The Cinq Préludes by Heitor Villa-Lobos represent the Brazilian composer’s last work for solo guitar and were written in the summer of 1940. They do not constitute a single cycle, but rather a heterogeneous collection, similar in spirit to a collection of pages from an album, with each one developing, in its own individual way, a different stylistic principle. In terms of instrumental technique, Heitor Villa-Lobos places the Préludes in a kind of ideal balance point between the still nineteenth-century writing style of the Suite populaire brésilienne and the daring instrumental experimentation of the Douze Études.

In the present edition, the manifold editorial issues concerning Heitor Villa-Lobos’ guitar music have been affronted by looking at of all of the sources available today: these efforts have thus enabled us to put together a more reliable text than those before it both in terms of the notes and the fingerings.