String Quartet No. 12 is the part of a series of seventeen works in the genre by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and was written in 1950. A performance lasts approximately twenty-two minutes.
String Quartet No. 12 is the part of a series of seventeen works in the genre by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and was written in 1950. A performance lasts approximately twenty-two minutes.
Villa-Lobos began composing his Twelfth Quartet in New York in 1950, during a stay in Memorial Hospital following kidney surgery, completing the score at the Hotel Weston on 15 September.[1] According to the catalogue published by the Museu Villa-Lobos, it was first performed by the Quarteto Haydn in the Auditório do MEC, Rio de Janeiro, on 3 November 1951.[2] According to another authority, the first performance was given that same year by the São Paulo Quartet.[3] The score is dedicated to Mindinha (Arminda Neves d'Almeida), the composer's companion for the last 23 years of his life.
As in all of Villa-Lobos's string quartets except the first, there are the traditional four movements:
Departing from the traditional sonata-allegro form, Villa-Lobos casts the opening movement of this quartet in a simple ABA ternary form. Each section is thirty-two bars in length, subdivided into sixteen- , eight- , and four-bars segments, and this main body of the movement is followed by a sixteen-bar coda. An interesting detail of the manuscript score is that Villa-Lobos uses the Portuguese tempo marking Alegro, instead of the Italian spelling which is his normal habit.[4] The middle, B section is marked meno, and is in the rhythm of a modinha.[5] The composer's biographer, Eero Tarasti, regards this as a regression to Villa-Lobos's earlier, clumsier style of quartet writing, and finds the texture "considerably more complicated than in previous quartets and the sound lacks transparency".[6] Juan José Gutiérrez, on the contrary, views the quartet as relatively simple and concise, marking the beginnings of a neoclassical concern with balance and symmetry of structure in the composer's late period.[7]
Like the opening movement's central section, the second, slow movement has the character of a modinha. Like the first movement, it is also in an ABA ternary form, in this case preceded by a thirty-two-bar introduction.[8]
The third movement is a scherzo (explicitly marked as such in the manuscript, but not in the printed score).[9] At rehearsal-number five the cello introduces a quotation from Villa-Lobos's 1940 cantata Mandú-Çárárá, played in parallel fifths.[10]
The finale is once again a ternary ABA form, with a twenty-one bar coda.[11] The composer described one theme from this movement as being "à la Spanish".[12]