The seventh child of a
criollo family, Chávez was born on Tacuba Avenue in Mexico City, near the suburb of Popotla. His paternal grandfather,
José María Chávez Alonso, a former governor of the state of
Aguascalientes, had been executed by the French Army in April 1864 during its
second invasion of Mexico. His father, Augustín Chávez, who died when Carlos was barely three years old, invented a
plough that was produced and used in the United States. Carlos had his first piano lessons from his brother Manuel, and later on he was taught piano by Asunción Parra,
Manuel Ponce, and Pedro Luis Ozagón, and harmony by Juan Fuentes. His family often holidayed in
Tlaxcala,
Michoacán,
Guanajuato,
Oaxaca, and other places where the cultural influence of the Mexican indigenous peoples was still very strong. In 1916, Chávez and friends started a cultural journal,
Gladios, and this led to his joining the staff of the Mexico City newspaper in 1924. In the succeeding 36 years he was to write over 500 items for this paper. After the
Mexican Revolution and the installation of a democratically elected president,
Álvaro Obregón, Chávez became one of the first exponents of Mexican nationalist music with ballets on
Aztec themes. In September 1922, Chávez married Otilia Ortiz and they went on honeymoon to Europe, from October 1922 until April 1923, spending two weeks in Vienna, five months in Berlin, and eight or ten days in Paris. During the latter visit he met
Paul Dukas. Some months later, in December 1923, Chávez visited the United States for the first time, returning in March 1924. Chávez again went to New York City in September 1926 and stayed there until June 1928. Upon his return to Mexico, Chávez became director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Mexicana (Mexican Symphonic Orchestra), later renamed Orquesta Sinfónica de México (Mexico's Symphonic Orchestra); the country's first permanent orchestra, started by a musicians'
labor union. Chávez was instrumental in taking the orchestra on tour through Mexico's rural areas. In December 1928, Chávez was appointed director of Mexico's National Conservatory of Music—a position he held for a total of five years (until March 1933, and again for eight months in 1934). In that capacity, Chávez spearheaded three , two concerned with collecting and cataloguing indigenous music and its literature, and the third to study the uses of old and new scales. In 1937, Chávez published a book,
Toward a New Music, which is one of the first books in which a composer speaks about
electronic music. In 1938, he conducted a series of concerts with the
NBC Symphony Orchestra, during a period of absence by the orchestra's regular conductor,
Arturo Toscanini. In 1940 he produced concerts at New York's
Museum of Modern Art, and by 1945, Chávez had come to be regarded as the foremost Mexican composer and conductor. From January 1947 until 1952, Chávez served as director-general of the
National Institute of Fine Arts. In his first year, he formed the
National Symphony Orchestra, which supplanted the older OSM as Mexico's premier orchestra and led to the disbanding of the older ensemble. Throughout all this time, Chávez maintained a busy international touring schedule. , Mexico City In May 1953 he was commissioned by
Lincoln Kirstein, director of the New York City center of Music and Drama, for a three-act opera to a libretto by
Chester Kallman based on a story by
Boccaccio, to be titled
The Tuscan Players. Intended to be finished in August 1954, it was first postponed to April 1955, but only finally completed in 1956, by which time the title had been changed twice, first to
Pánfilo and Lauretta, then to . The City Center waived its rights to the first performance, which was given under the title
Panfilo and Lauretta in the Brander Matthews Theatre at
Columbia University in New York on 9 May 1957, under the baton of
Howard Shanet. Stage direction was by Bill Butler, scenic design by Herbert Senn and Helen Pond, and costumes by Sylvia Wintle. The principal singers were
Sylvia Stahlman, Frank Porretta,
Craig Timberlake, Mary McMurray, Michael Kermoyan, and
Thomas Stewart. The opera would be revised twice more and the title changed again to (
The Visitors), for productions in 1968 and 1973, in Mexico City and
Aptos, California, respectively.() From 1958 to 1959 he was the Charles Eliot Norton professor at
Harvard University, and the
public lectures he gave there were published as a book,
Musical Thought. From 1970 to 1973, Chávez served as the music director of the
Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. His orchestral composition
Discovery (1969) had previously been commission by the Festival and was first performed there. Failing health and financial setbacks forced Chávez to sell his house in the
Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood of Mexico City and move in with his daughter Anita in
Coyoacán, in the fringes of the Mexican capital, where he died quietly on 2 August 1978, his wife having died in April. Chávez's manuscripts and papers are housed in the Music Division of the
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and in the
National Archive of Mexico, in Mexico City. ==Musical style==