His life changed as the city changed, and now the poor room in which Contursi places him is probably in one of the working-class neighbourhoods that have recently arisen. Perhaps he, like the Milonguita, had moved out of the dockland barrio in search of better things. His failure, as it is painted here, however, is not a financial one but a kind of moral fall replayed against the gaudy background of the demi-monde. All that is left to him now is nostalgia for that world, now lost, and loquacious self-pity poured into song.
Eche amigo, nomás, écheme y llene
hasta el borde la copa de champán,
que esta noche de farra y de alegría
el dolor que hay en mi alma quiero ahogar.
Es la última farra de mi vida,
de mi vida, muchachos, que se va . . .
mejor dicho, se ha ido tras de aquella
que no supo mi amor nunca apreciar.
Yo la quise, muchachos, y la quiero
y jamás yo la podré olvidar;
yo me emborracho por ella
y ella quién sabe qué hará.
Eche, mozo, más champán,
que todo mi dolor,
bebiendo lo he de ahogar;
y si la ven,
muchachos, díganle
que ha sido por su amor
que mi vida ya se fue.
Y brindemos, nomás, la última copa
que tal vez también ella ahora estará
ofreciendo en algún brindis su boca
y otra boca feliz la besará.
Eche, amigo, nomás, écheme y llene
hasta el borde la copa de champán,
que mi vida se ha ido tras de aquella
que no supo mi amor nunca apreciar.
Come on, my friend, fill it up / fill my glass of champagne to the brim / on this night of booze and joy / I’m going to drown the pain that’s in my heart. / It’s the last binge I’ll ever have / my life is fading away, lads . . . / or rather it’s gone away with her / the woman who never appreciated the love I had to give.
I loved her, lads, and I still do / and I’ll never forget her . . . / I’m drinking because of her. / Who knows what she’s doing now. / More champagne, barman, / I’ve so much pain to drink away / And if you see her, friends / tell her / that my life drained away because of her. So let’s raise a final glass. / Perhaps she’s raising her glass at this very moment / and offering up her lips / for other fevered lips to kiss. / Come on, barman, more champagne / fill my champagne glass to the brim / my life has gone, she has gone / the woman who never understood my love.
(‘La última copa’, The final glass – J. A Caruso, 1926)
Men are the bearers of this vision of authentic love, the seekers after romance, the worshippers of passion. Women are more cynical, more pragmatic, unimpressed by these promises of eternal love unless it is accompanied by material improvement.
The reality, of course, is that in this world of prostitution the women were the breadwinners, maintaining their pimps and protectors in the style to which they quickly became accustomed. For the tangos make it clear that the men never worked – it is rare for any wage-earning activity to be mentioned in tango lyrics.
The protagonists of the new tango lyrics seem strangely familiar from the fin de siècle literature of Paris. They carry echoes of Murger’s Vie de bohème and mirror Hoffman’s aimless flaneur, adrift in a city that is hostile and strange.10 And although the language of this new poetry is the argot of the port, lunfardo, its imagery owes more to the late romantic Modernista movement of the turn of the century in Latin America, which borrowed heavily from Parnasse and the literary movements of Paris. Mimi reincarnated in the avenues of Buenos Aires.
Mi adorado París
no te puedo olvidar
porque yo allí
aprendí a amar.
Juventud
Que dorada pasó
Entre risas y champán
Y besos de mujer.
Oh, París, ciudad luz
y ciudad del querer
no podré olvidar
Montmartre de placer.
En ti siempre estarán
la dulce Midinette,
brindando con su amor
un verso de Musset.
¡Oh, París! ¡Oh, París de mi ensueño!
¡Oh, París! ¡Oh, París de mi amor!
My beloved Paris / I can’t forget you / because it was there / that I learned to love. / My lovely golden youth / has passed / amid laughter and champagne / and the kisses of women.
Oh, Paris, city of light / city of love / I cannot forget / Montmartre the place of pleasure / There will always be the sweet / Midinette / celebrating with her love / a poem by Musset.
Oh, Paris, Paris of my dreams / Paris, Paris of my love.
(‘Oh, Paris’ – J. A Caruso, 1924)
There is one more female presence in this world of disappointed men and cynical women: the Mother, the exemplar of idealized Woman, locked in the family (literally, since she never appears outside the home), selfless and dispensing a love that requires no recompense or even recognition; someone who is caring and protective.
Pobre viejecita, que llorando está
por la mala hija que no volverá! . . .
Huyó de su lado tras un falso amor
y hoy la pobre madre muere de dolor . . .
Viejecita buena, deja de llorar;
que la que se ha ido ha de retornar . . .
Por la misma puerta por donde salió
ha de entrar un día a pedirte perdón.
Añora esos días de felicidad,
muy cerca de aquella que nunca vendrá;
cuando la besaba con todo su amor
y la acariciaba con loco fervor.
Y los días pasados en el dulce hogar
junto a la que un día la pudo dejar
sin ver de que al irse tras de aquel querer
destrozó la vida a quien le dio el ser.
Y una triste tarde, muy cansada ya
de esperar en vano la que no vendrá,
cerró aquellos ojos, dejó de llorar,
y al cielo la pobre se fue a descansar . . .
Y la santa madre, que tanto esperó
la vuelta de aquella que nunca volvió,
en su pobre lecho, antes de morir,
a tan mala hija supo bendecir.
Poor little old lady, who is crying / over the bad daughter who will never come back / She fled from her side, pursuing a false love / and today her poor mother is dying of sorrow / Stop crying, old lady / the girl who left will return / through the same door she left by / she’ll walk in to ask your forgiveness.
She misses those happy times / beside the girl who will never come back / she kissed her then with all her love / and caressed her with passion / and those days at home in the distant past / with the girl who left her / without seeing that following her love / destroyed the life of the one who brought her into this world.
And one sad evening, weary / of waiting in vain / she closed her eyes and ceased to weep / and took her rest in heaven. / And the saintly mother / who waited so long / for her to return, though she never did / in her simple bed, just before dying / gave a blessing to her errant child.
(‘No llore viejecita’, Don’t cry little old lady – Julio Aparicio, 1930)
By 1920, tango has changed once more. The dance bands, the orquestas tipicas, were giving way to more sophisticated ensembles whose members were more likely now to have a musical education and be able to read music, unlike their predecessors who had tended to whistle or sing their songs to others who could note them down on paper. The ensemble allowed individuals some space for solo performance too – the tango virtuoso was emerging, like Homero Manzi and Francisco Canaro on the bandoneon or Juan D’Arienzo on piano. The orchestras were becoming larger, often including three or four bandoneons, and their tuxedos suggested sophistication rather than identification with the life of ordinary people. Dance, too, was giving way to song, as the heroes of a new age, the
Guardia Nueva or ‘New Guard’, took the baton from the Vieja Guardia who had set tango successfully on its way. And it would be two great names – one a composer, the other an adored star of the cinema screen – who would launch tango into its new life.
5 GARDEL AND THE GOLDEN AGE
THE BOY FROM THE ABASTO
Superstars rarely come ready made, not even Carlos Gardel, the iconic figure of tango legend whose name still resonates across the Spanish-speaking world even though he died in an air crash in Colombia in 1935. For the wider world, it was Rudolph Valentino who embodied the excitement, the danger and the sexual frisson of the age of Tangomania. He always referred his viewer back to the origins of tango in the dark streets of port cities, or the shabby bars, where sailors met their prostitutes and wrestled with their pimps. Valentino personified that time of transition; he was a dancer whose body language was all that mattered, even as the silent films that made him famous moved into sound.
Tango as song and as poetry, tango as a personal drama shared the same setting, but its relationship with that background was profoundly different. With Valentino it was a theatrical backdrop and little more. But Carlos Gardel reaffirmed at every turn his relationship with the real world of the barrio with a sympathy and pride reflected in his mellifluous baritone voice and his gentle smile. His voice carried the early days of Argentine cinema, but his appeal went far beyond Argentina, to Venezuela and Colombia, to Cuba and to Spain, where his iconic status was elaborately constructed by a North American film industry anxious to penetrate the lucrative and growing market south of its border.
Like Argentina, Mexico had its golden age of cinema too, with music playing a central part; its singing stars, like Maria Félix and Pedro Infante, reached a semi-divine status. The films of ‘El Indio’ Fernández and other key directors of the cinema of the era were set against rural backgrounds, usually during the Mexican Revolution of 1910–17. Their central characters wore the stylized clothes of the Mexican horseman (the charro), and sang the ballads of the border country, the rancheras. This imagined world of wicked landowners, downtrodden peasants and heroic strangers with beautiful singing voices reinforced a national identity in construction whose central motif was the epic story of a revolution fictionalized in film and song.1
Gardel was equally the focus of a nascent national symbolism, but one that lacked the heroes or victors of Mexican film. Argentine society in the late Teens and early Twenties of the century had severed its historical and cultural connections with the patrician families of historical myth – the Mitres, the Newberys, the Güiraldes and the rest. They remained powerful economic actors, of course, and continued to live out their European culture in their mansions in Belgrano, shopped at the Harrod’s store on the Calle Florida and, like Jorge Luis Borges, often spoke English at home. But they were no longer the point of reference for a modern nation in construction.
The election victory of the Radical Party in 1916 was the direct result of the Sáenz Peña Law four years earlier, which marked the emergence of a new nation. Both the Law and indeed the Radical Party itself were a response to the social transformations of the preceding decades and the social weight of a population well represented by a capital city in which 50 per cent of the population had been born outside the country. Yet if the experiment in consensus and national unity, led from the now uncontested federal capital, was to be successful, a new imaginary would need to emerge which could embrace and unify these disparate communities. It would also have to convince a working-class population deeply suspicious of a system of parliamentary democracy in which it had no voice and was dominated by ideas that reinforced that distance. And that would require a language of nationhood rooted in its shared experience, its specific icons and its distinctive voice. It found all these in Carlos Gardel.
Carlos Gardel.
Gardel was probably born in Toulouse on 11 December 1890; he moved to Argentina with his mother when he was six. His street friends in the Abasto district where he grew up called him ‘Frenchie’; they were immigrants too and their playground was the street, where Carlos and the others were regularly picked up for petty misdemeanours. As a teenager, he frequented the city’s theatres, where in this first decade he would have seen and heard singers in the Spanish light operas called zarzuelas, as well as visiting grand opera companies from Italy and France. The music of the Argentine countryside, the often improvised ballads sung to a guitar accompaniment, were popular in the arrabales, where the recent migrants to the city gathered to sing and listen. This much is known; most of the rest is legend or gossip. Gardel’s origins have moved around continuously and his fairly ordinary working-class past transmuted into youthful brushes with the criminal classes, an early career as a gigolo, and the status of the bastard child of the aristocracy. Gardel himself made no great effort to set the record straight; the enigmas and the mysteries, after all, sustained the myth.
The popular música criolla, the Argentine folk music tradition now largely written and formalized rather than the history of improvisation from which it came, won Gardel’s interest and attention, and in 1911 he began to work with José Razzano in an increasingly popular singing duo. They would continue to perform together for more than a decade, making their first recordings in 1913. One night they were invited to a post-theatre performance at the exclusive and luxurious Armenonville Club, where they were cheered to the rooftops and offered a more permanent contract, prompting Gardel to say, as legend has it, ‘My God, for that much money I’d wash the dishes as well as sing’.2
Gardel and Razzano were well known in the theatres of Buenos Aires. The duo lasted until 1925, but Gardel had already moved long before that into singing tango. His recording of ‘Mi noche triste’ in 1917 was a huge and instant success – it sold 100,000 copies. He had first sung it in Montevideo, after its composer Pascual Contursi approached Gardel at a concert. Razzano was sceptical in the beginning, but Gardel began increasingly to perform tangos, and by 1920 he and Razzano had more or less abandoned their old repertoire in favour of this immensely popular new form.
This was also the beginning of the age of radio. His partner’s recurring throat problems left Gardel to take centre stage, which he did not just in Argentina. His recordings were popular in Spain in particular, and in the early Twenties he made a series of tours there. He was prolific; in a relatively short career he recorded over 500 tangos, many of them his own compositions with lyrics by his constant collaborator, the journalist Alfredo Le Pera. But these came later. More importantly, he was the interpreter and performer of the iconic tangos of Contursi, Celedonio Flores and others. Gardel was the voice of the Golden Age of Tango.
The Guardia Nueva had taken tango from the dance floor to the stage, the theatre and the cabaret circuit, with Gardel at its head. Musically, it was perhaps a more adventurous time, as the opportunities for solo performance multiplied in this new context. Tango was certainly becoming smoother, more sophisticated, less tied to the rhythm of dance. Its dramatic narrative became increasingly important and the bandoneon not simply its background, but a companion to the words, almost a commentator on the relationship between the past and the present of tango.
The bandoneon is impossible to play without involvement; it engages the whole body, and not just the fingers and the arms. The drama of the song is somehow enacted, and the singer and the player exchange regular glances of complicity.
THE BANDONEON PLAYER: GERARDO’S STORY
I’m a student of the bandoneon and I respect the history of the instrument. It’s a diatonic aerophone, that is, it has a different range opening and closing. The arrangement of buttons is quite illogical because instead of notes being next to one another, they’re all over the place. There are half a dozen buttons at each side that give you a chord opening and a fifth closing. That was logical when it was invented in Germany with a harmonic relationship between them. But when it arrived in Argentina, musicians kept asking for notes to be added, so they were apparently randomly added
around those central buttons. But it’s only apparently illogical because having two notes next to each other an octave apart probably makes it easier to play a tango. And some people say that because of that arrangement, it’s the only keyboard for playing tango.
The tango is its own music, even though it is related to classical music and Argentine folk music too. It has harmonics, cadences, passages between the bass notes, so the structure of tango music is binary, verse and choruses repeated twice, though sometimes it has three parts. The harmonic richness is huge. That happened when tango musicians began to study music because the first generation played by ear. The early bandoneon players didn’t know the instruments and didn’t read music so they learned by ear. That was the Guardia Vieja.
They played in the brothels. That’s a good story because the bandoneon was invented in Germany to be played in churches instead of the harmonium. But it never really became popular there and ended up in the brothels of Buenos Aires. When it arrived, tangos were played on guitars and flutes and later the piano. By 1900, the bandoneon was the dominant instrument in tango. Then around 1915 came the Guardia Nueva with De Caro and Arolas, a phenomenal composer.
The bandoneon has its own vocabulary and it would be good for someone to collect all those terms that musicians used. ‘La mugre’, for example (literally, ‘the muck’) – musicians would say ‘put in some muck’ and you know it means adding a semitone above or below the main note. Of course, that doesn’t appear in the written score and if musicians come from other traditions, they play what they read and it isn’t tango. There’s a big difference between the way it’s written and the way it’s played. And I think that’s closely linked to the singer. If you want to learn how to phrase tango, you have to listen to the singers. It’s like the way the bagpipes are played in the north of Scotland – they follow the singers.
Tango Page 9