The Bachianas Brasileiras are a series of nine suites by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, written for various combinations of instruments and voices between 1930 and 1945. They represent not so much a fusion of Brazilian folk and popular music on the one hand, and the style of Johann Sebastian Bach on the other, as an attempt freely to adapt a number of Baroqueharmonic and contrapuntal procedures to Brazilian music. Most of the movements in each suite have two titles: one "Bachian", the other Brazilian.
Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1
Scored for orchestra of cellos. Dedicated to Pablo Casals.
Introdução
Prelúdio
Fuga
Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2
Scored for orchestra. There are four movements. According to one opinion, the third movement was later transcribed for piano, and the others for cello and piano ; according to another, it was the other way around: three pieces for cello and piano and a solo piano piece, none of them connected with each other and none of them originally with any Bach associations, were brought together and scored for chamber orchestra.
This work is scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, tenor and baritone saxophones, bassoon, contrabassoon, 2 horns, trombone, timpani, ganzá, chocalho, pandeira, reco, matraca, caixa, triangle, cymbals, tam-tam, bass drum, celesta, piano, and strings.
Bachianas Brasileiras No. 3
Scored for piano and orchestra
Prelúdio
Fantasia
Ária
Toccata
The orchestral forces for this work, in addition to the solo piano, are: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone, and strings.
Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4
Scored for piano ; orchestrated in 1942
Prelúdio
Coral
Ária
Danza as spelled on p. 45 of the orchestra score, in, and, twice in the piano version and once for the orchestral version, in.]
The orchestral version is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, bass clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone, celesta, and strings. The first movement is scored for strings alone.
Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5
Scored for soprano and orchestra of cellos.
Ária . This Aria is Villa-Lobos's best-known work. English translation:
Dança . The musical form is embolada, a rapid poem/song of the Brazilian Northeast. It is a poem of nostalgia for the birds of the Cariri Mountains, in the state of Ceará. The lyrics contain a list of species of birds: ben-te-vi, sabiá, juriti, irerê, patativa, cambaxirra. The music imitates bird song: "La! liá! liá! liá! liá! liá!" "Sing more", the words say, "to remember Cariri".
Because Villa-Lobos dashed off compositions in feverish haste and preferred writing new pieces to revising and correcting already completed ones, numerous slips of the pen, miscalculations, impracticalities or even impossibilities, imprecise notations, uncertainty in specification of instruments, and other problems inescapably remain in the printed scores of the Bachianas, and require performers to take unusual care to decipher what the composer actually intended. In the frequent cases where both the score and the parts are wrong, the recordings made by the composer are the only means of determining what he actually intended.
