Saturday, June 27, 2009

Happy Father's Day, Epaminandos Villalba

I've always had a soft spot for Heitor's father Raúl Villa-Lobos, partly because he was a librarian, and partly because he introduced his son to music before his untimely death in 1897, when Heitor was a teenager. I came across this work by the elder Villa-Lobos, a scholar who worked at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro: it's a naval history called "A Revolta da Armada da 6 de septembro 1893".

You can see the work scanned by Google from a book in the Harvard Library, thanks to the archive.org website.

You'll notice that Raúl's book is published under the name "Epaminandos Villalba." Heitor Villa-Lobos paid tribute to his father throughout his life by using the pseudonym "Epaminandos Villalba Filho" (filho being the Portuguese version of Jr.) The early piano piece Tristorosa, written in 1910, was published under that name. Later, Heitor used the pseudonym for the texts of a number of works he published in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

This post is a little late; Father's Day has passed, but I liked the title.

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