Tango (21 page)

An encounter with the Uruguayan poet Horacio Ferrer
¹³
opened new horizons for Piazzolla. Their collaboration over twenty years enjoyed huge early success with the ‘Balada de un loco' (The Ballad of a Crazy Man). It was written for the Buenos Aires Festival of Song and Dance in November 1969, and won second prize and a very cool reception. Yet within a week the recording had sold 200,000 copies. Some said that it had not won first prize because of the resistance of a tango establishment that
was and remained bitterly hostile to Piazzolla's revolution in tango.

Ya sé que estoy piantao, piantao, piantao . . .

No ves que va la luna rodando por Callao;

que un corso de astronautas y niños, con un vals
,

me baila alrededor . . . ¡Bailá! ¡Vení! ¡Volá!

Ya sé que estoy piantao, piantao, piantao . . .

Yo miro a Buenos Aires del nido de un gorrión;

y a vos te vi tan triste . . . ¡Vení! ¡Volá! ¡Sentí! . . .

el loco berretín que tengo para vos:

¡Loco! ¡Loco! ¡Loco!

Cuando anochezca en tu porteña soledad
,

por la ribera de tu sábana vendré

con un poema y un trombón

a desvelarte el corazón
.

¡Loco! ¡Loco! ¡Loco!

Como un acróbata demente saltaré
,

sobre el abismo de tu escote hasta sentir

que enloquecí tu corazón de libertad . . .

¡Ya vas a ver!

Quereme así, piantao, piantao, piantao . . .

Trepate a esta ternura de locos que hay en mí
,

ponete esta peluca de alondras, ¡y volá!

¡Volá conmigo ya! ¡Vení, volá, vení!

Quereme así, piantao, piantao, piantao . . .

Abrite los amores que vamos a intentar

la mágica locura total de revivir . . .

¡Vení, volá, vení!

I know I'm crazy, crazy, crazy / Can't you see the moon moving along Callao Street / And a cortege of astronauts and children, waltzing / Around me . . . Dance! Come! Fly!

I know I'm crazy . . . / I look down on Buenos Aires from a sparrow's nest / and I saw you looking sad . . . Come! Fly! Feel! / this crazy gift I have for you
.

Mad! mad! mad! / When night falls on your Buenos Aires solitude / I'll skirt the banks of your sheet / with a poem and a trombone / and unveil your heart
.

Mad! mad! mad! / I'll jump like a demented acrobat / over the canyon of your decolleté until I feel / that I've driven you mad with freedom in your heart / You'll see! . . .

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.