe?” However , even his Brazilian songs are considered more Italian than Brazilian in form and style. In nineteenth-century Brazil, Italian and French were more commonly heard in recitals than any other languages. It was not until Alberto Nepomuceno (1864–1920) returned to his country under the influence of European nationalistic movements (especially those from Scandinavia) that Brazil started a steady movement toward an authentic musical identity.4 Nepomuceno led the campaign to implement the vernacular Portuguese at the National Conservatory in Rio de Janeiro , launched his own compositions for voice with Portuguese texts, promoted concerts and recitals where songs were sung in Portuguese, and encouraged composers of his time to look for national sources of inspiration. Thus the marriage between national poetry and national music flourished in Brazil. brazil 61 Many composers born in the nineteenth century reached their prime in the following century. Such is the case for the generation of composers including João Gomes de Araújo (1846–1943), Savino de Bene­dictis (1883–1971), Antônio Francisco Braga (1868–1945), Ernani Costa Braga (1888–1948), Paulo Florence (1864–1949), Francisco Mignone (1897–1986), Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez (1897–1948), Antonio de Assis Republicano (1897–1960), Hekel Tavares (1896–1969), and so many others, including the most prolific and well-known Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959). Although the Portuguese language is used in the majority of the songslisted,songswithtextsinFrench,Italian,German,Spanish,Latin, and...