Tango: The Music that Buenos Aires Gave to the World (1880–1955)

Candombe, the Cuban habanera, milonga, mazurka, quadrille, waltz, polka, and Andalusian tango — music in vogue at the time — also made their contribution. Tango music was performed and danced in lupanars, brothels, and taverns.

It was the music of those who had no place in the official city: the soundtrack of the overcrowded tenement, the neighborhood store, the courtyard where languages and stories mixed that had nothing in common except displacement. That social promiscuity — which the bourgeois Buenos Aires of the late nineteenth century found threatening — was the condition that made tango possible.

The Argentine upper class rejected it. Paris adopted it. And when Paris adopted it, the Argentine upper class accepted it. That paradox — the music of the outskirts legitimized by Europe in order to be recognized in its own land — defines the relationship between tango and Argentine identity to this day.

The Old Guard: Tango Without Words

The period that tango historians call the Old Guard spans approximately from 1880 to 1917: tango in its primary, instrumental form, still without lyrics, played by small ensembles — sometimes a single street organ, sometimes a trio of flute, guitar and violin — at dances in the outskirts.

The instruments that define the sound of the Old Guard are the transverse flute, the violin and the guitar. The bandoneón — the instrument that today is synonymous with tango — arrived relatively late, establishing itself as the central instrument of the genre in the early years of the twentieth century.

Ángel Villoldo was the most important composer of the Old Guard: his tango "El Choclo" (1903) — 🎵 Doresol — is the most representative piece of that era. Also by Villoldo is "La Morocha" (1905) — 🎵 Doresol — one of the first tango recordings to reach Europe.

The Old Guard finds immortality in an instrumental work composed by a 19-year-old young man from Montevideo: "La Cumparsita", by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez. In 1916 Roberto Firpo arranged it and premiered it in Montevideo. Years later Enrique Pedro Maroni and Pascual Contursi wrote the best-known lyrics — "si supieras / que aún dentro de mi alma..." — and Carlos Gardel recorded it, turning it into a worldwide hit. 🎵 Doresol

Tango Conquers Paris

In 1907 there was a first foray into Europe by Los Gobbi and Ángel Villoldo, followed in 1911 and 1913 by other musicians and dancers who moved the Old Continent with a sensual dance that completely revolutionized the ways of dancing and even of relating to the body and between genders.

Paris was fascinated. The most elegant ballrooms in the French capital adopted the tango with the enthusiasm of those who discover something absolutely new. The very dance that Buenos Aires considered obscene and dangerous became the sensation of the Parisian belle époque. Pope Pius X banned it. Kaiser Wilhelm II banned it at Prussian military uniforms. Those prohibitions were the best possible publicity.

When the tango returned from Paris bearing the stamp of European modernity, Buenos Aires had to reconsider its position. The very salons that had rejected it opened their doors. And the tango began the process of refinement that would take it from the outskirts to the theaters.

Carlos Gardel: The Creole Thrush

Charles Romuald Gardes — Carlos Gardel — was probably born in Toulouse, France, in 1890, although the dispute over his origins between Argentina and Uruguay has never been fully resolved. He arrived in Buenos Aires as a child, grew up in the Abasto neighborhood, and became the most important artist Argentine music has ever produced.

"Mi Noche Triste" (1917) — 🎵 Doresol — was the first tango-song in history: the first tango with a narrative lyric that told a story of love and abandonment in the first person. That moment — Gardel singing "Mi Noche Triste" at the Teatro Buenos Aires in 1917 — is the instant when tango ceased to be only music for dancing and became also a song to be listened to.

What Gardel had was impossible to analyze and even more impossible to imitate: a baritone voice with a warmth and naturalness that made every song sound as if he were inventing it in that very moment. His phrasing — the specific way he breathed within the melody, lengthening some notes and shortening others with a freedom no previous singer had allowed himself — defined what it meant to sing tango for decades after his death.

He went solo in 1925 and became an international star until his tragic death in a plane crash in Medellín, Colombia, on June 24, 1935. He was forty-four years old.

"Volver" — 🎵 Doresol — with lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera, is the most important song in the tango repertoire after "La Cumparsita": a meditation on returning to Buenos Aires from the exile of fame. "Volver / con la frente marchita / las nieves del tiempo / platearon mi sien": four lines that define tango as the music of nostalgia.

"Por una Cabeza" — 🎵 Doresol — composed by Gardel and Le Pera in 1935, just a few weeks before his death, is the perfect metaphor for love-as-game: the horse race as an image of romantic obsession.

Even today, ninety years later, Argentines say that "he sings better every day" — the phrase that captures the paradox of an artist who became greater after death than he ever was in life.

The Golden Age: The Great Orchestras

The nineteen forties were the golden age of tango: the period in which the genre reached its greatest mass popularity, when the great typical orchestras filled the ballrooms of Buenos Aires and their records played on every radio across the continent.

Aníbal Troilo — "Pichuco" — was the bandoneon player and orchestra leader who best embodied that period. His compositions — "Sur" — 🎵 Doresol — with lyrics by Homero Manzi, are the most perfect document of tango as urban poetry.

Osvaldo Pugliese was the opposite pole: his orchestra had a more dramatic sound, with the "yumba" — the characteristic beat of his style — which made his music the most difficult to dance to and the most exciting to listen to. "La Yumba" (1943) — 🎵 Doresol — is one of the most complex instrumental tangos in the classical repertoire.

Juan D'Arienzo — "El Rey del Compás" — was the one who made the people of Buenos Aires dance the most: his orchestra was faster and more sharply marked, with a rhythm that made feet move on their own.

The lyricist poets of that era — Homero Manzi, Enrique Santos Discépolo, Cátulo Castillo — brought the tango lyric to a literary complexity that no other Argentine popular genre has achieved. Discépolo — author of "Cambalache" (1934) — 🎵 Doresol — wrote the most lucid and most furious diagnosis of Argentine modernity in three minutes of tango.

The Bandoneón: The Instrument of the Soul

The bandoneón deserves a specific mention because it is the most important instrument in the history of Argentine music and the most unlikely: invented in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century to play religious music in rural churches that could not afford an organ, it arrived at the Río de la Plata in the hands of Central European immigrants and tango adopted it as if it had been made exactly for it.

When the bandoneón opens its bellows, it sounds like a sigh. When it closes them, it sounds like resignation. It is the instrument of the emotional ambivalence that defines tango.

Editorial note: Carlos Gardel recorded more than nine hundred songs throughout his career. Of all of them, "Volver" is the one that best sums up what tango is as a cultural phenomenon: the nostalgia for something that perhaps was never as good as we remember it, sung by someone who knows that return is impossible but who sings anyway because singing is the only way to process loss. Buenos Aires is a city of voluntary and involuntary exiles who carry tango as luggage: the music that says what distance does to memory. That is why tango has no borders — because exile and nostalgia have none either.

Editorial selection

Top 10 of Classic Argentine Tango

1. 1

   La Cumparsita

   Carlos Gardel

   The most famous tango in the world. Composed by a 19-year-old Uruguayan, arranged by Firpo, sung by Gardel. The anthem of a genre that belongs to both shores of the Río de la Plata.

   1917
2. 2

   Volver

   Carlos Gardel

   The ultimate song of nostalgia. Tango as the philosophy of the impossible return.

   1935
3. 3

   Cambalache

   Enrique Santos Discépolo

   The most lucid diagnosis of Argentine modernity. The denunciation of an era where everything is worth the same, in three minutes of tango.

   1934
4. 4

   Sur

   Aníbal Troilo / Homero Manzi

   The southern neighborhood of Buenos Aires as a topography of the soul. The most perfect tango-poem of the golden age.

   1948
5. 5

   Por una Cabeza

   Carlos Gardel

   Gardel's last great song. The horse race as a metaphor for obsessive love.

   1935
6. 6

   Mi Noche Triste

   Carlos Gardel

   The first tango canción in history. The moment tango ceased to be only music for dancing.

   1917
7. 7

   La Yumba

   Osvaldo Pugliese

   The most dramatic instrumental tango of the golden age. The "yumba" as the sonic signature of the most thrilling orchestra to listen to.

   1943
8. 8

   El Choclo

   Ángel Villoldo

   The Old Guard in its purest form. Tango before melancholy.

   1903
9. 9

   Mi Buenos Aires Querido

   Carlos Gardel

   The sentimental anthem of the city. Buenos Aires seen from the exile of fame.

   1934
10. 10

    A Media Luz

    Edgardo Donato

    The modest luxury of 1920s Buenos Aires seen with the affectionate irony that tango reserves for the middle class.

    1925

🎵 Practice these songs on Doresol

• La Cumparsita — chords and melody
• Volver — intermediate level
• Por una Cabeza — piano and guitar
• Cambalache — basic chords
• Sur — simplified version

Next chapter — Argentina Series: Modern Tango — Astor Piazzolla, the bandoneon revolution and the tango that scandalized purists and conquered the world.