As we had a head-start this week, my Friday thoughts have arrived early. I would apologise, but it's really nothing to do with me and, besides, I'm sure the timing won't be the only cause for complaint, so here they are:
Earsense lists 109 works for string quartet that were written in 1953. Their authors include Ernest Bloch, Irwin Swack, Gyorgy Ligeti and Heuwell Tircuit, reminding us that some the world is not yet ready for, while others just aren't ready for the world.
Villa-Lobos, along with his 14th quartet, arguably occupies at least one of those categories. As has been tactfully suggested by several in the preceding discussion, the quartet doesn't quite click. And nor, it seems, did Villa-Lobos.
Villa-Lobos's father had, through a stroke of luck, been classically educated, leaving him with the ability to hold down a job as a librarian and indulge a fondness for proper music. This appreciation he passed on to his son, Heitor, by way of a little instruction in the cello and exposure to chamber music at home. When little Heitor was only 12, however, he upped and died, leaving his son with little to live on but the expensive tastes of his social superiors.
An interest in classical music, even an aptitude for it, is of little use without the wherewithal to study. Nevertheless, Heitor did his best. His best involved mixing with street musicians and, after working as an office runner, scraping enough for evening classes in which he learnt about Wagner and Puccini and Saint-Saens. He dropped the classes soon enough, presumably for reasons of cost, but he'd learnt enough to get paid to play cello with a theatre group and to carry on composing in his spare time, while keeping an eye on the European scene, especially the distant upstart Debussy.
Persistence paid off slowly, as it always does (persistence that pays off quickly is more generally known as 'luck', and Villa-Lobos was mostly short of that). Either way, after around fifteen years of scribbling and pestering he began to get his compositions performed in the salons of Rio and, thuswisely, came to the attention to the right sort of people. In the fullness of time he risked what was probably most of his cash (unless it was someone else's) on a trip to Paris, where he seems to have had a miserable time, finding he didn't fit, and falling out with Cocteau, who said his music was derivative. Which, at this point, it seems to have been. Miserable though this experience must have been, some reckon it was the making of him.
His return to Brazil was defiant, rather than triumphant. From now on, rather than mimicking his European peers, he'd become the national composer of Brazil, fusing the classical with the demotic in a way that the sneering French could never understand, and travelling, at least in his mind, widely through the backwaters and byways of his country, much like Bartok might have done, if Bartok had had an imaginary cart. It was a bold move. Rather than sanding his rough edges, the square peg aimed to change the shape of the hole.
If Villa-Lobos had any luck at all, it was that this was a politically-convenient time for nationalism. Although, to be fair, there aren't many times when it isn't. Either way, the strategy clearly worked, though I'd guess it took more effort and persistence than he'd admit. He certainly seems to have above-average levels of self-belief, but necessity can do that. For those who've experienced it, poverty is generally a more potent motive for industry than, say, a passion for real-estate or a burning desire to change the face of fast-moving consumer goods.
If I were to hazard a reason why Villa-Lobos wrote his 14th Quartet it wouldn't be because he'd received a commission (though he had). I'd suggest it was more because he had to. It was part of the persona he'd created, the Pucciniesque caricature of a great composer that stares out from all those photographs. He'd carved a niche and, trapped in his own legend, couldn't do anything else.
I don't think many would argue that Villa-Lobos was a flawlessly great composer, or that he didn't gift his works with a dose of the slapdash. To my ears, the 14th is a fairly typical example. It has interest, and will bear repeated listenings, but it won't necessarily reward them. Like Villa-Lobos himself, it lies in an uneasy, ungainly space of compromise and, in short, doesn't quite fit. And, as others have suggested, neither do its constituent parts.
That said, it is what it is. Villa-Lobos made his own rules, breaking from the tyranny of Paris and Vienna, and perhaps I should be listening to it on its own terms, rather than by what I've been taught to expect by Europe.
I have tried that, as thoroughly as I could. For, as well as listening to the Cuarteto Latinamericano via YouTube and Earsense in the 14th, a good half-dozen times, I've also listened to the 13th and 15th and, from my own haphazard collections of recordings, plucked from shelf-ends and bargain-buckets like so many lottery tickets, the concertos for harmonica, piano and guitar (not all at the same time, sadly) and a hatful of the Bachianas, and the only thing I can safely say, without fear of contradiction, is that the experience has taken some time.
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