A favorite who should need no introduction, but certainly deserves one!
Mignone, Francisco (Paulo) (Thanks Grove!)
Mignone at piano.jpg
(b São Paulo, 3 Sept 1897; d Rio de Janeiro, 2 Feb 1986).
Brazilian composer and conductor. A son of an Italian immigrant musician, he began flute and piano studies with his father, continuing his piano training from 1907 under Silvio Motto. At an early age he played both of his instruments in local dance orchestras. He studied the piano, the flute and composition at the São Paulo Conservatory, where he was a pupil of Cantù and from where he graduated in 1917; although Mário de Andrade was his teacher for history and aesthetics, it was only later that Mignone came under Andrade's influence. By 1920, when he left for Europe, Mignone had composed and conducted several orchestral pieces. He studied under Ferroni at the Milan Conservatory, and there he wrote the opera O contratador de diamantes (1921), first performed in Rio de Janeiro in 1924; Congada, taken from the second-act ballet, achieved great popularity. A second opera, L'innocente, was presented in Rio with great success in 1928; the following year Mignone returned to the São Paulo Conservatory as a harmony teacher. In 1933 he moved to Rio and was appointed official conductor and conducting teacher at the Escola Nacional de Música; he also taught privately for many years. After a European conducting tour (1937–8) he visited the USA for the first time in 1942. In New York the League of Composers had some of his works performed and he conducted the NBC and CBS orchestras in concerts of his music. During the next two decades he held many different appointments in Brazil, among them the music directorships of the Teatro Municipal, Radio Ministério da Educação e Cultura and Radio Globo.
In the first (c1917–28) of the three periods that may be distinguished in Mignone's output, his Italian background and training are evident in the Romantic structure and harmony of such pieces as the Suite campestre, the Paráfrase sobre o hino dos cavalheiros da Kirial, and the tone poems Festa dionisíaca, Momus and No sertão, the last a fantasy suggested by the work of Euclides da Cunha. At the same time, an interest in national idioms may be perceived in Maxixe and Congada, both based on Brazilian popular rhythms.
Mignone was strongly attracted by the ideals of musical nationalism eloquently propounded by Andrade, and about 1929 he began a new period of intensive creativity drawing on all manner of Brazilian folk and popular traditions, a period that lasted until around 1959–60. Typical of this nationalist style are the ballets Maracatu de chico rei and Leilão, the orchestral Batucajé and Babaloxá, and the four Fantasias brasileiras for piano and orchestra. The first ballet and the two orchestral pieces are on Afro-Brazilian subjects and use almost exclusively Afro-Brazilian themes, or themes akin to them in rhythm and melody. Nearly all of the collective numbers of Maracatu are stylized folk- or popular dances, and the orchestration is given individuality by the inclusion of popular percussion instruments. The Fantasias epitomize Mignone's style better than any other works of the period; all are rhapsodic pieces with a piano part recalling the captivating, spontaneous, virtuoso style of such popular pianist-composers as Nazareth. In a 1939 newspaper article Andrade mentioned the third Fantasia, Babaloxá and Maracatu as ‘monumental landmarks’, recognizing their importance in contemporary Brazilian music. The symphonic ‘impressions’ Festa das igrejas, which received international recognition after a Toscanini NBC SO performance in 1944, take some thematic material from the mestizo caboclo music.
In the 1930s and 1940s Mignone had most success in Brazil with solo songs and piano pieces. His first nationalist song, Quando na roça anoitece, is characteristic in its melody and guitar-like accompaniment; and the best of these songs are the Seis líricas, Dentro da noite and Dona Janaína from the cycle Quatro líricas, and Pousa a mão na minha testa. Of the piano pieces, the most overtly nationalist are the Lendas sertanejas, the Quatro peças brasileiras, Cucumbizinho, Cateretê, Dança do Botocudo and Quase modinha. Lyrical melodies, some taken from folksongs, within a prevailingly tonal harmony and frequent syncopated rhythms (as in Nazareth from the Quatro peças) point to a heavy dependence on urban popular music. Two sets of very Romantic waltzes, Valsas de esquina and Valsas choros, attempt to re-create the style of the improvised waltzes of early 20th-century strolling serenaders, of the popular piano pieces of such composers as Nazareth, and, in their melody, of the popular modinhas. These persistent references to national music were to some extent transcended in the Piano Sonata no.1 (1941).
Writing six years later in A parte do anjo, Mignone decided that ‘my music will have to be gradually more refined technically, but clear, honest and easily understandable to the majority’. Such an intention appears to underlie the Piano Concerto (1958), a Romantic piece with colourful orchestration and brilliant bravura solo passages. Other orchestral and chamber pieces of the late 1950s indicate a turning away from direct preoccupation with national sources in favour of an attitude of such eclecticism that it is difficult to isolate constant features, although a tendency to polytonality, tone clusters, atonality and serialism can be discerned. Indeed, the Variações em busca de um tema (1972) were designed to accommodate ‘all present-day compositional processes’.
In the 1970s Mignone returned to opera, with O chalaça (1973), one of the best works in the contemporary operatic repertory in Brazil, and O sargento de milícias (1978), both on librettos by H. Mello Nóbrega. He utilized a number of popular musical themes in the latter, regaining in the last few years of his life a strong attachment to nationalism, in which he found ‘a message of richness, variety, atmosphere and local colour’, as he stated in a 1977 interview. His works of the late 1970s and 80s, such as Quincas Berro d'Agua, Nazarethiana, several Valses brasileiras, and the Choro for two guitars, reveal this affinity with the many musical expressions of his country.
Bibliography
F. Mignone: A parte de anjo: autocrítica de um cinqüentenário (São Paulo, 1947)
M. Verhaalen: ‘Francisco Mignone: his Music for Piano’, Inter-American Music Bulletin, no.79 (1970–71), 1–36
G. Béhague: Music in Latin America: an Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979)
V. Mariz: História do música no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1981, 4/1994)
J.M. Neves: Música brasileira contemporânea (São Paulo, 1981)
B. Kiefer: Mignone: vida e obra (Porto Alegre, 1983)
V. Mariz, ed.: Francisco Mignone: o homem e a obra (Rio de Janeiro, 1997)
Gerard Béhague
Out of print
Mignone, Francisco (1897-1986) - Miudinho [Brasilean Dance].pdf