Francisco Mignone

Francisco Paulo Mignone was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1897. The middle name is generally dispensed with and is bracketed in the New Groves. He studied flute and piano with his father from an early age, before studying both instruments and composition at the São Paulo Conservatory. He graduated from there in 1917. In 1920, he left Brazil to study in Europe and, specifically, at the Milan Conservatory. There he composed his first opera in 1921, which received its first performance in Rio de Janeiro in 1924. A second opera followed, which premiered (again in Rio de Janeiro) in 1928. At that point, he moved back to São Paulo to become a harmony teacher at the Conservatory. He spent the next two decades conducting, teaching or administering various musical institutions.

His music style is generally Romantic, inflected by Brazilian popular rhythms. From the 1930s on, his music became rather more heavily influenced by Brazilian folk and popular traditions: this is usually called his 'nationalistic period', and it ended around 1960. A glorious, foot-tappingly enchanting favourite of mine from this period of his output is his choral ballet Maracatu de Chico Rei, which dates from 1933, telling the story of the building of a church by a tribe of African slaves, some of whom win their freedom and gradually purchase the liberty of their fellows. It is exuberant, full of Brazil with Stravinsky inflections and difficult not to keep listening to!

From the late 1950s on, he concentrated on (as he put it) 'refining technicality, but being clear, honest and easily understandable to the majority'. The epitome of this last style is probably his Piano Concerto (actually from 1958), a Romantic piece with colourful orchestration and bravura solo piano writing. After that, he tended to abjure specifically Brazilian influences and turned instead to an eclectic mix of polytonality, tone clusters, atonality and even serialism -which, I have to confess, is not exactly the 'easily understood' music for the majority that he had been aiming at, though it clearly is a concentration on the technical and academic aspects of the compositional process!

He died in Rio de Janeiro in 1986, aged 88. He is generally considered to be the most significant Brazilian composer since Heitor Villa-Lobos.