Octavio Pinto

Brazilian composer Octavio Pinto is perhaps better remembered as the husband, from 1922 on, of the brilliant and famous Brazilian pianist Guiomar Novaes. Pinto was in fact not a musician by trade, but actually an architect with a thriving business throughout Brazil. He did manage, however, to get some piano lessons from the well-known Hungarian pianist Isidore Philipp (teacher also of Pinto's wife when she was at the Paris Conservatoire) as a young man, and he issued a relatively steady stream of music -- character and show pieces for solo piano -- until he died in 1950. Pinto's most often-played piece of music is one written for and made famous by his wife: Childhood Memories (Scenas infantis, from 1932). Well-known in South American musical circles even before marrying one of that continent's greatest virtuosi, Pinto was a close friend of Heitor Villa-Lobos. The oft-made claim, however, that Villa-Lobos composed his piano work Próle de bébé, Book 1 in honor of Pinto and Novaes' two children (daughter Anna Maria and son Luis Octavio) is a dubious and untidy one: Villa-Lobos composed Próle de bébé in 1918, several years before the two married and had children.