CD Curumim

Making of do CD Curumim - Camargo Guarnieri

CD-List of Songs

Lacan Group

Paulista Chamber Orchestra releases CD with Camargo Guarnieri compositions

About Camargo Guarnieri

List of main compositions

Photos

Interview with Vera Silvia and Tânia Guarnieri

Interview with Sister Marion Verhaalen



Portuguese



"The CD will be launched in October" 		About Camargo Guarnieri
Mozart Camargo Guarnieri was born on February 1st 1907 in Tietê, 100 km distant from the city of São Paulo. His Italian grandfather immigrated to Brazil, arriving in Santos in 1895. Due to an error of the immigration employee, the last name of the family gained the letter "i", eliminating the linking with the Guarneri, famous manufacturers of violins of Italy. The father of Guarnieri, Miguel, was 11 year old when the family disembarked in Brazil. After some time in the capital of the State of São Paulo, they moved to Tietê, where Miguel started to work as barber and married Géssia Arruda Combed Camargo, sister of a rich family.

Guarnieri`s father was an opera fan. He was also a good musician and he played, for example, piano, flute and contrabass. With Géssia, he had ten children, being that the four men had gained names of composers (Mozart, Rossine, Belline and Verdi). Guarnieri was the oldest. When he discovered the origin of his name, he did not used Mozart anymore, but just the initial M for "not offending the master", as he said.

His father initiated him very early in music. After an experience frustrated with a local professor, his mother started to still give him piano lessons. Later, he studied in a neighboring club. In 1920, with only 13 years, he wrote its first composition, the waltz "Sonho de Artista (Dream of Artist)", that got compliments and made his father to redouble the efforts do educate him, leading the family for the city of São Paulo in 1922, where Guarnieri could study with better professors.

He started to have lessons of flute and violin with his father and, of piano, with Ernani Braga, musician who played in the "Semana de 22" (Week of 1922, a famous modernist event in the nation), as well as Villa-Lobos. To help in the sustenance of the family, he worked in a store of sheet music. Later he started to play in theaters, with his father, and in cabarets. He also studied with Antonio Sá Pereira, important figure in the Brazilian musical life in this period.

In 1926, Guarnieri read in the news that the excellent and innovative Italian regent Lamberto Baldi was moving to São Paulo. Without speaking a word of Italian, he took his father as interpreter and he showed Baldi his work. The maestro gave lessons to him up to 1930. Guarnieri considered Baldi one of its main masters, as well as the writer Mário de Andrade, who knew him in 1928, introduced by the pianist Antonio Munhoz, friend of his professor Antonio Sá Pereira.

At this time, under the orientation of Baldi, Guarnieri already had written "Dança Brasileira (Brazilian Dance)". Dedicated the Munhoz, it is one of his important composition and was recorded sometimes overseas, as Dansa or Danza Brasileira, by interpreters such as the cello player Yo-Yo Ma, very recently, and, in 1963, by the New York Philharmonic, under the regency of Leonard Bernstein.

Mário de Andrade was astonished with the excellence and the Brazilian nature of the compositions of the young musician of 21 years. Andrade made a pact with Baldi. The Italian maestro would be in charge of the musical studies, while Andrade would be a teacher to Guarnieri in other subjects. Until that moment, he had only two years of primary school. At this year, 1928, Guarnieri also started to give lessons in the Drama and Musical Conservatory of São Paulo. In 1931, Baldi moved to Uruguay and Guarnieri assumed his classroom in the Conservatory.

In 1935, Mário de Andrade convinced the São Paulo mayor to create a chorus and an orchestra, the Paulistano Chorus, under the direction of Guarnieri. On May 27, he presented for the first time in a public concert as composer. His work had great repercussion in the press. In the following year, the French pianist celebrity Alfred Cortot, in a tour to South America, heard of the regent Lamberto Baldi, in Montevidéu, that, when arriving in São Paulo, to have a look on Guarnieri`s work. Impressed when knowing his music, Cortot wrote a letter to the governor of São Paulo, recommending a scholarship in Europe. So, Guarnieri, as well as Villa-Lobos, had his future influenced by a foreign pianist, in the case of this last one, the Polish North American Arthur Rubinstein.

In 1938, Guarnieri left the Country to Europe, where he studied in France with the musician Charles Koechlin and the maestro François Ruhlmann, head of the Opera of Paris Orchestra. With the approach of the Second War, he came back to Brazil in 1939, with great financial difficulties. In 1942, he earned his first international competition, with his composition "Primeiro Concerto (First Concert)". The recognition led to an invitation to study in USA. His works started to be played in concerts in the USA and received many compliments. Guarnieri had become known for the most important musicians in Europe and in the USA.

Guarnieri returned to Brazil in 1943. He received a series of prizes for his work and became the regent of the São Paulo Municipal Orchestra. He still gave lessons in some schools. In 1947, he returned to the USA, where he was invited to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra. His notoriety, that never would become into financial comfort, took him to a famous episode in 1950, when he wrote the "Carta Aberta aos Músicos e Críticos do Brasil (Open Letter to the Musicians and Critics of Brazil)".

He considered to be his responsibility "to alert the young composers about the perils of false progressive theories of music contrary to the true interests of Brazilian music". The "dodecaphonism", movement created by the Austrian musician Arnold Schoenberg, who Guarnieri considered "charlatanism" was the danger. But t was seducing important Brazilian composers Brazilian, such as Guerra Peixe, among others, on account of the influence in Brazil of Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, professor of some important musicians, such as Antonio Carlos Jobim.

In the decade of 1950, Guarnieri continued composing and giving lessons. He was aide to the Minister of the Education and, after the death of Villa-Lobos in 1959, became honorary president of the Brazilian Academy of Music. In 1961, he married Vera Silvia, sister of a friend, with who he had three children, Tânia, Miriam and Daniel Paulo. Before, of a first marriage, he had his first son Mário.

In the year of 1975, the University of São Paulo established its symphonic, bred especially for Guarnieri, what enchanted the composer. Beyond the work as regent, he continued with intense creative and didactic activity. In December of 1992, Guarnieri was awarded with the Prize Gabriela Mistral, by the Organization of American States, as the Greater Musician of Americas.

Camargo Guarnieri died in January 13, 1993.
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