Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) studied with Alberto Ginastera and in Paris with the now legendary Nadia Boulanger. It was she who in 1954 persuaded him to devote himself to the tango rather than to classical music. “Here you have the real Piazzolla; Astor, be true to him”, were the words of his teacher when she heard him play his tango Triunfal. Piazzolla was understood as a musician from Buenos Aires who interpreted the popular music of Argentina, as Bartók, Stravinsky, Gershwin and Villa-Lobos did the music of their countries. He took up motifs of popular music and created classical music in the musical context of a city and a country. And what music could better personify Argentina than the tango? Piazzolla took the tango and from it produced classical music, for which the tangueros regarded him with suspicion, just as did the classical musicians. It was in the ’50s when Piazzolla was conducting a symphony and an Italian musician in the orchestra said to him, “I assume you are nothing to do with this Piazzolla who plays tangos.”
In Paris Piazzolla heard, besides other jazz combos, Gerry Mulligan and his ensemble. Impressed by the musicians’ swing and wealth of ideas, he decided to free the tango from its traditional patterns, to give the music more nuances and to make it more complex. For this he made use of quite novel tone-colours and rhythms as well as dissonant harmonies. The classical tango sextet consisted of two bandoneons, two violins, double bass and piano. Piazzolla enlarged it with a cello and an electric guitar, and in 1955 founded the Octeto Buenos Aires.
In 1956 Piazzolla wrote Tango Ballet for the Octeto Buenos Aires. It is the music to a short film, in which the music was recorded first and Ana Itelman subsequently designed the choreography. The director Enrique de Rosas then shot the short film, which was shown at a short-film festival. The music was welcomed with enthusiasm, but not the film: the music was considerably stronger than the images. It is a difficult work which made great demands on the octet’s musicians at the time: many rehearsals were necessary before they mastered them. The recording of Tango Ballet with the Octeto Buenos Aires and the short film have been lost. The work found no echo because it was recorded only for this short film, and the Octeto Buenos Aires never played it again; only years later, in April 1989, did the Sexteto Nuevo Tango perform it again in the Club Italiano. In Tango Ballet classical music, tango and ballet are merged into a composition of unique originality. The work has six movements: Introducción - La calle (The street) - Encuentro (Meeting) - Cabaret - Soledad (Solitude) - Calle final. La calle is presented passionately and with melancholy. Cabaret is pure tango - a movement from which speak the spirit of the tango and Piazzolla’s nature. The mood in Soledad is darker and marked by melancholy.
In 1958 Piazzolla was inspired in New York by cool jazz, and assembled his first quintet with an instrumentation of bandoneon, piano, double bass, electric guitar and vibraphone. Back in Buenos Aires, in 1960 he founded the “Nuevo Tango” quintet. The vibraphone was replaced by the violin. It was always Piazzolla’s concern to create tango music, not tango mythology. In this he did not wish to fall back on the tango of the past and the suburbs but, through his music, to give voices to the modern city - and that meant interpreting a Buenos Aires with changed problems, since the city had a new rhythm and had become more cosmopolitan. Piazzolla also brought the tango to a new audience: students, young workers, avant-garde artists, jazz and Bossa Nova fans. It was the time of Club 676, an institution in Buenos Aires nightlife, where “progressive music” was to be heard: the modern tango of Astor Piazzolla.
For Piazzolla as composer the most fruitful phase was the ’60s, in which he also developed new forms. Among his numerous works, particularly outstanding here are the “Angel series”, which revolves round the subject of an angel: Tango del Angel (1957), Introducción al Angel (1962), La muerte del Angel (Death of the angel, 1962), Milonga del Angel (The angel’s milonga, 1965) and Resurrección del Angel (1965). The first three pieces refer to the music to the theatre-piece “EI Tango del Angel” by Alberto Rodriguez Nuñoz, which was performed in 1962 in a theatre in the harbour quarter of San Telmo. (The theatre no longer exists; it was destroyed in a fire.) At that time Piazzolla’s music attracted great attention, for it sounded new, unusual, evocative and sensitive. Introducción al Ángel describes the mysterious path of an “angel” who appears in a block of flats in Buenos Aires in order to cleanse the souls of its inhabitants. La muerte del Ángel begins with a three-part tango-fugue, followed by a passage which depicts the desperate struggle between a villain and the “angel”, whom he kills. In 1971 Piazzolla founded the Conjunto 9 (“Ensemble 9”) nonet, which was engaged in 1971-72 by the Buenos Aires city council to give two concerts each week, free of charge, throughout the country and also to appear abroad. This ensemble played what Piazzolla called “popular contemporary music of the city of Buenos Aires”. At his disposal Piazzolla had nine musicians for whom he could write and with whom he could rehearse and play - a really privileged situation, and moreover without financial pressure. “At the moment I am very calm, very contented, very happy, and so is my music, too. I am not searching. I want to compose and accept what I bring forth”, he said at the time. Piazzolla wrote Preludio 9, Fuga 9 and Divertimento 9 in 1972 for his nonet.
