Tango

by Mike Gonzalez

  TANGO COMES HOME

  Many of the Argentines who had flocked to Paris, whether the gilded youth on their own version of the Grand Tour, or the working-class tango musicians and performers who had responded to the tangomania that took hold of the city on the eve of war, returned to Argentina at the start of the First World War.

  In fact, tango was becoming acceptable even before the exiles returned. The party organized by the Baron de Marchi, an Italian aristocrat living in Buenos Aires, in the Palais de Glace in late 1912 was a turning point, and he continued to organize ‘several aristocratic tango events (in private mansions, restaurants and clubs) to openly bring his high-life acquaintances into contact with skilful tangueros’.25 Those young bloods who had made the obligatory trip to Paris were prominent guests at these affairs, of course.

  In this time of transition, the tango orchestras too were changing in manner and style, as well as in their instrumental line-up. Those who had remained in Buenos Aires still used the underground pseudonyms that betrayed their origins in the slums and conventillos – El Tuerto (‘the One-eyed man’), El Chivo (‘the Goat’), El Rusito (‘the Little Russian’), and so on. And the life the early tangos celebrated was crowded with petty criminals and toughs, pimps and con men still. Most of them had learned their music by ear. And unlike the tango orchestras of Paris, the musicians of Buenos Aires in this first decade limited their ensembles to piano, bandoneon and violin (like Francisco Canaro’s trio), or the guitar, flute, bandoneon and violin of Juan Maglio’s band (formed in 1912).26

  The proliferating cafés and cabarets of the city centre were evidence of how significant the European seal of approval was. The Café Royale and the Pigalle were among the most sought-after locales. Argentina’s gilded youth would spill out of Madame Jeanne’s high-class brothel into the Armenonville Cabaret. There they could dance to the music of the icons of what became known as La Guardia Vieja – ‘the Old Guard’ of tango musicians who still wore their origins on their sleeves, albeit sleeves that were increasingly well tailored to reflect the elegant surroundings in which the musicians were now placed. The orchestras were still playing for dancing; the emerging group of lyricists were still a minority and their songs basically interludes in the evening’s (and morning’s) dance.

  The bandleaders of the epoch also wrote ballads – Roberto Firpo produced ‘El compinche’ and ‘La chola’, Juan Maglio ‘El Zurdo’ and Vicente Greco’s output included ‘La infanta’ and ‘El Pibe’. And among the singers were a first generation of women whose heyday would come in the 1920s.

  The tango was changing – and so was the city of its birth. The immigrant’s song was about to become the ballad of the city. And within a short time, the expression of the nation itself.

  Foreign/superior recognition empowered the tango – which had been a locally denigrated cultural expression – and made it a competitive marker of national identity.27

  It is profoundly ironic that the process of assimilation and acceptance that made the forging of a new national identity possible should have begun in Europe. In fact, as will become clear, it was a complex business. During and after the First World War, tango became an international phenomenon, a dance of local origins made universal. At the same time, within Argentina, it became a symbolic expression of a social process whereby the immigrants – physically and psychologically marginalized for nearly forty years – were absorbed into the mainstream of Argentina, or more particularly, Buenos Aires society. This was not to say that the social divisions had in any sense disappeared; the ruling class remained resolutely criollo, of Spanish origin, and held itself physically apart in its well-defined upper-class districts. The children and grandchildren of the immigrants were still to be found in the working-class areas. But their music could be heard, and danced to, everywhere. And more importantly, tango was now also song, expressing nostalgia for a recreated (and romanticized) arrabal and more general existential positions which found their definition in the lunfardo terms that survived into the language – like the omnipresent mufarse – a kind of moping or melancholy reflection which some writers insist is particularly characteristic of Argentines.

  Tango had certainly broken out of the barrio – but it remained at its heart the expression of an urban experience of solitude, of nostalgia and loss.

  Del ciego musicante la música manida,

  la tonada gangosa de un lejano acordeón

  revive en una estampa borrosa y desvaída

  el alma arrabalera del turbio callejón.

  La muchacha modista que cegó una quimera

  dorada, que no pudo jamás satisfacer,

  flor que duró tan sólo lo que una primavera

  y pasó como todo lo que no ha de volver.

  Qué profunda tristeza

  tiene la calle sola.

  La música lejana

  solloza una milonga.

  Todo está como entonces,

  cuando tú eras la novia

  que gustaba los versos,

  los besos y las rosas . . .

  Yo también como tú me perdí en el camino

  y entre sombras extrañas paseo mi tristeza

  y no le pido cuentas de mi vida al destino,

  aunque es larga la ruta y ruda la maleza.

  El mismo torbellino nos lleva al mismo puerto,

  la misma sed de olvido nos une en hermandad.

  Qué lejos nuestras almas del callejón desierto

  donde la vida un día nos vino a despertar.

  The music coming from the blind musician / the seductive tune Of a distant accordion / brings back a blurred and shifting image / the soul of the barrio and the murky alleyway. / The young seamstress blinded by a golden / chimera, that she could never satisfy / a flower that lasted only a single spring / and passed like all things that never will return.

  How deep the sadness / of the empty street / the distant music / Sobs a milonga. / It’s all like it was / when you were the lover / Who enjoyed poetry / kisses and flowers . . . / Like you I got lost on the way / and now I carry my sadness through strange shadows/and I don’t ask fate for explanations of my life / though the road is long and the going tough. / The same storm will carry us to the same harbor /And we are joined by the same yearning to forget.

  (‘Yo también como tú’, Me too, just like you

  – Diego Larriera Varela, 1926)

  4 TANGO FINDS ITS VOICE

  TRANSITIONS

  While its wealthier young people were sowing their wild oats in Paris and elsewhere, a restless Buenos Aires was relentlessly moving on. The changes were physical, social and cultural; and it was finding new political forms too. In 1912, the Sáenz Peña Law marked a key moment of transition. The rent strikes in the conventillos in 1907 involved 120,000 people and announced a change in the attitudes of their immigrant inhabitants. The cowering new arrival, fearful of the landlord and his agents and powerless in the face of them, grew taller as the twentieth century began. By now, their insecure status as immigrants was changing; their sons and daughters were citizens of the new Argentina and they and their families now made up a significant majority of the urban population, reaching 50 per cent by 1914.

  By 1914, the total population of Argentina was close to 8 million, 3 million of them immigrants, living mostly in the cities and principally in Buenos Aires. In two decades the number of industrial workers had doubled, and the overwhelming majority of them were foreign immigrants who had arrived in the last two decades of the previous century. There were 100 engineering factories employing around 15,000 workers but over 2000 plants of every kind, two-thirds of them owned by foreign entrepreneurs. And this industrial growth was helped by a level of external capital that made Argentina the recipient of the largest volume of external investment in the world in the years to 1913.

  If the immigrant populations were occupying an increasingly central role in modern Argentina, this working-class majority remained marginalized, both socially and physically, and exploited. But the social
relations of production were changing. The rent strikes were signs of a new sense of the collective, of burgeoning forms of organization. A new generation of trade unions was emerging informed by the ideas of anarchism and socialism that the European migrants had brought with them. The new unions were general unions organizing the unskilled – the new sector of the working class that was denied access to the tighter and more exclusive guild organizations of an earlier generation. And with them came a growing confidence in the right of immigrant workers to play their role in the new Argentine nation, a nation reforming in a cosmopolitan, modernizing image. The Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 was a recognition of the expanding nation and the demands of its new citizens to participate fully in it.

  After 1900, a militant Anarchist movement established a large following among the immigrant workers in Buenos Aires. There was a series of violent general strikes, which triggered a spate of repressive measures by the government. Strikes were broken by force and legislation was passed by congress allowing the government to deport or imprison working class leaders.1

  In 1902, the Congress passed the Law of Residence, which allowed rights of residence to be withdrawn in the case of ‘undesirables’. In 1910, this was reinforced by the more openly repressive Law of Social Defence. Social conflict was clearly intensifying, and the influence of anarchism, with its disregard for the struggle to win control of the state and its emphasis on direct collective action, connected with the experience of immigrant workers and their families. The rent strike of 1907 was a clear expression of a political philosophy that linked social and trade union struggles. And it was not surprising that anarchist ideas should take hold in an environment in which political control remained in the hands of the old landowning oligarchy, while the economic and social transformation of the country was occurring in the cities.

  While the working class was developing forms of collective organization to fight back against its marginalization and exclusion, the middle class was also growing increasingly restive with a political system still dominated by the old elite. They were enjoying economic prosperity and profiting from growth, yet they remained marginal to the political process. Their frustration was expressed by the Radical Party.

  Radical doctrine and ideology . . . were little more than an eclectic and moralistic attack on the oligarchy, to which was appended the demand for the introduction of representative government.2

  The Radicals had to achieve a delicate balancing act between the oligarchy on the one hand and an increasingly angry and militant working class on the other.

  Sáenz Peña’s Law of 1912, passed just two years after the promulgation of the Law of Social Defence, had a clear objective: to channel political dissent towards parliamentary democracy and away from the violent revolutionary rhetoric which was becoming increasingly strident as the first decade of the century ended. The Radical Party itself had often employed a vague revolutionary language in its early years. Yet it was equally ill at ease with the multilingual voices of protest growing louder in the barrios of Buenos Aires. Sáenz Peña’s commitment was to offer the Radical Party a stake in the existing, but reformed political system – as it was very clear that in an election in which the middle classes voted, their majority support would go to the Radicals and their leader, and presidential candidate, Hipólito Irigoyen.

  Irigoyen was elected in 1916; his rise to the presidency marked the end of a century-old political system controlled by the old elite and used to maintain its interests. They remained the controlling economic class, of course, but the shifting and changing balance of power between these two social forces would mark and shape the subsequent two decades of Argentine political life. The Radicals, even before their election to the national government, had consolidated their influence at local and regional levels, in particular in the growing cities where the networks they created felt and looked very like the system of controlling city bosses that was already well established in the United States. For the working class, however, the changes were limited, and what improvements were achieved were the result of militant trade union action. While the immigrant populations may well have thrown their support behind the Radicals and against the old ruling class, their relationship with a Radical party in power remained tense and conflictive.3

  POLITICS AND CULTURE

  After its boom years on both sides of the Atlantic, tango came home in 1914 as the exiles returned. They came flushed with their success in the cafés and clubs of the demi-monde of Paris and their acceptance in the elegant salons of the city. Those who returned from the United States brought back a different, sexually less adventurous tango, its steps sacrificed in exchange for access to the thés dansants of the Upper East Side and the elegant parties of the grandes dames of New York. What they found in Buenos Aires was that news of Europe’s craze for tango had arrived before them, and that new cabarets and cafés had opened in the city centre, bearing French names and European decor. The Armenonville and the Pigalle, Lo de Hansen or the Café Tortini mimicked a kind of French grand style. There was little here to recall the rural interior from which the internal migrants had come nor to reflect the poor rural background from which the steerage passengers on the migrant ships had emerged.

  The beginning of the First World War brought the exiles back to the River Plate. But tango had arrived back before them. Though it was still seen as risqué, tango could now be danced in Buenos Aires at semi-respectable tea dances, where the more adventurous ladies of the middle class partnered the slick young gigolos who frequented the cafés of the city centre in the afternoons. In the evenings their husbands would dance with women who were definitely not of their social circle, but young women who had graduated from the brothels and cabarets of the port areas to the grander surroundings of the new cafés. The resentment of their erstwhile pimps, the compadritos, when they had to watch their charges disappear into this other world on the arm of a wealthy protector (the bacán) would be a central theme of the tango songs of subsequent decades.

  Muchacho

  Que porque la suerte quiso

  Vivís en un primer piso

  De un palacete central,

  Que para vicios y placeres

  Para farras y mujeres

  Dispones de un capital.

  Muchacho

  Que no sabes el encanto

  De haber derramado llanto

  Por un amor de mujer,

  Que no sabes qué es secarse

  En una timba y armarse

  Para volverse a meter . . .

  Young man / who because destiny placed you / in a first-floor apartment / in a mansion in the centre of town / and for vices and pleasures / for parties and women / gave you money to spare.

  Young man / you don’t know the enchantment / of weeping tears / for the love of a woman / who doesn’t know what it’s like / to be cleaned out in a game and steel yourself / to go back the next day and start again . . .

  (‘Muchacho’, Young Man – Celedonio Flores, 1929)

  Another irony of the triumphant return of tango from Europe was that the tango recordings that were causing such an impact in the wider world were largely made in Europe and the United States, mainly on the Odeon and the Victor labels, respectively. There were some recordings being made in Buenos Aires, but they signally failed to capture the spirit of tango as the French and German engineers had done.

  The (local) gramophone companies did not aim their product at those who would rather spend their money on sex, narcotics and pistols. Early examples of Tango are largely stiff, somewhat ersatz affairs and the few genuine groups to record made little impact on the domestic market.4

  The Odeon label’s agent in Buenos Aires, Max Glücksmann, was instrumental in reacquainting Argentina with the music of its lower depths. Odeon, a German company, preferred to have Germans selling their products abroad, and Glücksmann was appointed their agent in Buenos Aires. As the war affected supplies of shellac and made the transport of discs more difficult, the ties between headquarte
rs and its far-flung agencies were broken. Glücksmann, who was already active in finding and recording local artists, persuaded his bosses to provide both a pressing plant and a recording engineer in Buenos Aires. He went on signing up artists and performers, who now appeared on his own label, ‘Discos Nacional’. At war’s end, Glücksmann reached an agreement with his old employer and his records began to be exported back to Europe, where they caught the mood of the ‘Jazz Age’.

  The Vieja Guardia, or ‘Old Guard’ as this first generation of tango musicians and performers were called, developed in Paris. It was there that the original tango trios expanded into sextets, like the early orquestas típicas of Juan Maglio and Vicente Greco. Tangomania was providing opportunities for tango musicians to live from their music. And the dance was also changing under the influence of Europe and America. The fast, tripping style (conserved most closely in the milonga today) was giving way to the slower, more dramatic and less crudely erotic version – the tango argentino. And that in turn eased its entry into the respectable night life of Argentina’s bourgeoisie, and opened a new market for the enterprising Glücksmann.

  Under Glücksmann’s tutelage another change was taking place, more profound and far-reaching, and moved by a combination of transformations. The Law of Social Defence of 1910 had referred explicitly to social and political undesirables whose right to remain in Argentina could be withdrawn. It seemed a dramatic reversal of that original assurance of four decades earlier that immigrants could become part of the expanding Argentine nation.

  The target was clearly not so much the immigrant community as such as the militants and dissidents who had begun to stamp their presence on the society through acts of political violence in some cases, and more generally through the growing trade union movement whose dominant anarchist ideology made it less amenable to political negotiation.

  At first sight, the decision to withdraw the legal recognition of brothels may seem to be unconnected. But ‘from 1900 onwards prostitutes were linked symbolically to the most dangerous men in Argentina – the anarchists’.5 And the association of tango with the sexual underworld was explicit.