In 1968, he left his wife for a singer, Amelita Baltar, for whom he wrote a body of work, including his opera, Maria de Buenos Aires. By his mid-20s Piazzolla was leading his own band, but in the late 1950s a return to New York proved unfruitful. At last I said, 'Look, Nadia, I play tango.' She said, 'I love tango.'" So he played one of his tangos for her. "When she analysed my music," Piazzolla remembers, "she could find maybe Ravel, Stravinsky, Béla Bartók and Hindemith, but never Astor Piazzolla. It was the legendary teacher who recognised his destiny before he knew it himself. "The people won't like it and they won't dance to it."īut Piazzolla's ambitions lay beyond dance music, and in 1954 he and his first wife, the artist Dedé Wolff, left Buenos Aires and their two children behind and travelled to Paris, where he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger. "Please don't add any more notes to my music," Troilo told him once Piazzolla had begun to arrange tunes for the band.
His professional career started to take off when, at the age of 18, he joined the celebrated tango orchestra of Anibal Troilo, who became the first to recognise the unorthodox instincts of his young recruit. And it was the instrument of which, even before the family moved back to Argentina in 1937, Piazzolla became a master.
Taken to Argentina by German sailors, it became the principal instrument of the tango. When he was nine years old, his father came home with a present acquired from a junk shop: a bandoneon, a version of the accordion devised in the mid-19th century by a German, Heinrich Band, for use in a chapel that could not afford an organ or even a harmonium. "If you want to change the tango," Piazzolla says in the film, with a smile on his face but the memory of pain in his eyes, "you had better learn boxing, or some other martial art."īorn in 1921 in the coastal town of Mar del Plata, he was raised on New York's Lower East Side, listening to the family's collection of tango 78s. Yet 50 years ago he was to tango as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk had been to jazz when they introduced what became known as "the bebop heresy" and found themselves the objects of neophobic scorn.
Now he has become part of the global soundtrack, his music reinterpreted by Gidon Kremer, Yo-Yo Ma, Daniel Barenboim, Richard Galliano, Joanna MacGregor, the Kronos Quartet and the Gotan Project crew (all of whom appear in Dibb's film), and used as the basis for movie soundtracks and Broadway shows.
I am a man of tango."įor his efforts to update the tango and bring it closer to other advanced forms of music in the second half of the last century, Piazzolla was at first virtually excommunicated by his fellow Argentinians. On top of that music you can hear good music. "My music has all the primitive tango, from the bordellos until today," Piazzolla says in an interview taped before his death in 1992 and included in Mike Dibb's new biographical documentary, Tango Maestro. In place of the swooning romanticism came something astringent, intricate and sinewy, a vehicle for instrumental virtuosity that retained and even intensified the emotional impact of its original model. With his Quinteto Tango Nuevo, Piazzolla proposed a music that, while based on the Argentinian dance form, took it far beyond a parody of Latin sensuality.
B ack in the summer of 1985, Astor Piazzolla's week-long season at the Almeida Theatre in Islington came as a revelation to those whose idea of the tango began and ended with the vision of a gigolo in tails and slicked-back hair and a vamp in a plunge-necked gown careering across the floor of a velvet-draped whorehouse to a rather comically rigid rhythm.