When photographer Sebastião Salgado has spoken publicly in recent years about the destruction of the Brazilian rainforest, he has mostly refrained from naming those politically responsible. But Salgado did not need to be explicit. During his four-year term as President of Brazil, populist Jair Bolsonaro made no secret of the fact that he considered state environmental agencies and international climate targets to be annoying obstacles to his radical capitalist agenda. Between January 2019 and January 2023, Bolsonaro permitted and promoted the deforestation of huge areas of forest to create agricultural land – with the result that greenhouse gas emissions increased dramatically in a short period of time, the water balance was disrupted and the unique animal diversity is now extremely threatened. ‘We have destroyed the rainforest,’ Salgado warned until shortly before his death in May 2025. ‘But if we destroy the balance in the rainforest, we destroy the climatic balance on the planet. And one solution to our planet's great ecological crisis is to reforest the forests.’

For Sebastião Salgado, the fight against the destruction of the Brazilian landscape also had an autobiographical dimension. He was born in south-eastern Brazil in 1944 and grew up on his father's farm. Even back then, untouched natural areas were being handed over to large landowners and international investors in order to increase meat yields and exports by clearing tropical forests and converting them into pastureland. In 1969, Salgado left Brazil during the military dictatorship and emigrated to Paris with his wife Lélia Deluiz Wanick. The trained economist became a renowned photojournalist, making his breakthrough as a photographic artist in 1986 with images of the gold rush in Serra Pelada. In black-and-white photographs with stark contrasts, Salgado documented the catastrophic conditions of the gold miners in a huge earthen funnel.

Even in this series, the ruthless exploitation of the garimpeiros contrasted with the beauty of the precisely composed, almost choreographed images – an apparent contradiction for which Salgado has occasionally been accused of “aestheticising suffering”. But he did not allow himself to be deterred from his path. For it was important to him to show both sides: beauty and destruction, human dignity and exploitation, the wonders of nature and the unimaginable atrocities of the genocide in Rwanda.

After his Rwanda reportage, Sebastião Salgado was physically and mentally exhausted. In search of a new meaning for his work, he returned to his parents' farm in Brazil in the mid-1990s. By then, desertification and overexploitation of nature had become impossible to ignore – Salgado decided to take practical action. Together with his wife, he founded the Instituto Terra and sought out donors to finance a comprehensive recultivation of the rainforest in his homeland. More than three million trees have been planted since then. On countless journeys through the Brazilian rainforest regions, Salgado spent nine years photographing the wonderful but endangered unity of humans, animals and nature, presenting a selection of these impressions in his photo book Amazônia. By then, he had long been an international celebrity. Filmmaker Wim Wenders dedicated the portrait The Salt of the Earth to him and gave the laudatory speech when Salgado received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2019.

In the same year, Sebastião and Lélia Salgado designed an exhibition of photographs from the rainforest for the Philharmonie de Paris. This time, they wanted the audience not only to see, but also to hear: Salgado's photographs were accompanied by music by Heitor Villa-Lobos, conducted by Simone Menezes. Since then, the immersive Amazon project has been staged to great acclaim in many cities, including London, Avignon, Rio de Janeiro and Zurich.

Heitor Villa-Lobos connects the Old and New Worlds

The question arises as to what connects the 255 images Salgado selected for the concert project with the music of Villa-Lobos. The photographer discovered Brazil's ‘national composer’ relatively late in life, but in an interview he pointed to their shared interest in the unique nature and culture of the Amazon region: ‘The composer Villa-Lobos lived with the local communities in the rainforest. Sometimes he disappeared for months, and people thought he was dead. But he was alive and sharing the life of these people, collecting sounds and adapting to his surroundings.’ In fact, there are some great stories about the young Villa-Lobos' excursions into the rainforest – once he is even said to have narrowly escaped a tribe of cannibals. However, the reports come mainly from the composer himself, and according to serious estimates, he may have exaggerated somewhat in order to lend the necessary authenticity to the indigenous echoes in his music.

It is undisputed that Heitor Villa-Lobos was one of the first to give art music in Brazil a national identity. When he was born into a middle-class family in Rio de Janeiro in 1887, classical music from Europe still dominated the salons and theatres of the capital. After the early death of his father, Villa-Lobos earned his living as a cellist not only in cinemas and coffee houses, but also in small street bands. Here he became acquainted with the ‘chôros’, popular and rhythmically catchy numbers in the style of Tico-Tico, which Villa-Lobos enriched with other Brazilian musical styles in his own Chôros. Indigenous music also played a role in this. However, he probably did not note it down during his own travels in the Amazon, but copied it from contemporary music collections or invented it himself – according to his motto: ‘I am folklore!’

Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras

At the urging of pianist Artur Rubinstein – one of the Brazilian composer’s early admirers – Villa-Lobos visited Paris for the first time in 1923, followed by a second visit in 1927–30. Further trips to Europe were prevented after the military coup by the dictatorial Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas. Villa-Lobos came to terms with the ruler, wrote patriotic songs and, as cultural attaché, took care of musical education in Brazil. During the dictatorship until 1945, he also composed the Bachianas Brasileiras, a series of nine suites for various ensembles. Forms commonly used in the Baroque period, especially by Johann Sebastian Bach, such as the toccata, chorale and fugue, are confronted and fused with Brazilian musical types in these subtle, delicately orchestrated creations. Today, the Bachianas Brasileiras are not only among Villa-Lobos' most popular pieces. They were also an important step towards a Brazilian national music that was technically ‘secured’ in the European tradition. The fourth of the suites was conceived for piano in 1930 and arranged for orchestra more than ten years later, with the Prelúdio heard in today's concert being for strings only.

Floresta do Amazonas – a mighty symphony of the jungle

After the end of the Second World War, Heitor Villa-Lobos was able to expand his career internationally once again. His productivity was dizzying: in the post-war years alone, he composed eight string quartets, five piano concertos and six symphonies, several ballet scores and his most important opera, Yerma, based on the drama by Federico García Lorca, before his death in 1959. Following the example of the Académie Française, Villa-Lobos founded the Academia Brasileira de Música in 1945 to promote musical life and music research in the country. We owe the academy several careful new editions of his works, including his cantata Floresta do Amazonas (The Amazon Forest), from which a suite will be performed this evening – accompanied by Amazon photographs by Sebastião Salgado.

Love troubles in the jungle

Villa-Lobos' music was also originally intended for images. The production company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer commissioned the composer to write the music for the 1959 Hollywood film Green Mansions. In this jungle story, the son of a Venezuelan minister (played by Anthony Perkins) flees into the jungle after a political upheaval and falls in love with the indigenous Rima (Audrey Hepburn), which leads to complications with the native people. Hepburn's husband Mel Ferrer directed the film, but despite the star-studded cast, it was a colossal flop.

Villa-Lobos received a princely fee for his music, but it was radically shortened for the film and re-orchestrated by an arranger. To save his score, the composer reworked it into a grand concertante epic for solo soprano, choir and orchestra, for which the Brazilian poet and diplomat Dora Vasconcellos contributed several texts – including the two most popular songs, Canção do amor (Love Song) and Melodia sentimental, which Villa-Lobos associated with the character of Rima in the film.

Delicate and wild

Floresta do Amazonas soon became a national anthem in Brazil: The country's dazzling musical tradition, from urban chôro to the songs and dances of the indigenous peoples, the evocation of native nature myths and the imitation of bird calls, are combined with the school of Bachian counterpoint, French musical sensibility and the formal experiments of pre-war modernism. Villa-Lobos' palette of orchestral colours is breathtaking: numerous South American percussion instruments create not only rhythmic energy, but also a variety of natural sounds. In addition to a soprano and alto saxophone, Villa-Lobos used piano, guitar and the Solovox, an early electronic instrument similar in sound to the Hammond organ. From the 23 numbers of this delicate yet wild music, conductor Simone Menezes has compiled an eleven-movement suite for soprano and orchestra for the Amazônia project, in which she dispenses with the numbers featuring the choir.

In the concert, Villa-Lobos' music is complemented by a twelve-minute piece inspired by Philip Glass during a trip to Brazil. At that time, Glass became acquainted with the music group Uakti and their unique sound, which is largely derived from homemade instruments. In the early 1990s, Glass composed ballet music for Uakti, which was later supplemented by the movement Metamorphosis 1 for the CD Águas da Amazônia. The orchestral arrangement performed this evening is by Charles Coleman.v

Michael Struck-Schloen

Michael Struck-Schloen, born in Dortmund in 1958, studied musicology, German language and literature, and art history. He works as a freelance author for newspapers, trade journals, and public broadcasting. He is also known to many WDR listeners as a presenter.