Tango

by Mike Gonzalez

  A tango musician will add to the phrasing. And before the Golden Age of tango, the orchestras were working orchestras – they had to compose and arrange their own music. That’s the origin of the ‘yeites’, the way in which the player moves chromatically between one note and another instead of going directly. They’re dramatic runs, I suppose. Rock musicians still use the term in Argentina – though the word comes from tango.

  It isn’t the same as jazz because tango musicians tended not to improvise. The music was written and the musicians had to stick to the composition and the arrangement. These orchestras were playing for dance. Aníbal Troilo, for example, composed some wonderful pieces and there was no one to equal his bandoneon playing. But he was a working musician and he didn’t stray from the music. Troilo felt his music, he spoke as he wrote and he had tango in his soul. You can see on the videos that he had a connection with the instrument. I play other instruments and all the people I know who have taken up bandoneon after playing another instrument agree that the relationship you have with the bandoneon is completely different from any other instrument. He was very professional and when Astor Piazzola worked with him, he said, ‘Look don’t decorate, just play the music.’

  Your relationship with your instrument is physical. Your fingers don’t produce the sound of the bandoneon; they just press buttons. The different articulations and attacks can be compared to the piano. It has a shorter range, of course – five and a half octaves. Like the cello, you can sustain notes forever, opening and closing. But all the sound comes from moving keys, from moving the bellows – so it is very physical.

  I’m a bit mystical about the bandoneon. I’m a percussionist and I have my favourite drums but I never talked to any of them. But I do talk to my bandoneon, though it doesn’t usually answer.

  Why did I take up bandoneon? I grew up under the last military government and tango wasn’t popular. As far as young people were concerned, tango was like a closed sect. You never saw people out and about doing tango. It just wasn’t cool – and it was miserable too. And yet tango was a backcloth to my growing up – I listened to it on the radio, my parents played tango in the house, and I liked it. But tango was the music of old people, and the bandoneon was a kind of secret instrument. People said you had to start learning when you were five or six. That’s because tango was the rock and roll of its time and parents would buy their kids a bandoneon like today’s parents will buy their kids an electric guitar.

  That’s why they started so young because in their day the bandoneon was music. It is very difficult – some people say it’s the most difficult instrument to learn. You can’t see the keyboard, so you have to learn where the notes are, and you have to learn four keyboards – right and left closing and opening. If you make it through the first six months, that’s it. You’re in love. Lots of people give up. But I started late and I took it up knowing I wouldn’t ever tame it – and I know I never will dominate it. Because the bandoneon has a memory, music inside, tastes and smells. I don’t know the history of my instrument, but I know it has a history of its own. It’s had two previous owners, it has seen the world. The bandoneon has its secrets and it will never give them up. You have to draw them out, playing, practising. And if someone else plays my instrument, it will sound completely different. It is so personal that everything you do influences the sound. I’ve never felt such frustration, such ecstasy, such love.

  The tone of the tango-song of the 1920s is nostalgic, plangent (just like the bandoneon), evoking a lost world within living memory. For the most part, the story is told from the margins of the barrio, its voice predominantly male and complaining of betrayal and misunderstanding, of lost love and despair. Its moral universe is conservative and masculine. The likely history of its implied narrator – obviously a recently retired compadrito – the romantic story of love and devotion misunderstood and rejected cannot hide the fact that it was the woman who was the breadwinner and he its beneficiary. The setting for this drama is urban; the light cast by the yellow street lights over the singer waiting, hopelessly, for his ex-lover to pass by, though she has deserted him for a rich man who will keep her, as long as she is young and beautiful. And when it becomes clear that he can never win her back, then all that remains is the long slide into oblivion recounted in one of Gardel’s most popular tangos ‘Cuesta abajo’ (Downhill).

  Era, para mí, la vida entera,

  como un sol de primavera,

  mi esperanza y mi pasión.

  Sabía que en el mundo no cabía

  toda la humilde alegría

  de mi pobre corazón.

  Ahora, cuesta abajo en mi rodada,

  las ilusiones pasadas

  yo no las puedo arrancar.

  Sueño con el pasado que añoro,

  el tiempo viejo que lloro

  y que nunca volverá.

  Por seguir tras de su huella

  yo bebí incansablemente

  en mi copa de dolor,

  pero nadie comprendía

  que, si todo yo lo daba

  en cada vuelta dejaba

  pedazos de corazón.

  Ahora, triste, en la pendiente,

  solitario y ya vencido

  yo me quiero confesar:

  si aquella boca mentía

  el amor que me ofrecía,

  por aquellos ojos brujos

  yo habría dado siempre más.

  She was my whole life / Like spring sunshine / My hope and my passion. / She knew that the world wasn’t big enough / For the humble joy I felt / In my heart. / Now, sliding downhill / I can’t get rid of / Those illusions of the past / that past / I dream of, long for / The old times I weep for /That will never return.

  Because I followed her trail / I drank relentlessly / From my glass of pain / But no-one understood / That if I gave everything / I left pieces of myself behind / At every turn. / Now, sad and in decline / Alone and defeated / I want to confess. / If that mouth lied / When it offered me love / I would have given anything / For those bewitching eyes.

  (‘Cuesta abajo’, Downhill – Alfredo Le Pera, 1934)

  But beauty fades and fate brings the arrogant mistress back to the reality of ageing and poverty. It is as if the man who sings is claiming for himself a kind of moral superiority, though he too has been the victim of passions and blind desire that led him in so many tangos to leave behind the lodestar of a moral life – the mother who is home, stability and selfless love. Many tangos evoke the place of innocence, of childhood, its location indeterminate but its role in the drama clear. It is the time before corruption, a rural Eden overseen by a caring, undemanding mother who seems to be in an endless posture of waiting for the son or daughter to acknowledge the error of their ways and return, laden with guilt, to ‘la casita de mis viejos’, to quote a famous tango by Juan Carlos Cobián, ‘the home of my parents’. The ‘sienes plateadas’, the silver temples, are a conceit repeated in many tangos, to mark both the passing of time and the burden of experience; only the ailing mother can offer absolution, in the absence of any religious personnel, and the unconditional love whose absence in the urban underworld is so often recalled.

  Carlos Gardel, however, largely because of the flawless beauty of his voice, lifted tango from its dangerous closeness to sentimentality and invested words and music with a passionate intensity. Gardel was more than simply a singer, the zorzal, or thrush, he was named after; he was also el morocho del Abasto, ‘the dark-skinned boy from the Abasto district’, the embodiment of the tango story. All these things prepared the ground for superstardom of a new kind – in and beyond Argentina, and in the new medium of film.

  There is a suggestion that he was first approached by Paramount during a hugely successful tour in Paris in 1928–9 (70,000 records were sold in three months while he was there).3 His first appearance on celluloid (other than bit parts in two much earlier silent films) was in late 1930, in ten short films of his best-known tangos filmed in Paris and directed by Eduardo Morera. Paramount did ev
entually get their man a year later, when he filmed Luces de Buenos Aires (Lights of Buenos Aires), directed by Adelqui Millar, which included his famous line ‘Tomo y obligo’ (‘I drink and I buy rounds’). Paramount was desperately seeking to enter the Latin American market, and in 1932 contracted Gardel for three more films, to be directed by Louis Garnier. It was Garnier who introduced Gardel to Alfredo Le Pera in Paris in 1932 (though they had met briefly before) and set in motion the intensely creative but short-lived collaboration between the singer and the lyricist. Le Pera was a journalist and theatre critic who was employed by Paramount to write the scripts for Gardel’s films and the lyrics of the songs they included. In 1934, produced by Western Electric and distributed by Paramount, Gardel made three more films, all filmed in New York: Cuesta abajo (Downhill), El tango en Broadway and El día que me quieras (The day you love me), which included two of Gardel’s most loved (and most beautifully written) tangos – ‘El día que me quieras’ and the glorious ‘Volver’. Le Pera’s contribution to Gardel’s career, and his posthumous fame, is not often recognized. But Le Pera’s brief was to write for Gardel in a language that would resonate throughout Latin America, and tell a story that was universal. For Paramount, Gardel was the centre of its planned conquest of the Latin American market. Indeed, their ambitions were grander still, for they envisaged a future for him as an English-language star (one of the passengers killed with him in the crash that ended his life was José Playa, his English tutor). Unfortunately, Gardel’s command of English proved disappointingly tenuous. Instead he embarked on a tour of a Latin America, where he played everywhere to adoring crowds. His brief visit to Venezuela is commemorated in a popular and frequently performed play El día que me quieras by José Ignacio Cabrujas, in which his arrival provokes a crisis between the members of a bourgeois family. Elvira, the jilted spinster daughter, reports excitedly on Gardel’s arrival in Caracas.

  Did you see the flags? . . . There isn’t a flower to be had in the whole city. If you got ill and wanted a flower before you died you wouldn’t find one anywhere. Tonight the Principal Theatre smells of magnolia. He was all dressed in black. Did you hear? . . . And not a drop of sweat on his whole body. Not even when he was feeding the pigeons in the square. Not a bead of perspiration on his forehead, and everyone’s saying – look he doesn’t sweat, Gardel doesn’t sweat . . .4

  Gardel and Le Pera flew on to Medellín in Colombia, where a runway crash prematurely ended the life of them both.

  Gardel’s funeral procession to La Chacarita cemetery in Buenos Aires in March 1935 was the largest public gathering ever seen in the city. He was mourned, and continues to be mourned in Medellín and across the continent. He was in every sense a superstar.

  But what was it in the music that created such admiration within Argentina and Latin America and across the world? This was a very different tango fever from the craze that hit Europe and the U.S. immediately before the First World War. At that time, the exoticism and overt sensuality of the dance, its identification with a dangerous world of the shadows, where criminality, prostitution and transgression prevailed, was what drew a new generation towards tango. Perhaps its riskiness, its moral ambiguity reflected a world on edge, full of portents of disaster and the winds of change – what George Dangerfield had described for Britain in The Strange Death of Liberal England.5 Gardel’s songs were framed by a very different worldview, one that closely reflected the changed perspectives of postwar tango in Argentina, and which was then refined and honed for a cosmopolitan audience growing used to cinema musicals and the high production values of Hollywood in the early Thirties.

  What were the elements of the tangos that Gardel sang? Musically, they were rich and complex; their lush orchestration and sophisticated presentation were matched by the quality of both poetry and voice. Gardel presented himself to the world not as a disappointed pimp abandoned by his ambitious protégée, but rather as a much more recognizable romantic hero. The lyrics were poetic, and had for the most part abandoned the lunfardo that still tied the tangos of, for example, Celedonio Flores, to its history. And although Gardel recorded a huge proportion of the tango repertoire, including the work of Flores and the great Enrique Santos Discépolo (to whom we will come in a moment), the tangos that he sang on screen and for which he is widely remembered were essentially romantic ballads. They shared the nostalgia, the longing for a lost and idealized past, the preoccupation with loyal and devoted men abandoned by women whose shallow self-interest had deposited them in the arms of wealthy but worthless protectors. But they relocated those feelings in a less specific world and universalized them. One of Gardel’s most famous songs, ‘Silencio en la noche’, transfers some of tango’s central themes to the fields of Flanders and a First World War in which Argentina played no part.

  Silencio en la noche.

  Ya todo está en calma.

  El músculo duerme,

  la ambición trabaja.

  Un clarín se oye.

  Peligra la Patria.

  Y al grito de guerra

  los hombres se matan

  cubriendo de sangre

  los campos de Francia.

  Hoy todo ha pasado.

  Renacen las plantas.

  Un himno a la vida

  los arados cantan.

  Y la viejecita

  de canas muy blancas

  se quedó muy sola,

  con cinco medallas

  que por cinco héroes

  la premió la Patria.

  Silence in the night / Everything is calm / the muscles at rest / ambition at work.

  A bugle sounds / the nation is in danger / and with war cries on their lips / men kill / covering with blood / the fields of France. Today everything has passed / the plants are reborn / the ploughs sing / a hymn to life. / And the little old lady / her hair a pure white / sits very much alone / with five medals / which the Nation awarded her / for the five heroes she bore.

  (‘Silencio en la noche’, Silence in the night – Gardel / Le Pera, 1932)

  The most famous of all their collaborations, however, is a sort of resumé of the tango story. ‘Volver’ is lyrically and musically moving and beautiful – but it takes tango into a different moral universe where there is little in the way of danger.6

  Yo adivino el parpadeo

  de las luces que a lo lejos,

  van marcando mi retorno.

  Son las mismas que alumbraron,

  con sus pálidos reflejos,

  hondas horas de dolor.

  Y aunque no quise el regreso,

  siempre se vuelve al primer amor.

  La quieta calle donde el eco dijo:

  ‘Tuya es su vida, tuyo es su querer’,

  bajo el burlón mirar de las estrellas

  que con indiferencia hoy me ven volver.

  Volver,

  con la frente marchita,

  las nieves del tiempo

  platearon mi sien.

  Sentir, que es un soplo la vida,

  que veinte años no es nada,

  que febril la mirada

  errante en las sombras

  te busca y te nombra.

  Vivir,

  con el alma aferrada

  a un dulce recuerdo,

  que lloro otra vez.

  Tengo miedo del encuentro

  con el pasado que vuelve

  a enfrentarse con mi vida.

  Tengo miedo de las noches

  que, pobladas de recuerdos,

  encadenan mi soñar.

  Pero el viajero que huye,

  tarde o temprano detiene su andar.

  Y aunque el olvido que todo destruye,

  haya matado mi vieja ilusión,

  guarda escondida una esperanza humilde,

  que es toda la fortuna de mi corazón.

  I glimpse the blinking lights / in the distance / that mark my return. / They are the same ones / whose pale reflections / shed their light on deeper sorrows in the past. / And though I never wanted to return / you a
lways do come back to your first love. / The quiet street whose echo tells you: / ‘This was your life, these were your loves’, / under the mocking gaze of the stars / that watch me with indifference at this moment of return.

  Coming back / with furrowed brow / and silver temples. / Feeling / that life is a single breath / that twenty years pass in a moment / that a fevered glance / wandering in the shadows/seeks you and calls your name. / Coming back/with your soul tied/to a sweet memory / that you weep for once again.

  I’m afraid of what I’ll find / in the past that’s now returning / to confront the life I’ve lived. / I’m afraid of the nights / that, full of memories / will occupy my dreams. / But the traveller who tries to flee / sooner or later must halt his steps. / And if the forgetfulness that destroys everything / has destroyed my old illusions / it still conceals a modest hope / that is the only fortune that my heart retains.

  (‘Volver’, Returning – A. Le Pera, 1935)

  Gardel’s appearance and dress had always been emblematic of tango’s origin – the homburg, the fitted suit, the gentle and seductive voice of an ordinary young man. There was never a sense that he was a working person; how he earned a living was left unspecified, like every tango protagonist. And Gardel’s private life was also deliberately kept mysterious, though he always presented the minimal attributes of the tango protagonist – a man but not a machista (compare the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, for example), without swagger but intense and passionate, a gambler (but in the more genteel world of horse racing), a lover (but with one long-term stable partner, Margarita).

  In Argentina itself tango’s transformation from the transgressive expression of a marginal world into the emblematic expression of a new national community – urban, cosmopolitan and modern – accompanied Gardel’s rise to fame. And his mythic status and tragic death confirmed the register and character of the tango through its continuing heyday until the mid-1940s.