Heitor Villa-Lobos told Paris salons he had escaped from cannibals in the Amazon, and whether or not the story was true, it was brilliant anti-conservatory marketing. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1887 during a period of massive social upheaval, he learned music by secretly listening to his father’s musical evenings, taught himself cello, clarinet and guitar, and after his father’s death in 1899 supported his family playing in cinema and theater orchestras. Around 1905 he abandoned formal training entirely to absorb indigenous, African and street-band sounds from Brazil’s interior.

This episode follows how his pianist wife Lucilia taught him the piano he needed to compose, how he was booed off stage at the 1922 Sao Paulo Festival of Modern Art while wearing one shoe and one carpet slipper, and how he moved to Paris to exhibit rather than study. We cover the choros form, the 12 guitar etudes written for Andres Segovia, his controversial work in music education under Getulio Vargas, the Bachianas Brasileiras, a rejected Hollywood score that became Forest of the Amazon, and a catalog of more than 2,000 works.

• Why the fabricated cannibal stories served as a deliberate branding strategy
• How he made orchestras imitate jungle sounds through extended techniques and dissonance
• The cultural exchange with Darius Milhaud and the lifelong support of Arthur Rubinstein
• The historical debate over his propaganda work versus democratizing music education in Brazil
• How Bach’s fugue structure was used to house Brazilian folk melodies