El Tanguero

Astor Piazzolla was born with a deformed right leg, the result of his mother having contracted polio during her pregnancy. By the time he was four, when he moved with his parents from Mar del Plata, Argentina to New York City, he had already undergone four surgeries to correct it. He had to wear special shoes, but this physical obstacle only added to an innate stubbornness and inner drive. His life story, narrated in patchwork form in a book called Astor Piazzolla: A Memoir (“A Manera de Memorias”), could just as well have been titled “The World as Will and Idea.”

Back in the late 1980’s there was a huge explosion of interest in Piazzolla here in the US. Due to my own inherent stubbornness and obstinate nature I refused to join in, missing the boat and only becoming familiar with his art about ten years later. Then someone gave me a dozen or so of his tangos in sketchily written out versions for piano. I made arrangements of several of these for Gidon Kremer, and we performed them together with various orchestras in the US and Europe, usually as an encore after my violin concerto. Now that I know his music better and even have listened to the tango artists that influenced him, I’m inclined to think my arrangements are off the mark, too smoothed over and not sufficiently violent. I would probably do myself and the world a favor by recalling them.

Piazzolla’s “memoirs” (actually transcripts of several long interviews made shortly before he succumbed in 1990 to a terrible, debilitating stroke) reveal a man who, when it came to musical discrimination, took no prisoners. He could be brutal in his opinions, not only about what he considered mediocre music (his own included), but also about the people who made it. One very uncomfortable chapter in the book is prompted by the interviewer’s request for Piazzolla to name his all-time “ideal” ensemble. This means having to diss many other longtime, obviously very faithful collaborators. But Piazzolla—and he refers frequently to himself as “Piazzolla,” as if already thinking about his place in history—is tough as nails when it comes to musical assessments.

Perhaps that toughness was born from the straightened circumstances of his childhood and having to overcome being a little guy with a bum leg in the immigrant streets of 1920’s New York where all the neighborhood stores were “protected” by the local Mafioso. But Astor’s Italian-born parents were an obviously gentle and deeply caring couple, and they did everything to encourage their only son. “Nonino,” his Sicilian-born father, gave him his first bandoneon, an event that didn’t at first make much of an impact. But a primal moment occurs in his childhood narrative when he hears from a neighboring apartment window of his Greenwich Village tenement the sound of a pianist playing Bach. Up to that point Astor has been just another alley kid, getting into fistfights and grabbing joyrides on the back of passing trucks, but now at the sound of Bach he becomes completely captivated. He begins piano lessons, and what turns out to be his omnivorous musical intellect quickly reveals itself.

The book includes as an appendix an aptly named little essay called “My Crazy Bandoneon,” an appreciation of his technique written by two other Argentinean players. For those who have never seen one, the bandoneon is similar to an accordion, except it has no piano-style black and white keyboard. Rather it has a single push-button for each pitch—33 for the left hand and 38 for the right, a total of 71 buttons. The player cannot see these buttons while playing, and their physical arrangement is a confusing matrix that, at least on first encounter, seems to defy logic. I’ve stared at the diagram for longer than I want to admit, and I still can make little sense of the layout. The buttons are neither organized chromatically nor by symmetrical intervallic relations. To make matters even more piquant, the buttons change pitch depending on whether the bellows are being opened or closed. AND the left hand is tuned to F while the right hand is tuned to G. Got it? It’s enough to make you wonder if all those military coups in Argentina weren’t carried out by frustrated bandoneon players who’d gone postal trying to figure out the instrument.

Not only that, but the bandoneon, weighing in at around twenty-two pounds is not for weaklings. The traditional way to play it was sitting down, but Piazzolla broke the mould by performing standing up, supporting it on a knee that rested on a small stool.

The bandoneon was a German invention, and the ones played in Argentina for decades came from there. If you listen to earlier masters of the bandoneon like Aníbal Troilo or Osvaldo Pugliese, you’ll hear a very fluid, folk-like style of playing that can be wonderfully evocative but sounds definitely like entertainment music at the service of the dance. That all changed with Piazzolla, who, with his obsession with Bach, Bartók and Stravinsky as well as American jazz, treated the instrument in a radically new fashion. Even in his early ensemble music from the 1950’s, done with his “orquesta típica,” (an ensemble that included strings and piano as well as multiple bandoneons), he was slapping and jerking the instrument, eliciting short, machine-gun staccatos, and punchy chord combinations that aroused the ire and scorn of tango purists. Eventually he seems more or less to have forgotten about the tango’s dance origins—his later compositions are to be listened to as one would listen to symphonic music or a great jazz performer.

His musical sophistication must have perplexed and intimidated most of his musical collaborators in the world of Buenos Aires nightclubs and recording studios. He demonstrated early on an insatiable curiosity about all kinds of music, and he had not the least shyness nor self-doubt about asking for what he wanted. When he was nineteen and still largely self-taught, he composed a piano concerto. Hearing that the great Artur Rubinstein was living in Buenos Aires at the time, he knocked on Rubinstein’s door and asked him to look at it. Rubinstein was amused by the young composer’s chutzpah—it didn’t take him long to deduce that the “concerto” was just the piano part because Astor hadn’t yet written an orchestral accompaniment—and within minutes he had arranged for his young visitor to take composition lessons with Alberto Ginastera. Ginastera, described here as generous, shy and self-effacing, had never taken a student before. Soon Piazzolla had composed a “Buenos Aires Symphony” that won him a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the greatest theory teacher of her time, teacher of Copland, Thomson, Carter, Harris, Piston, Glass and others.

With his scholarship Piazzolla went with his young wife, Dedé Woolf, a painter, to Paris, and both spent a year, 1954-55, studying there, leaving their two young children back home with their grandparents. Boulanger was kind to her Argentinean student, but she immediately recognized that his faux-Stravinsky and faux-Bartók pieces were not the real Piazzolla. He was, as he describes himself, ashamed of his tango roots and didn’t even want to admit that he played that kind of music. But she had the wisdom to ferret out the true Piazzolla and make him appreciate where his real gifts lay.

The year with Boulanger was a crash course, utterly humiliating for a man of 34. She assigned fiendishly difficult counterpoint exercises and was, in her own gentle and infinitely kind way, utterly merciless in her criticism. He says that he worked so hard on counterpoint that he sometimes broke down into tears of frustration. I can dig it, having been through a similar experience with my own theory teacher, herself a Boulanger protégé.

What makes Piazzolla’s music so emotionally powerful is his infallible sense of harmony. I tell students over and over that the principal problem with most compositions I see is their lack of harmonic coherence. Listening to Piazzolla ought to be a model of how one cannot hope to establish an original musical voice without first having a secure and identifiable harmonic sense.

Of course Piazzolla’s harmonic world is largely derived from Bach’s, with smooth, circle-of-fifths progressions moving effortlessly underneath the plangent cantilenas of his melodies. That was his special discovery—a melding of indigenous tango rhythms and melodic tropes with the contrapuntal sophistication of Bach and the edgy brutalism of early Stravinsky and Bartók.

As he matured he experimented within the context of his tango ensemble with harmonic techniques that had little to do with its indigenous roots. In Part 2 of “Tango para una Ciudad” some of the harmonies are derived from tritone relations and sequences of chromatically crawling quartal configurations. In a piece like this he reveals that he was a careful listener of Gil Evans, Stan Kenton and the more progressive of the big band innovators of the sixties and seventies.

Like Duke Ellington, Piazzolla’s artistic life saw an amazingly varied growth of intricacy and sophistication. And also like Ellington it was inextricably interwoven with the unique performing mannerisms of his instrumental collaborators. You can identify the period of a certain recording by the individual performers he was working with. He spent most of his adult life touring and performing, sometimes at a stupefying pace. How he kept his intellectual interests and musical curiosities fresh in the company of others, most of whom, in his words, “could only talk about football and gambling,” is beyond understanding. But he had many extraordinary friends and collaborators during his life, from the French actress Jeanne Moreau and the American jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan to the great writer Jorge Luis Borges. With Borges Piazzolla made an album of poetry and music, “El Tango,” a project he was proud of, but one that revealed Borges ignorance of music, an ignorance that did not prevent him from articulating grandiose pronouncements about it.

By the end of his life, Astor Piazzolla was a national treasure of Argentina. Although he was more or less indifferent to politics throughout all the dark, chaotic years of that country’s history, he as a major celebrity in a small population couldn’t help getting drawn in from time to time. At one point General Jorge Rafael Videla, leader of the military junta that ended up murdering tens of thousands of political opponents, invited Piazzolla and several other Argentinean artists and theatrical people to a much-publicized luncheon. It was an “offer you couldn’t refuse,” and Piazzolla acquiesced, earning him the eternal scorn of, among others, his novelist contemporary Julio Cortázar.

(The General wishes you to join him for lunch)

At the end of his life, lying nearly lifeless in his hospital room, he was visited no less than six times by President Carlos Menem, despite the fact that years before Piazzolla had denounced him for his Peronism.

Like many a jazz artist Piazzolla signed away copyrights to some of his most popular pieces during earlier periods of economic distress. He went through periods of terrible economic crises and was forced to accept quick solutions often proposed by less-than-honest impresarios and agents. But it appears that by his last years he was at least financially secure, and his turbulent personal life more or less had calmed down. But, as his friends say in the book, nothing was ever easy for Astor, not even dying. At the age of 69, in Paris, he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was flown back to Buenos Aires, but he never recovered, lingering on painfully until his death two years later on July 4, 1992.

What comes through in this book of memories is Piazzolla’s extraordinary clarity of thought. He could be brutal—just like Boulanger’s counterpoint exercises—but his musical and intellectual mental processes were both profoundly absorptive and shrewdly practical. In this way he was much like his idol, Stravinsky. But even when discussing Stravinsky, Piazzolla refused to pull his punches. Commenting on Stravinsky’s late works and his adopting of Webernian serialist techniques, Piazzolla laments that this was more a matter of an old composer trying to stay hip and au courant, and in so doing losing touch with his true voice. (In this I don’t entirely agree—I’d hate not to have “Requiem Canticles”…) But then Piazzolla is honest enough to admit his own misfires and wrong turns, such as the “electronic” octet comprised of young rockers that he formed and briefly toured with during the eighties.

An honest man, as tough as the street-fighting kids he grew up with and gifted with one of the great musically expressive “animas” of all time, he was something very very special. He made of an individual indigenous genre, the tango, what Chopin did of the mazurka and the waltz, elevating it to the level of the sublime.