Monseñor Pablo Chávez Aguilar

Monsignor Pablo Chávez Aguilar (Lima, 1898 – Lima, 1950) was a Peruvian composer whose output and career unfolded almost entirely within the religious and academic circles of his native city. His music reflects a traditional training, in which counterpoint and a classical harmonic language occupy the centre, although in some pieces he drew on materials rooted in the Andes.

He entered the seminary of Santo Toribio in Lima in 1913, where he began studying the organ and composition with José María Coll. His first major work, the Misa solemne en honor de Santa Rosa, was premiered at Lima Cathedral in 1918. A year later he obtained a doctorate in theology from the Gregorian University in Rome and was ordained a priest while completing his musical studies at the Scuola Pontificia di Musica Sacra, where his teachers included Refice, de Sanctis and Manari, as well as Perosi and G. Giannini. He directed the musical chapel of Lima Cathedral in two periods, from 1924 to 1938 and from 1942 to 1950, and in 1949 he was appointed chantre. In 1928 he founded the Instituto Bach de Lima and, from 1930, taught harmony at the Academia Nacional de Música.

In his piano works, such as the Variaciones sobre un tema incaico (1926) and the Preludios incaicos (1927), he attempted to adapt pentatonic themes, probably of Inca origin, to academic structures. In the Suite peruana, around 1940, he explored a freer form based on the development of motifs of a popular character. His legacy survives chiefly in sacred music, with masses, motets and eucharistic hymns, while his stage and didactic works are less well known. He also contributed to specialist publications on the organ and sacred music.