Claudio Santoro began his musical training in his native city of Manaus. An extremely talented violinist, he received a local government scholarship to continue his studies in Rio de Janeiro, and his earliest works date from this period. His First Symphony, written in 1940 when he was just 21 and had not yet begun to study composition in any formal way, impressed the German musician and teacher Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, leader of the ‘Música Viva’ movement, made up of young composers seeking out new directions in which to take Brazilian music, in line with the European avant-garde of the time.

In the late 1940s, however, Santoro’s music took a radical turn, as a result of his political-ideological convictions and his role as the Brazilian delegate to the 1948 Prague Congress of Progressive Composers, whose final manifesto urged composers to avoid excessive subjectivity and look to their national folk traditions for inspiration. The works Santoro wrote during the 1950s were influenced by his search for a more direct and immediately communicative idiom, an effect he achieved by using nationalist elements.