The following is an excerpt from the biography of Villa-Lobos by Eero Tarasti:

"Brazilian-born Heitor Villa-Lobos was given cello lessons by his father, and he later attained a rare mastery of the guitar. But as a composer he was almost entirely self-taught. As a young man intended for the medical profession, he preferred to spend his days in the bohemian life of the street musician, developing the ability to improvise guitar accompaniments to the capricious modulations of the popular instrumental music known as the chôros. Between ages eighteen and twenty-five, he traveled extensively throughout Brazil studying the various types of popular music and noting its characteristic features. At first his music was scorned in his own land for its novelty, but in the 1920s it was taken up enthusiastically in Paris, where Villa-Lobos attracted wide interest in many circles of the avant-garde. He made friends with many leading musicians (such as the pianist Artur Rubinstein) who not only became devoted admirers but promoted his music in performance. Throughout his long life he continued to pour forth an unending stream of new works, almost all of them marked by a freshness of melodic line (often marked by Brazilian popular styles), a rhythmic vitality, and imaginative instrumental color.

"Some of his most popular works attempted to combine Brazilian folk material with the contrapuntal style of J.S. Bach, and to these works Villa-Lobos gave a generic title that might be translate "Brazilian Bach-like Pieces" (Bachianas Brasileiras); some of them are for full orchestra, others for as few as two instruments. One of the most popular movements in all of this section of the composer's output is a miniature tone-poem depicting a train that runs through jungle and mountain, with evocative sound effects from the instruments.

"It is almost impossible to survey Villa-Lobos's vast output, which is only now being satisfactorily catalogued. Estimates of the number of compositions he wrote vary widely, from something like 700 to more than double that, though this inconsistency is at least partly caused from the fact that he sometimes arranged a piece in several forms and one accounting might consider these arrangements as separate works. Confusion arises, too, from the delight he himself took in mystification, in telling stories about himself that might or might not have been fully accurate.

"During the '30s, too, Villa-Lobos was playing an active and vital role in developing music education in his native country, and to this end he composed a great deal of choral music and other works designed for use in schools, just as Kodály did in Hungary and a few other composers have done in their native lands.

"From 1945 until his death, Villa-Lobos became more interested in questions of instrumental virtuosity and produced concertos for piano (five of them), cello (two), harp, guitar, and harmonica. His piano compositions became longer and more consciously brilliant (though Rudepoema--approximately "rough poem"--written for Rubinstein in the 1920s was already regarded as one of the most difficult works ever created for the instrument. He also continued, with considerable regularity throughout his life, composing string quartets (the final total was seventeen, with an eighteenth left in sketches at his death) and, after a break of a quarter century, he began to write symphonies again, composing his Sixth in 1944 and continuing to his Twelfth in 1957.

"As if all this weren't enough, he composed six ballets, film scores, a couple of operas, and even a Broadway show, Magdalena, with the team of Robert Wright and George Forrest, who were best known for converting the tunes of deceased older composers into show tunes for hits like Song of Norway (Grieg) and Kismet (Borodin).

"The 2nd Piano Trio in a-minor (1915-1919) shows a great progress in the composer's development. The textures have become notably denser and the meters and complex rhythms tend to overload each section. The chord variety has become mover varied and the whole musical material more thematic in nature. Seldom does Villa-lobos resort to ostinato accompaniments as he once did, but all the parts are filled with events - which do not always realize their potential due to their abundance. An almost tropical exuberance characterizes this work. Now, for the first time, the composer has given free rein to his imagination. He has something to say but he does not yet know that everything must not be said at the same time. Like the First Trio, the work consists of four movements: allegro moderato, Berceuse-Barcarolla, Scherzo and Final. Already in the beginning the piano's accompaniment figure with its hemiolas and soft syncopations form an interesting background for the theme, whose elements Villa-Lobos used later in his other works. The texture reveals influences from Wagner and again from the background figures of French neo-romanticism, Franck and Faure. The violin and cello move mostly in a canon. Villa-Lobos also experiments with new ways of playing the violin and cello. The tonal language already begins to remind one of Ravel, to whom reference is made by his use of 9th and expanded chords. In the final movement the main theme found at the beginning of the trio returns as though unnoticed, now augmented. Thus, Villa-Lobos realized the idea of a cyclic form following the doctrine of d'Indy. The movement ends brilliantly with a chain of augmented triads over the keyboard and a chord resolved at the end to a-minor."