Bachianas Brasileiras No.4

Dansa (Miudinho): muito ritmado e animado

Villa-Lobos’s nine Bachianas Brasileiras were inspired by an oddly mystic but extraordinarily fruitful identification of the music of J.S. Bach with Brazilian folklore. As the composer himself somewhat fancifully put it, “The music of Bach comes from the astral infinite to infiltrate itself in the earth as folk music.” His usual practice in these works was to give each movement a formal title such as Bach might have used, add a vernacular equivalent as a subtitle, and apply Brazilian material and Brazilian thinking to the form in question.

    The most Bach-like and least Brazilian movement in Bachianas Brasileiras No.4 - written at various times between 1930 and 1941 - is the Prelude which, based on one simple theme, proclaims its allegiance to Bach not only in numerous stylistic allusions but also in an enterprisingly contrapuntal middle section. The Coral, on the other hand, has far less to do with the Lutheran chorale than with religious songs from Brazil’s northeastern desert region. It also features the voice of the araponga, which single-minded bird persists in its B flat monotone right up to the grandiloquent coda, where the pianist is more concerned with simulating the sound of the organ.

    If it is difficult to associate Bach with the barber-shop cadences regularly applied to the folk-song melody of the outer sections of the Aria, it is impossible to think of him at all in relation to the quicker middle section, where the main theme is now presented in diminution against a samba rhythm in the left hand. As in the two previous movements, the melodic material of the Dansa derives from the northeast of Brazil. It is a miudhinho, a dance related to the samba and set here against an ostinato of pattering semiquavers sustained from the first bars almost to the last.