Tango

by Mike Gonzalez

  Love me like this, crazy, crazy, crazy . . . / climb into this tenderness of madmen there are in me / put on this wig of swallows and fly / Fly with me, come, fly, come / Love me this way, crazy, crazy / Open yourself to the love we’ll soon attempt / the magical madness of being born again. / Come! Fly! Come!

  (‘Balada de un loco’, Ballad of a Crazy Man

  – Piazzolla / Ferrer, 1969)

  Ferrer had been true to the spirit of tango and revived its language – lunfardo. But his lyrics were poetry in their own right, a succession of surreal images and flights of fancy matched by the soaring accompaniments that pressed both words and music into new and unexpected combinations. Two years earlier, what they called their ‘little opera’, María de Buenos Aires, had failed to make a mark. But the ‘Balada’, still a favourite across the world, struck a chord with an audience that was reported to have received the music in stunned (but, as it turned out, appreciative) silence. Many of their joint compositions are futuristic, some apocalyptic, but most revisited the cityscape of early tango with an ironic eye. Ferrer saw Poe, Baudelaire and the Nicaraguan founder of Latin American Modernism, Rubén Darío, as his influences: ‘they travel the deep, nocturnal, lower depths of the city’.14 Clearly, Ferrer saw himself like Baudelaire’s ‘flaneur’; embedded in the city crowds, aimless and adrift in the streets of the modern metropolis, just as his predecessors watched from the shadows behind the streetlamps as the prostitutes and their clients passed by on their ephemeral journeys.

  In 1970, Piazzolla returned to Paris; two years later he played in Buenos Aires’s iconic Teatro Colón with a number of other tango orchestras. It was highly significant that tango itself, and even more so this brash and adventurous new variant, should find its way into Argentina’s premier concert hall; it was a massive step towards recognition. But a heart attack in 1973 was taken as a warning that he should reduce the intensity of his working life. He found stability in Italy, where he lived for five years (1974–9), composing film music and recording several albums including the highly successful Libertango.15 In those years he was drawn to electronic instrumentation and the possibilities of rock, forming his ‘Conjunto Electrónico’. The next ten years would be his most successful. His score for the film El Exilio de Gardel (Tangos) won him a César, and his ever widening corps of collaborators now included the jazz musician Gary Burton and the pianist and orchestra director Lalo Schifrin. In 1987, he returned to New York to record the album Tango: Zero Hour and to play a concert in Central Park in front of 4,000 people. New York had finally taken him to its heart. He went on to tour Europe before a heart attack in 1990 curtailed his extraordinary career.

  It was fitting that Piazzolla’s final years should have been attended with the success and acknowledgment in his own country which had been denied him for so long. His music for Fernando Solanas’s iconic film Sur came to express the pain of exile and exclusion that the Argentine dancers living in Paris in El Exilio de Gardel (Tangos) set out to express in dance. It may be, paradoxically, that the impact of the stage show Tango Argentino across the world,16 beginning in 1984, which featured so much of his work, propelled him into this new realm of global fame. By the late 1980s, it was impossible to sit in a modern café anywhere without hearing his music around you.

  Throughout his life, Piazzolla sought and created a fusion, or perhaps a better term would be a creative ‘encounter’ between classical music, jazz, electronic music and tango. What he achieved was innovative, entirely original, moving and inspiring music. While his detractors denounced him for departing from tango or diluting it, in fact, the driving force within his work was always tango that was strengthened rather than denied by its meetings with other traditions. That is why the innumerable artists who have reinterpreted Piazzolla have never suppressed, even had they wanted to, the towering presence of tango at its heart.

  A stroke in 1990 left those nimble, restless hands immobile and Piazzolla never returned to the bandoneon.

  The last work he was to hear, ‘Le grand tango’, was written for and performed by the cello virtuoso Mstislav Rostropovich. Piazzolla’s work had by then moved into a realm that embraced classical forms among its many references. Whether it was tango nuevo or a new music rooted in tango continues be a question for heated debate. What is certain is that he transformed the musical landscape of his country for ever, taking tango into new terrains and new encounters that angered purists but also freed tango from a dependence on its past and carried it triumphantly into new fusions and new arenas.

  8 THE LONG ROAD HOME

  EXILE AND RETURN

  The second presidency of Juan Domingo Perón lasted less than a year before his death in July 1974. The shootout at the airport when he arrived a year earlier proved to be a sign of things to come. The interpretations of Perón’s first regime produced very different and conflicting conclusions about what his return would mean. The rank and file of the working-class movement took it as a signal to radicalize their activities in a battle to restore the living standards and working conditions that had deteriorated so dramatically under the previous military regime.

  In the elections of February 1973, Héctor Cámpora, a loyal supporter of the old man, was elected to the presidency. But he was always going to a be simple caretaker until Perón himself was allowed to return as a candidate for the presidency. When he did return, in September 1973, Perón was elected with 62 per cent of the popular vote. However, his movement was deeply divided politically and at war with itself. While Perón himself favoured a kind of social contract between trade unions and employers, the radical Left Peronists – led by the movement called the ‘Montoneros’ – spoke openly of a revolution. And the Perón of 1974 was not the man who had come to power thirty years earlier. There was no Evita at his side, and the new wife, Isabelita, who aspired to take over her role, had neither a mass base nor the charisma of her predecessor. In fact, she was under the sway of a small, corrupt and extremely right-wing group led by López Rega, who was both Perón’s secretary and Isabelita’s lover. Had the stakes not been so enormously high, it might have sounded like one more tango drama.

  After Perón’s death in July 1974, Isabelita assumed the presidency. Corruption was rife and, more importantly, López Rega launched a savage assault against the Left of the Peronist movement, organizing groups of thugs to attack trade union and political activists and passing legislation that increasingly limited or forbade oppositional activity. A massive strike in the town of Villa Constitución early in 1975 proved to be a crucial test of strength between government and the social movement. The government’s response was to introduce severe austerity measures which provoked a national general strike in July. As López Rega pursued his systematic persecution of the Left under the guise of an anti-terrorist campaign mounted by the military, the war between the two wings of Peronism became in reasingly bitter and violent. The economy, meanwhile, was spiralling into crisis, and the open relationships between the Argentine military and the newly established military dictatorships in neighbouring Chile and Uruguay were a chilling warning of what was to come.

  In fact, the Argentine military were themselves actively preparing a coup – there was only disagreement over timing. In January 1976, Isabelita had removed the final remnants of the old Peronist establishment from government, replacing them with the López Rega circle of death squads and corrupt functionaries. The reaction in the streets was instant. The coup, when it came, seemed almost inevitable. The exhausting struggles of previous months involved tens of thousands of working-class people; but in the end they found themselves battling against their own erstwhile leaders. By the time the military seized power in March 1976, a demoralized trade union movement seemed unable to maintain the resistance any longer.

  The military regime led by Jorge Videla now embarked on a process of political repression that gave the world the word ‘disappeared’ as an active verb meaning the kidnapping, torture and murder of political opponents. ‘The Dirty War’
which was immediately set in motion was a systematic campaign designed to root out a generation of socialists and working-class militants. Its true dimensions only emerged after the fall of the military in 1983, when the names of its thousands of victims, adults and children began to be published. Yet even while it was in progress, the courageous women of the Plaza de Mayo began their Thursday morning demonstrations in front of the presidential palace, demanding to know the whereabouts of their ‘disappeared’ relatives. Their white scarves became global symbols of the fight for human rights.1

  For political opponents, Argentine society became a place of fear and silence. Ford Falcons without number plates cruised the streets with their cargo of secret police, kidnapping and disappearing anyone suspected of opposing the regime. Their victims would join the lists of the disappeared and later their children, some born in the secret prisons, would discover that they were not the sons and daughters of the military or police families with whom they lived.

  For those threatened by repression who had the opportunity to escape, the alternative was exile. The ideology of the new government, like the conservative regimes before it, was overtly racist, anti-Semitic and of course anti-communist. Musicians and artists had played an important role in the earlier movements of resistance. The Latin American protest song movement had outstanding Argentine representatives in Mercedes Sosa, Léon Gieco and others. In Uruguay, a parallel and equally brutal repression had begun in 1974, and there too musicians, like Daniel Viglietti and Alfredo Zitarrosa, were forced to sing from exile. Argentina’s rock nacional, led by musicians like Charly García, enjoyed the enthusiastic support of urban youth. Tango, now dominated by the tango nuevo of Piazzolla and others, maintained its small local audiences, though it was gaining a following in Europe. Tango had proved time and again that reports of its death or disappearance were premature.

  Fernando Solanas was a key figure in the vigorous and diverse world of Argentine cinema.2 His iconic film La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) was radical in every sense, politically and aesthetically. Released in 1969, it exemplified what Solanas himself described as a ‘third cinema’:3 radical in content – it was shaped by Peronist ideas – it was cinema as a political instrument, a means of agitation. It was banned by the existing regime, but shown in factories and schools; this method of distribution was made easier by its episodic structure and its deliberately roughcast style. But its fierce critique of neocolonialism and its creative use of montage gave artistic form to the ideology of resistance.

  Clearly, Solanas would appear on the list of those pursued by the military and he moved to France to join the community of Latin American political exiles in the French capital. There he made what is arguably his most complex and most important film, El Exilio de Gardel (Tangos), eventually issued in 1984. The film’s theme is, at its simplest, exile and its impact on individuals and communities. A community of Argentines exiled in Paris are preparing a tango show. The film opens with a couple on a bridge across the Seine dancing a stylized and balletic version of tango – its artistic and Europeanized expression. But when the couple move down beneath the bridge and dance their tango on the towpath, it is the recognizable, erotic encounter of tango’s origins. It is perhaps the moment of rediscovery of Argentina, of the community idealized in the tango-song bound together by its sense of marginality; an interior exile nostalgic in its turn for another half-remembered place.

  But it is also a sensual encounter. Later we meet the members of the ensemble on a rooftop, responding like automata to electronic sounds, until those sounds merge with the music of Piazzolla which awakens and rehumanizes the characters.

  In this complex film the sensual utopia of tango is interwoven with the shocking memories of the military regime, of the disappeared and the raw relived experiences of torture and imprisonment. Begun in 1981, it was completed just as the military regime fell in the wake of the war with Britain over the Malvinas, to be replaced (in 1984) by a return to democracy. But it was a return against a background of rage and distress and of gathering economic crisis. The film was not well received at first; tango seemed to some to belong to a world that had been murdered by the Dirty War, and to be too oblique and symbolic for a society that now expected its film and theatre to unmask the period of government terror.

  Yet El Exilio de Gardel (Tangos) did address important and complex issues of national identity and community in the aftermath of a period that had torn apart the notion of a shared culture. Solanas’s exploration of tango and its rediscovery of Gardel and Discépolo as the icons of its Golden Age are essentially journeys through the consciousness of exile, its references, its nostalgia, its preservation of a national imaginary. His subsequent film, with its soundtrack also by Piazzolla, addressed the opposite phenomenon, defined by Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti as ‘el desexilio’ – ‘dis-exile’, or more conventionally, the return from exile.

  Nostalgia is often a feature of exile, but counter-nostalgia may equally be a feature of the return from exile. Just as the home country is not a flag or an anthem, but the sum of our childhoods, our skies, our friends, our teachers, our loves, our streets, our kitchens, our songs, our books, our language and our sun, the country that takes us in gives us its own fervour, hatreds, habits, words, gestures, landscapes, rebellions and there comes a moment when we become a curious conjuncture of different cultures and dreams . . .4

  The film was Sur. Its protagonist, Floreal, is a trade unionist imprisoned by the regime, who, on his release, wanders the streets of Buenos Aires through a long night, afraid of returning to his home and his wife. In this case, it was the loss of his own landscape rather than the acquisition of another which produced his alienation from his own world. His nocturnal conversations with El Negro, a murdered ex-comrade, lead him finally to reconciliation and return to his broken society with the dawn.

  The iconic tango ‘Vuelvo al sur’ (I return to the south), with music by Piazzolla and words by Solanas himself, accompanies the protagonist through this nocturnal journey into his own soul. But he returns, as you always do, to what is most familiar and most welcoming, with doubts, fears and confusions, but with love. Piazzolla’s bandoneon illustrates the drama and inner conflict that attend the journey, but its sound itself is in a way what draws Floreal inexorably back. Solanas himself subsequently turned to politics, and is currently a member of the Argentine Senate.

  The irony of all this is that, not for the first time, the revival of tango in Argentina itself began in Paris, or at least in Europe. After the defeat of the military government, the exiles began to return; but in the interim many of Argentina’s finest tango artists – musicians, singers, dancers – had also left Argentina, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes because the decline of tango had left them with few means of earning a living. Some of the old dance ensembles had survived in the salons that remained open for their largely ageing clientele. The resurgent nationalism of a younger generation found its favoured expression in contemporary rock music or in the music of a protest song movement which embraced the whole of Latin America and part of which brought a rediscovery of national folk traditions in the music of Jorge Cafrune, Atahualpa Yupanqui or Léon Gieco.

  Those tango musicians who had survived were largely of the old New Guard, dedicated to keeping alive the Golden Age of tango and to dance. Radio probably contributed more than anything else to maintaining enthusiasm for tango, at least among its devotees, but radio itself was highly territorial and it was unlikely that new younger audiences would be drawn to what felt like an exercise in nostalgia.

  Europe, by contrast, was discovering tango anew in a theatrical context. The towering success of the show Tango Argentino at its first showing in Paris in 1983 was not easy to predict. The show was ten years in the making and its performers were not in their first flush of youth; great dancers though they were, Juan Carlos Copes and Virulazo were no longer young, and nor was Roberto Goyeneche, the acclaimed tango singer. According to the show�
�s director, Claudio Segovia, only 250 tickets had been sold days before the performance in Paris in a 2,500-seater theatre. Yet, on the day, it was a runaway success and set a precedent for a series of identical shows to follow. Tango Argentino sold out wherever it was produced, and has continued to do so for twenty years around the world – though the great breakthrough was probably its sell-out shows on Broadway.

  We could speculate endlessly on the reasons for the acclaim it enjoyed and continues to enjoy. The precedent, of course, was Piazzolla, who had won a growing and appreciative audience for his ‘tango nuevo’. Jazz and classical musicians like Gary Burton and the Kronos Quartet performed with him and his compositions became a standard part of their repertoire. But outside Latin America the dance still belonged to the ballroom dancers in the bowdlerized version that owed more to the manuals of Vernon and Irene Castle at the beginning of the century than to the sensual dramas played out by dancers like El Cachafaz in the same era.

  Street tango in Buenos Aires.

  Tango Argentino, by contrast, was athletic, sensual and balletic – it was modern dance with interwoven bodies and an open sexual interplay. And it was a dramatic and beautiful spectacle. Its scenario was nostalgic and evocative of an underworld whose vocabulary and characters were widely recognizable – though not necessarily as Argentine. Perhaps its success was that it made seduction, heterosexual and homoerotic, acceptable not just on stage, but in the intimacy of the dance salon. Yet its impact was most problematic in Argentina itself – at least at first. Claudio Segovia reports that it was difficult to win an audience and the show was not presented there until nearly a decade later. Perhaps it was once again the case that it was Europe’s enthusiasm for tango that regenerated interest in its homeland. But it is also true that a new phenomenon, tango nuevo, a new musical fusion, built around the work of Piazzolla (who died in 1992), was winning back the young to tango in electronic versions by groups like the Gotan Project or Bajofondo Tango Club.