Ástor Piazzolla
1921 – 1992 · Argentina
Known for: Argentine bandoneonist and composer who created nuevo tango
“He took the tango out of the dance hall and set it in the concert hall.”
Biography
Ástor Piazzolla was born on 11 March 1921 in Mar del Plata, the only child of Vicente Piazzolla, whom everyone called Nonino, and Asunta Manetti, both of Italian immigrant stock. In 1925 the family moved to Greenwich Village in New York, a hard neighbourhood of gangsters and immigrants, where the boy, who walked with a limp, learned to look after himself. At home he heard his father's records of the tango orchestras of Carlos Gardel and Julio de Caro, and beside them jazz and Bach; in 1929 his father found a bandoneon in a pawn shop, and the instrument became his life. He wrote his first tango at eleven and learned from the Hungarian pianist Béla Wilda to play Bach on it, a schooling that marked everything he later wrote.
Back in Argentina from 1936, Piazzolla moved to Buenos Aires at seventeen and in 1939 joined the orchestra of Aníbal Troilo as fourth bandoneon, arranger and occasional pianist. With what he earned he paid for lessons with the composer Alberto Ginastera, rising early after nights in the clubs to hear the Teatro Colón rehearse; five years of that gave him the orchestration he counted among his strengths. Troilo came to fear that his young player's ideas would drive the dancers away, and in 1944 Piazzolla left him. He founded his own Orquesta Típica in 1946, dissolved it in 1950 and nearly abandoned tango, studying conducting with Hermann Scherchen while he looked for a voice of his own. The symphony he entered for the Fabian Sevitzky Award in 1953 set off a brawl in the hall, because he had put two bandoneons into a symphony orchestra, and won him a scholarship to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, who sent him back to the tango he had been trying to hide.
What followed was nuevo tango: tango kept as the root but opened to counterpoint, dissonance and the improvisation of jazz, written for listeners rather than dancers. His Quinteto Nuevo Tango gave the music its sound of bandoneon, violin, piano, electric guitar and double bass, and works such as Adiós Nonino, María de Buenos Aires and Libertango passed from scandal into the standard repertoire. In Buenos Aires traditionalists resisted him for years, and he was often heard abroad before he was accepted at home. A stroke in Paris in 1990 ended his playing, and he died in Buenos Aires on 4 July 1992. His scores are played now by tango ensembles and symphony orchestras alike, and the question he forced, whether tango could leave the dance floor, was settled in his favour.