Alexandre Levy's composition Comala, his opus 11, written in 1890, advertises itself as a Poema sinfonico para grande orquestra. It is both an evocative response to the Ossianic poem of that name and a highly accomplished work for a twenty-six-yearold. Less typical than other pieces of the composer that incorporate elements of Brazilian popular music, its antecedents are in the symphonic tradition of illustrative or program music such as the concert overtures of Mendelssohn or tone poems of Franz Liszt. His life spanned the musical period between Offenbach's opera bouffe La Belle Helene (1864) and Debussy's “L'apres-midi d'un faune” (1892). Born in Sao Paulo, Alexandre (1864–92) and his three siblings were children of the French clarinetist Henrique Louis Levy, originally from Dehlingen in Alsace, and Anne Marie Teodoreth, a Swiss from Treyvaux in the Fribourg canton. Henrique had fled to Switzerland at the time of anti-Semitic riots in February 1848. Later that same year, the couple emigrated to Brazil, settling first in Campinas, the city of the renowned opera composer Carlos Gomes (1836–96). Eventually they moved to Sao Paulo, where in 1860 they founded the Casa Levy, a piano and sheet music store that was also an important outlet for concerts and informal music-making. It still exists.

Alexandre received his first piano lessons from his brother Luiz (1861–1935) and had further musical training from the French pianist Gabriel Giraudon. With his brother he set up the Clube Haydn in 1883 to encourage musical culture in São Paulo, and two years later, in 1885, he conducted an orchestra of twenty-six players in a performance of Haydn's Symphony No. 1. In 1887 he went to Europe, spending nine months in Milan and Paris in order to take lessons from Emile Durand, Debussy's teacher, and from Vincenzo Ferroni, who had studied with Massenet. A number of Levy's compositions had been published in the early 1880s and by this time his work was entering a mature phase: he drew particularly on native urban music, in works such as the Variations sur un theme populaire bresilien (1887), which uses a Brazilian children's song.