Abstract In 1927, critic Lucie Delarue-Mardrus argued that Heitor Villa-Lobos’s music was imbued with an irresistible quality that made the audience experience, and perhaps assimilate, Brazilian indigeneity. While claiming that the authentic novelty of Villa-Lobos’s music stemmed from his recent captivity among “true” Brazilian “savages,” Delarue-Mardrus was actually reworking the colonial record of a German go-between, Hans Staden, originally published in 1557 in Marburg. This article examines the historical constellation in which Delarue-Mardrus, at times ironically, experimented with representations of indigeneity as an unmediated source of Villa-Lobos’s musical originality.
Luciana Villas Bôas (Sun,) studied this question.