Brasilia
Villa Lobos’ Dream (searching for birds)
BRASILIA
CONSTRUCTING OSCAR NIEMEYER AND VILLA-LOBOS
PAUL KRAINAK AND MICHAEL PESTEL
Brasilia: Constructing Oscar Niemeyer and Heitor Villa-Lobos is a collaborative installation by Michael Pestel, art professor at Chatham College, and Paul Krainak, professor of painting at West Virginia University. The exhibition is part of a series of events and lectures celebrating the Year of Latin America sponsored by Chatham College's Global Focus Program. Pestel and Krainak narratize a relationship between two quintessential Brazilian modernists of the Twentieth Century, Oscar Niemeyer, the heroic architect of Brasilia, and Heitor Villa-Lobos, Brasil's most beloved classical composer. Building on past collaborations along similar lines (The Fountainhead, Plot Lines), Pestel and Krainak examine the double-edge of modernist architecture's utopian dreams and the social elitism of its often violently seductive forms. The current exhibition combines painting, sculpture, text, video and musical performance in an attempt to elucidate a cultural alliance between Niemeyer and Villa-Lobos which, however short-lived, continues to resonate for the current generation.
On March 15, 1958, the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra, with Maestro Eleazar de Carvalho conducting, performed Heitor Villa-Lobos' Piano Concerto #1 and the world premier of his String Quartet No.17 at Symphony Hall in Rio de Janeiro. Villa-Lobos' wife, the pianist Lucília Guimarães, was soloist for the concerto. The composer sat in the front row with President Juscelino Kubitschek and his wife Sarah Luiza, and architect Oscar Niemeyer and his wife, Annita Baldo. Niemeyer had been invited by the president and flew down from Brasilia in a government plane that afternoon. He had closed his private offices in Rio a year earlier in order to serve as chief architect for the Building Authority of Brasilia and was designing all the major buildings. In order to become the most audaciously modernist capital in the world, the new Brasilia would require the efforts of sixty architects working feverishly day and night just to produce the drawings for Niemeyer's vision. From the site of Brasilia, over 1100 kilometers northwest of Rio, he returned home less and less frequently — and when he did, it was only to visit his family, never to nurture professional and social ties. With the commission to design Brasilia, his celebrity had grown enormously, and yet occasions such as this one, in which he might simply enjoy himself among his peers, were rare indeed.
Villa-Lobos, twenty years Niemeyer's senior, had just celebrated his 71st birthday earlier in the month. In addition to being an accomplished cellist and guitarist, he had composed nearly a thousand works over the past half century. He received on this special evening, even before the orchestra had begun playing, the thunderous and sustained ovation befitting a national hero. Though he had been diagnosed with cancer two years earlier, he continued both to compose, inspiring new generations of musicians, and to direct the shape of music education in Brazil. Known as the "Rabelais of modern music," Villa-Lobos suffused nonconformity with Brasilian flamboyance, grandeur and restlessness. His love of nature, especially bird song, along with an enduring devotion to folkloric culture and its incorporation into western forms of composition, lent to his work a depth of connection to Brasil in terms of indigenous culture and landscape that continues to resonate to this day. He declared: "I am folklore; my melodies are just as authentic as those which originate from the souls of the people."
Curiously, though Villa-Lobos and Niemeyer had for years moved in overlapping cultural and governmental circles, they had never met until now. The two men took an immediate liking to each other and, despite the growing line of admirers seeking autographs at the end of the evening, Villa-Lobos and Niemeyer chatted at great length in the crowded foyer, allowing the smoke from their cigars to form a cloud of intimacy around them. Villa-Lobos, himself a keen observer of modern architecture and civic projects throughout the country, if not exactly a staunch supporter of moving the capital to Brasilia, was quite moved by the encounter with Niemeyer. Thus, when Annita Baldo briefly interrupted and suggested the men continue their conversation over dinner at their house the following evening, Villa-Lobos was delighted to accept.
As was normal for the Niemeyers, the dinner was a lavish and drawn-out affair with multiple courses prepared by their mulatto chef from Trinidad. Ronzo had been with the family for nearly twenty years, helping to take care of the children and giving them music lessons on the piano, saxophone, flute and clarinet. Now, at Villa Lobos' request, he played a familiar popular tune on the alto saxophone in the new, emerging style, the bossa nova. What fun! The couples greatly enjoyed themselves and the youngest Niemeyer children ran wildly throughout the house playing Indios and conquistadores. After dinner, the men retired with their Havanas and cognac to an immense balcony cantilevering off the mountainside high above the exclusive Saõ Conrado district. According to Niemeyer, their conversation ranged from the enormous pressure to complete Brasilia on schedule, to the advances of music education in Brazil, to the mayhem generated by the last Communist National Party meeting in São Paulo a month earlier. On the subject of socialist programs, the two men did not see eye to eye and some heated political sparring ensued. Niemeyer was an active party member and Villa-Lobos, though sympathetic to the burgeoning Brazilian working class in his younger years, had moved more and more toward conservative agendas.
Suddenly, as Niemeyer tells it, Villa-Lobos stood up, poured himself some more cognac, went over to the railing and stared for some time into the distance toward Ipanema as if searching for the right words to convey a deep feeling. Then, still staring out at a fixed point on the horizon, he half-jokingly insisted that Niemeyer design him the house of his dreams. Years ago, his mother had left him the family property in the Laranjeiras District between Flamengo and the Reboucas tunnel at the foot of Corcovado south of the city. The land had many beautiful trees and a huge overgrown garden, but the house in which he had spent the first 12 years of his life until his father died, was in shammbles. It would have to be torn down. In its place, he envisioned a house with an open square courtyard flanked by four towers from which a woodwind or string quartet might cast a subtle dome of sound over the house much like birds singing in a tropical forest canopy. Villa-Lobos loved the sound of birds and had incorporated many of their songs in various compositions over the years. Now he wanted a house that would reflect the acoustic structure of the forest and enable him to enchant his friends with concerts under the stars.
Though Niemeyer was intrigued by the concept and welcomed such a project as a healthy diversion from the overwhelming scale of city planning, he countered that in exchange Villa-Lobos must compose a symphony for the inauguration of Brasilia. It would be performed underneath the giant concrete dome of the National Congress Building, scheduled for completion in early 1960. What had started as a light-hearted, if calculated, remark on the part of Villa-Lobos, had quickly escalated into mutual exitement and inspiration. It was the beginning of an inspired friendship. Almost immediately that week, Villa-Lobos began sketching out the contours of an orchestral work based on themes introduced in String Quartet #17 to be called The Brasilia Symphony. Niemeyer, likewise, on the following day before flying back to Brasilia, visited the site and started to make drawings in situ with his thick felt-tipped pen. Later, he commenced a series of abstract architectonic paintings which he loved to do in the planning phase. Eventually, after several months of stealing precious minutes here and there from his relentless schedule at Brasilia, he produced the first blueprints for the project. What emerged in this process was an expansive multi-level, steel-framed, modernist house with glass walls and flat roof-top gardens. Instead of four discreet towers around an open courtyard, there were four small, acoustic chambers with large, square openings in the walls at the top of an immense, inverted pyramid open to the sky. Additional, smaller openings on the same level provided numerous feeding and perching niches which would juxtapose birds and human musicians in concert with one other. For the guests below, reclining on Le Corbusier chaise lounges, the pyramidal configuration aimed both sound and vision outward toward the heavens. The sun, moon, clouds and stars would drift across the almost cinematic space above, while the music of Villa-Lobos and his beloved birds would sound distantly from the quadratic edges of eternity. He would call the house, somewhat humorously, The Villa Villa-Lobos.
But none of it was to be. Some five and a half months later, in mid-August, Villa-Lobos fell asleep in the afternoon on his studio sofa while smoking one of his ubiquitous Havanas. The cigar apparently rolled out of his hand and came to rest against a pile of manuscripts which soon ignited. Fortunately, Lucília smelled smoke and was able to rouse Villa-Lobos from his slumbers in time to get him out relatively unscathed. Before the fire engines arrived, however, he had lost the New York Steinway and many original manuscripts — including Brasilia. Six months later, on February 17, 1959, Villa-Lobos died at home from cancer.
Thousands of people attended his funeral at São João Batista Cemetery, including Niemeyer, who, shortly before the body was lowered into the ground, placed the plans for the Villa Villa-Lobos in the coffin while a string quartet solemly played the adagio movement of String Quartet #17 in the background. Niemeyer himself, of course, went on to complete Brasilia and many other projects to international accolades. Except for a brief exile in the 60's in Europe, due to his communist affiliations, he continues, at the age of 92, to produce great architecture from his offices on the top floor of the highest building in Rio with a panoramic view over Copacabana. Though he speaks fondly of Villa-Lobos, he has never shown anyone the preparatory work for the Villa Villa-Lobos, nor even acknowledged its existence.
Translated from the Portuguese from Villa-Lobos' granddaughter, Architect Elisa Jobim, Remembrances, in the culture section of the Rio de Janeiro Times dedicated to the 40th aniversary of Villa-Lobos' death on February 17,1999