Guarnieri, Camargo (EN)

Guarnieri Mozart Camargo *1 February 1907 Tietê (near São Paulo), †13 January 1993 São Paulo, Brazilian composer and conductor. He came from a family of Sicilian immigrants. His exceptional musical talent, evident from an early age, led to his being given the middle name Mozart, although he never used it professionally. He received his first musical training from his father, a flutist in a wind orchestra, and later studied in São Paulo with E. Braga and A. de Sá Pereira (piano), as well as with L. Baldi (composition). There he also met the musicologist and poet M. de Andrade, who directed his interests toward folk music. In 1927 Guarnieri took a position as piano teacher at the conservatory in São Paulo; he also worked as director and conductor of the renowned ensemble Coral Paulistano. In 1938 he received a government scholarship to Paris, where he studied with Ch. Koechlin (composition) and F. Ruhlmann (conducting), while N. Boulanger served as his advisor. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he returned to Brazil. He devoted himself primarily to composition and soon gained recognition as a composer; he was quickly appreciated in the United States, where he was invited twice and where his works were either awarded prizes (Violin Concerto No. 1, String Quartet No. 2) or received their premieres (Abertura concertante, Symphony No. 1). Guarnieri was among the founding members of the Academia Brasileira de Música (1945), and was later named its honorary president. In later years he worked chiefly as an orchestral conductor in São Paulo, while also directing American and European ensembles. In 1960 he became director of the conservatory in São Paulo, and in 1964 he additionally assumed responsibility for the composition and conducting classes at the conservatory in Santos. 

Both his encounter with M. de Andrade and his somewhat nationalist artistic ideology, as well as Guarnieri’s Parisian studies, were decisive moments in the development of his creative personality. The first shaped the aesthetic and emotional foundations of his artistic outlook, while the second, determining the character of his compositional technique, also carried important aesthetic implications. Guarnieri’s artistic sensibility was clearly oriented toward authentic folk traditions, which in Brazil are highly complex and, as in the modinhas (a type of accompanied song), often intertwined with elements of salon stylization. Accordingly, Guarnieri drew both on traditional song forms (modinhas in his collections of solo songs and in the second movement of the First Piano Sonatina) and on dance forms (piano works, sambas, chôros, and related genres in his suites, as well as chôros for solo instruments and orchestra). He also employed Brazilian folk instruments of various origins, such as the cavaquinho, cuíca, and agogô (for example in Flor do Tremembé), and even incorporated distinctive performance techniques, such as the discontinuous, quasi-pizzicato articulation found in the Ponteios for piano. At the same time, his studies with Koechlin and the atmosphere of the “Paris school” of the 1930s provided Guarnieri with a disciplined and economical compositional technique distinguished by advanced contrapuntal procedures, which he employed in his symphonies and concertos, works likewise inspired by folklore, as well as in other musical genres. The combination of these contrasting musical worlds resulted in a remarkably coherent artistic language. From his earliest works, such as the Sonatina No. 1, Guarnieri avoided the late-Romantic and academic stylizations commonly employed by contemporary Brazilian composers, nor did he adopt the easily assimilated and often superficial exoticizing tendencies of post-Impressionism toward which Heitor Villa-Lobos inclined. Entirely individual and free from the burden of European conventions, Guarnieri’s oeuvre ranks among the most significant achievements of modern Brazilian music and of the broader Latin-American cultural sphere.