Villa Lobos Rescue

Agência Estado – In his will, the conductor and composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) left his copyrights to the Brazilian Academy of Music, which he founded in 1945. Half a century after his death, it is only right that the institution should be concerned with perpetuating this legacy. From this need arose the Villa-Lobos Digital project, which aims to recover his scores. Copies of the originals, these on tracing paper, kept in the climate-controlled storage of the museum that bears the name of the greatest Brazilian composer, are often scores with erasures, almost illegible markings, and lapses. The work, coordinated by conductor Roberto Duarte, a specialist in his immense work and vice-president of the ABM, foresees the revision of errors committed by Villa-Lobos in his eagerness to transcribe the sounds he imagined, whether due to distraction or simply human forgetfulness. "When you find a seven-note chord, you can cut one of them. I don't have time to revise, I have too many ideas to put on paper," authorized, on another occasion, the guitarist Turibio Santos (at the time a teenager, now president of ABM).

The project has a noble objective, developed after years of negotiations with Villa-Lobos' foreign publishers (the French publisher Max Eschig acquired about 70% of the total): to enable more and more orchestras to play his music around the world. "Often the material that reaches the orchestras is in poor condition," says the conductor, who has been studying Villa-Lobos' legacy since 1975 and has already earned the title of his "ideal interpreter." "In 1995, when I was recording The Discovery of Brazil in Bratislava, Slovakia, the violins suddenly stopped because the copy was defective. I had to stop everything to fix it. This means that many works are no longer performed. He wrote quickly. There are 30, 50 notes. It is up to us, the reviewers, to look at this with great care." Duarte, who has also revised Carlos Gomes, is the author of "Villa-Lobos Errou? - Subsídios para Uma Revisão Musicológica em Villa-Lobos" (Was Villa-Lobos Wrong? - Contributions to a Musicological Revision of Villa-Lobos), a publication in Portuguese, English, and French, aimed at those already familiar with the subject, which was released in 1959 by the publisher Algol, on the fiftieth anniversary of the composer's death.

In the book, based on a profound knowledge of Villa-Lobos' syntax and an obsessive observation worthy of a music detective, as composer Ricardo Tacuchian jokingly puts it in the preface, he points out flaws such as the non-transcription of clefs, notes, or even the names of instruments. When turning the page, for example, he sometimes failed to include an instrument that was previously listed and reappeared later. It may seem presumptuous to speak of correcting someone sublime, but it is nothing more than the meticulous care for what Villa-Lobos left behind, and the desire to see him perform in more concert halls. Conceived by copyright lawyer Marisa Gandelman, legal advisor to ABM, the project is being carried out by Sarau Agência de Cultura Brasileira, which secured sponsorship of R$ 550 for the first stage through the Rouanet Law (an additional R$ 1,1 million was needed) from CSN and Whirlpool. Now, they are seeking another R$ 1,9 million to cover the costs of 12 symphonies that were left out, as well as the operas "Yerma" and "A Menina das Nuvens," and individual pieces.