"Formidable!"

"In Europe," Composer Heitor Villa-Lobos once complained, "I am known as Villa-Lobos. In the United States I am only a Brazilian--applauded because of the Good Neighbor policy."

But Villa-Lobos' U.S. neighbors are getting to know him better. His latest music arrived on Broadway this week in a garishly attractive package--a flamboyant new musical called Magdalena. For want of a better label, Sponsor Homer Curran and Producer Edwin Lester had billed it as "a musical adventure."

Listen to the Boomlay. The 38-piece orchestra included 16 native percussion instruments (with names like the pio, chocalho de metal, reco-reco and matraca) which thumped and clattered and clapped the rhythm. At times the music was full of melody, as melancholy as a native chant. Sometimes it bumped and blared like a carnival band. There were smatterings of dissonance and explosions of jungle jazz; and in one scene, Villa-Lobos had two different songs going at once, as skillfully laced together as a Bach fugue.

Heitor Villa-Lobos has spent a lifetime trying to write music that would seem entirely new--from his tricky Rudepoema (inspired by the profile of Pianist Artur Rubinstein) to his brilliant Bachianas Brasileiras, a volatile mixture of his own two idols, Bach and Villa-Lobos. He is a fiery little man who can jump in an instant from twinkling good humor to a shouting, stamping rage. He is vain enough to give his age as 60 (though friends say he is 67), and to rush his music indiscriminately into print. "The maestro," a Rio critic once said, "has written about 2,000 works. I would throw 1,950 of them away." The remaining 50 are still enough to make Villa-Lobos South America's greatest living composer.

The son of a Rio lawyer, Villa-Lobos went to work at eleven after his father died, eked out a living playing in theater and cabaret orchestras. He wandered all over Brazil, listening to the boomlay music of the Indians, the songs of the Negroes, and the backroom jazz of cellar cafes. Then he began composing, combining all he had heard. In 1922 he descended on Paris. "I did not come to study," he announced, "but to show what I have done."

"C Minor! C Minor!" When he got home again, in 1930, he found himself famous. As time went by he took to stuffing his pockets with costly cigars, developed a taste for conservative grey suits, manicures and perfume. In 1932 he was made director of musical education for Rio's schools.

Rio soon learned what it was like to have Villa-Lobos around. Symphony orchestras found him a ranting, swearing conductor, who at times seemed barely able to follow a score ("C minor! C minor!" he would scream--then, quietly, "It is C minor, isn't it?"). Once during his class at the Rio Conservatory, a girl fainted. Next day Villa-Lobos posted a sign--and students knew he meant it: "Fainting in class not allowed."

Though royalties piled up, Villa-Lobos never moved from his cramped little apartment in downtown Rio, chaotically cluttered with papers, overflowing ashtrays, strange native instruments and dozens of hats (he collects them). There he has lived, ranting in a mixture of Portuguese and his fluent French, or composing quietly in a corner with a phonograph blaring in his ear. When visitors come, he can be rude ("I hate singers," he once bellowed at one he had just met), or he may entertain them for hours, playing records or showing them how he can sound three different rhythms all at once--with hands, feet and mouth.

"You don't need to understand music," Villa-Lobos says. "You feel it." The music he feels is all the music of his own country. He grows angry when an unwary guest tells him that he sometimes sounds like a Brazilian Gershwin ("A child compared to me"), would be better pleased to be put on a par with Stravinsky ("Formidable!"). Actually, at his best, Villa-Lobos is like no one but himself. Says he: "I only ask that the maker of a piece of music be original. I do not care to walk in company with routine."

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