Villa-Lobos's Addresses & Timelines

In a 1999 article in Brasiliana, Maria Augusta Machado da Silva provides a series of short notes providing information on certain aspects of Villa-Lobos’s life. Speaking about VL's addresses, she says that "...late in life [he] liked to say he had in fact three: Rio de Janeiro, the airplane, and Paris."

In my article "Heitor and Lucilia At Home", I discuss the home of Villa-Lobos and his first wife in Rio de Janeiro, Rua Didimo #10, where they lived from 1919 to 1936.

Thanks to Google Lab's new search technology, you can see important locations from a search of Villa-Lobos's life on a Google map. This isn't perfect: the Naxos Records site shows up high on a Google Search for "Heitor Villa-Lobos", but in this view it results in the Google map with a pin at the Greek island of Naxos. References to President Getulio Vargas and the work Alvorado na Floresta Tropical show up on the map at the two Rio Grande do Sul towns of Getulio Vargas and Alvorada. But you can get a feel for the most important cities of VL's life on this map: Paris, Rio, Sao Paulo, New York and Los Angeles are all there.

Another cool new way of looking at Google search results is the Timeline view. This one is limited to Villa-Lobos's lifetime (1887-1959), and here's one for the important years of the 1920s. As Google Labs improves their search and presentation algorithms, we'll have new ways of looking at the Timeline of Villa-Lobos's life. Meanwhile, check out the Cronologia Illustrada - the Illustrated Time-Line at the new Museu Villa-Lobos website, with lots of pictures. And the Villa-Lobos Timeline at The Villa-Lobos Website is starting to come together with some useful content.

The Villa-Lobos Letters in Paperback

Martin Anderson at Toccata Press has let me know that Lisa Peppercorn's book The Villa-Lobos Letters is now available in paperback.

Complete information is available at the Toccata Press site. You can order the hardcover and paperback Letters from Amazon.co.uk, though only the hardcover version is listed at Amazon.com.

This really is an interesting book, containing valuable insights into Villa-Lobos's life at important times of his life. Peppercorn was for many years the main source of information about Villa-Lobos in English. Now that we have new sources of biographical information we can take Peppercorn's biases into account - notably her championship of VL's first wife Lucília over his eventual life-partner Arminda. Still, Peppercorn's intimate knowledge of VL's life - especially in the 1930's - and her access to source documents makes this volume an absolute must for those of us interested in this extraordinary, and very human, composer.

Heitor Villa-Lobos: A Life

An important new book is just about to be published: David P. Appleby's Heitor Villa-Lobos: A Life (1887-1959).



You can buy the book from Amazon.com. I'll post more information once I receive my copy. Note that the Scarecrow Press website includes a Table of Contents.

I love the picture on the cover. Surely Villa-Lobos deserves to be on the cover of Cigar Aficionado!