The unbelievable fecundity of Heitor Villa-Lobos' musical imagination could not possibly stay in one place for too long. And in many ways, the travels throughout the vast terrain of Brazil the composer took as a youth serve as an allegory for his future career: he was a supremely free spirit, blithely synthesizing a variety of musical folklores and classical European traditions. Similarly, he frequently departed from a particular style of his own, only to return to it later. This return to an older personal style is clearly exemplified by the String Quartet No. 13, written in 1951 and premiered in 1953 by the Quatour Municipal de Sao Paolo. The work is a kind of return, after the pinnacle of structural and harmonic complexity of the Quartet No. 7, to a simpler harmonic vocabulary. Though the work does not specify its key, it is clearly more tonally oriented than those middle quartets that Villa-Lobos scholar Arnaldo Estrella termed "systematically atonal." Similarly, its third of four movements, a glorious adagio, seems to gaze back at the nonchalant vulnerability of the slow movements of the composer's very first quartet, written in 1915.

The quartet's opening Allegro non troppo has numerous chromatic shifts, but generally unfolds in rich and generous diatonic harmonies; Villa-Lobos' free, modal approach analogously adheres to his thematic and constructive bent. Far from the tenets of Viennese classicism and the German tradition, the Brazilian employs a kind of fantasia/variation, frequently breaking with guileless confidence from his previous material and flying into new ideas and inventions. Still, he knits the first movement together with his inimitable brand of compositional virtuosity, somehow covering the seams or diverting the ear from their detection. Not just in his allusions, but also in his hectic, distracted structure does Villa-Lobos illuminate his taste for a kind of "urban folklore." Caught between a hot-blooded, texturally thick Scherzo and a finale full of popular figures and rhythms, Villa-Lobos offers what is surely one of the most beautiful moments in the entirety of his 17-quartet output. This Adagio unfurls a simple minor-mode melody above muted undulations in the other instruments; soon, this unworldly nocturnal atmosphere yields a lovely duet, a kind of wordless quartet-likeness of the Tristan night music, but offering, in contrast to Tristan, a stunningly modest, privately amorous dialogue. The beginning music returns at the movement's end, quietly transfigured into the sonic ether.

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