Astor Piazzolla

Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992) was an Argentine musician who revolutionized the tango form, infusing that passionate, somewhat melancholy dance tradition with elements of classical music and jazz. His "tango nuevo" (new tango) at first brought only angry rejection in his home country, but his energy and prolific creativity—"I promised myself I'd write a tango a day and that's what I did," he told Caleb Bach of Americas—finally brought his unique music to the attention of the world.

Even so, Piazzolla's death in 1992 merited only moderate notice from obituary writers outside Argentina, where he had slowly become a national icon. In his old age, Piazzolla was discovered by musical tastemakers, performing with hip groups like San Francisco's Kronos Quartet. In the decade after his death, however, his music exploded in popularity. Not easily classifiable as classical music, pop, jazz, or traditional tango, Piazzolla seemed fascinating to a generation of music fans who were used to crossing genre boundaries and hearing music that drew freely from various traditions. And there were few musicians of the 20th century who wove together diverse strands of their own experiences as skillfully as Astor Piazzolla did.

Moved with Family to New York

Born on March 11, 1921, in Mar del Plata, Argentina, Piazzolla was of Italian background. Argentines pronounce his name "Pia-SO-la." His family moved to New York in 1925, settling in the Little Italy neighborhood, and he learned to speak Spanish and English equally well. His father Vincent, a barber, however, longed to return to Argentina. He christened his motorcycle "The Spirit of Buenos Aires," and he spent $19 in a pawnshop on a bandoneón for his son. The bandoneón is a large Argentine version of the German concertina, an instrument related to the accordion. Piazzolla took lessons and learned quickly.

Numerous other influences were at work in Piazzolla's life in New York as well. He had hoped to become a boxer, giving up the dream after coming out on the losing end of matches against childhood friends Rocky Graziano and Jake La Motta. Piazzolla always felt that the sport had given him the toughness needed to survive in the world of music. "If you want to change the tango," he said in an interview quoted by Richard Williams in the London Guardian, "you had better learn boxing, or some other martial art." Piazzolla soaked up the jazz that was entering a golden age in New York, sneaking into clubs where Duke Ellington and other swing bandleaders created intricate musical arrangements that remained rooted in dance music yet reached new levels of subtlety. And a Hungarian-born pianist and neighbor, Bela Wilda, introduced Piazzolla to classical music.

Piazzolla immersed himself in the intellectual compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, observing the complexities of such forms as the fugue, a sort of large-scale round in which new lines of music must enter with the same musical material already presented by the lines that have already begun. Piazzolla would later name Bach as a major influence, and he would go on to create such novel fusions as the tango fugue. His leap into the professional musical world, however, came about when he met one of Argentina's musical icons, vocalist Carlos Gardel, who was making a film in New York. Piazzolla was 13 at the time, and on the street he met an assistant of Gardel's who had lost his building key. Piazzolla volunteered to climb in through a window. The singer hired him as an interpreter and later, after discovering his musical talents, as a bandoneón player. Since he was so young, Piazzolla's family turned Gardel down when he offered Piazzolla a place in his touring band—a fortunate refusal, for Gardel was killed in a plane crash in 1935.

Piazzolla's family moved back to Argentina in 1936, and Piazzolla began playing in tango orchestras. He moved to Buenos Aires in 1938 and began writing arrangements, looking for chances to deepen his compositional skills. In 1939 he joined the greatest of the traditional tango orchestras, which was led by bandleader Anibal Troilo. Still fascinated by classical music, he knocked on the door of visiting piano virtuoso, Arthur Rubinstein. The star pianist came to the door with a plate of spaghetti and was impressed by Piazzolla's enthusiasm. Rubinstein arranged for Piazzolla to take composition lessons with Argentina's leading modernist-minded composer, Alberto Ginastera.

Wrote Classical Works

Piazzolla married Dedé Wolff in 1942, and the couple raised two children, Daniel and Diana. Under Ginastera, he began to study contemporary classical music and culture seriously. His arrangements for Troilo became so experimental that the bandleader began to censor them, and he left Troilo and formed his own group, Orquesta del 46. He told Bach that a new music was "gestating in my gut." Piazzolla wrote a series of increasingly ambitious classical works, culminating in the Sinfonia Buenos Aires in 1951. The work won first prize at the Sevitzky Competition in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1953, but Argentine audiences rejected the work because it used the allegedly low-class bandoneón in a classical setting. Tango audiences were no more receptive to Piazzolla's music, and a frustrated Piazzolla accepted a grant to study classical music in France.

He sought out the top French composition teacher of the century, Nadia Boulanger. She listened to various pieces he had written, and, upon hearing one of his tangos, she said (as Piazzolla recalled to Caleb Bach), "This is Piazzolla, not that [i.e., the other music he had brought]. Throw the rest away!" Piazzolla took the advice to heart and began writing the tangos that made him famous. It was tango, but with a strong contemporary classical influence in its density and its use of dissonant harmonies; Piazzolla once called it New Tango in Tails. Piazzolla also renewed his acquaintance with American jazz in Paris, and his new music was partially written out in the classical fashion, and partly improvised. At the center of its sound was Piazzolla's own bandoneón.

Argentines were still unreceptive to the music of Piazzolla's Octeto Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires Octet); he was refused service by an angry taxi driver, and one crazed tango traditionalist pointed a gun at him on the street. Piazzolla moved to New York in 1958, trying to find work performing in clubs or composing for films, but he had little success there. He returned to Argentina following his father's death in 1959, composing one of his most famous pieces in his father's honor, "Adiós Nonino" (Nonino was his father's nickname).

Opening a new club called Jamaica in Buenos Aires (he patterned it after the renowned New York jazz club Birdland) and paring his sound down to a jazz-like quintet consisting of bandoneón, violin, bass, piano, and electric guitar, Piazzolla and his Quinteto Tango Nuevo finally began to make headway with progressive elements of the Argentine public in the 1960s. One breakthrough came when his tango opera, María de Buenos Aires, was positively received after its premiere in 1968. Several instrumental excerpts from the opera, including the "Fuga y misterio" (Fugue and Mystery) became well known, and the surrealistic work, with a text by Uruguayan poet Horacio Ferrer, seemed to capture the spirit of the Argentine capital. "I am my town!" sings the opera's main character (in Spanish, as translated by the All Music Guide). "María tango, María slum, María night, María fatal passion, María of love of Buenos Aires, that's me." Individual Piazzolla tangos such as "Buenos Aires Hora Cero" (Buenos Aires Zero Hour) cemented the association between Piazzolla and the city that had at first derided his efforts.

Suffered Heart Attack

The hard-living Piazzolla, who enjoyed such pastimes as shark fishing, was divorced from his first wife in the mid-1960s and remarried twice. He expanded his group to a nonet for a series of concert recordings for Italian national radio starting in 1971, and also wrote a choral work, El Pueblo jovén, that was premiered in Saarbrücken, Germany. Piazzolla's reputation in Europe was on the rise, but he was slowed by a massive heart attack in 1973. Undeterred from his energetic pace, he spent much of the 1970s in Europe, living in a variety of places (including Ginastera's home in Switzerland for a time) and making recordings. Many of the Piazzolla recordings that remain available date from this period; some are authorized, while others were illicit tapings made as Piazzolla kept up a busy performance schedule in concert and on radio. He kept writing new pieces, including the acclaimed "Libertango."

Piazzolla returned to live in Buenos Aires in 1984 after scoring a huge success with a concert at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires the previous year. His return to the Western hemisphere helped stimulate a new awareness of his work in the United States, where a revival of interest in the tango and other classic ballroom dances also led music enthusiasts to his work. The cutting-edge, boundary-crossing Kronos Quartet commissioned a new piece from Piazzolla, and he complied, enjoying substantial sales with the Five Tango Sensations album. He wrote a concerto for bandoneón and orchestra, performing it with the prestigious orchestra of St. Luke's. In 1987 Piazzolla and his quintet performed in one of America's largest musical venues, New York City's Central Park. Piazzolla continued to compose new individual tangos and tango songs (the latter, often written with Ferrer, remain an underappreciated facet of his output, perhaps because of the language barrier that exists outside of Spanish-speaking countries). His music varied according to the ensemble and situation for which it was written but maintained a distinctive and instantly identifiable mixture of tango, contemporary classical music, and jazz. He composed a set of four tangos depicting Buenos Aires in different seasons, the Verano Porteño, Invierno Portenño, Otonño Portenño, and Primavera Portenña ("porteñ o," or "porteña," is an adjective referring to Buenos Aires), and they were often performed as a kind of tango counterpart to classical composer Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons group of violin concertos.

Piazzolla was about to launch a major tour of the U.S. and Europe in 1989 when he suffered a major stroke. He lived on for several years and was able to function after intensive physical therapy, but his more than 50-year performing career was over. Piazzolla died in Buenos Aires on July 4, 1992, but his popularity only continued its upward trend. Younger tango musicians in Argentina venerated him, and musicians of all kinds began to perform his compositions. They became staples of classical concerts after Latvian-born violinist Gidon Kremer and Chinese-born cellist Yo-Yo Ma issued highly successful recordings featuring Piazzolla works and demonstrated that it could easily survive the transfer from the bandoneón to more conventional classical instruments. Jazz musicians such as guitarist Al DiMeola also began to experiment with Piazzolla's music. His more than 1,000 compositions were beginning, as of the early twenty-first century, to assume the status of enduring classics, no matter what genre classification they may be given.

Books

Piazzolla, Astor, and Natalio Gorin, Astor Piazzolla, trans. Fernando Gonzalez, Timber/Amadeus, 2001.

Periodicals

Americas, September-October 1991.

Billboard, December 6, 1997.

Guardian (London, England), November 27, 2004.

New York Times, July 6, 1992.

Times (London, England), July 21, 1992.

Online

"Astor Piazzolla," All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (January 10, 2006).

"Astor Piazzolla: Chronology of a Revolution," http://piazzolla.org/biography/biography-english.html (January 10, 2006).