Villa-Lobos before Paris, or: how delicious my French was

Abstract

This article intends to rediscuss Paulo Guérios’s hypothesis, for whom a) Villa- Lobos started to build himself as a Brazilian composer after his first visit to Paris; b) the eventual nationalist works of Villa- Lobos, before Paris, were only “temporary projects” and his main objective was “to demonstrate to others and to himself that he was an artist”. Based on documentation obtained from periodicals and data offered by Guérios himself, a different interpretation of those data is proposed, which points out the composer as a musician who experienced popular culture as a young man from the outskirts, resorting to the “anthropophagic” assimilation of European culture to obtain sufficient support that made it possible for him to go to Paris, where, after the recognition of his poetics, he was able to give space to the musical representation of Brazilian culture, of which he became a kind of “ambassador”.