Astor Piazzolla
Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata on 11 March 1921 and died in Buenos Aires on 4 July 1992. In between he changed what tango could be.
He was the only child of Vicente Piazzolla — known to everyone as Nonino — and Asunta Manetti, an Italian-Argentine couple who emigrated to New York City in 1925. Astor grew up on the Lower East Side, a tough, polyglot child fluent in the English of the street and the Italian of home, more at ease with Cab Calloway and Gershwin drifting up from the clubs than with anything from the country of his birth.
A box that was not roller skates
The turning point arrived when he was eight. His father, homesick for Argentina, bought a battered bandoneón in a Manhattan pawnshop for a few dollars and gave it to his son. Astor, who had been begging for roller skates, later remembered his disappointment at unwrapping the strange, wheezing box instead. He learned it anyway, and by his early teens was studying with a Hungarian pianist, Béla Wilda, a pupil of Rachmaninoff who taught him to transcribe Bach — a discipline that would echo through every mature bar he wrote.
Gardel, and a plane he did not board
In New York the boy met Carlos Gardel, the towering star of classic tango song, who took a liking to him and cast him in a walk-on role — a Parisian newspaper boy — in the 1935 film El día que me quieras. Gardel invited the fourteen-year-old to join his tour; Nonino refused to let him go. Weeks later Gardel and his entire troupe died in a plane crash in Medellín. Piazzolla would say for the rest of his life that his father's stubbornness was the reason he lived to compose.
The apprenticeship: Troilo and Ginastera
The family returned to Argentina in 1936. The teenager threw himself into the tango world of Buenos Aires and, by 1939, had won a seat in the orchestra of Aníbal Troilo — the most admired bandoneonist of the Golden Age — first as a player and soon as an arranger whose ideas were already too adventurous for the dance floor. Hungry for more, Piazzolla studied composition with Alberto Ginastera, Argentina's leading concert composer, absorbing orchestration, harmony and the twentieth-century repertoire even as he earned his living in the tango cabarets.
Paris, and the lesson that freed him
By the early 1950s Piazzolla was ashamed of the tango. He wanted to be a serious composer of symphonic and chamber music, and in 1954 a prize took him to Paris to study with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger. He showed her his concert scores; she found them accomplished and cold. Only when he confessed, almost in embarrassment, that he played the bandoneón in tango bands and sat down to play her one of his tangos did she stop him and say the words that redirected his life: this is the real Piazzolla — do not ever leave it. He never did.
Zero Hour, and the war at home
Home in Buenos Aires he formed the Octeto Buenos Aires in 1955 and declared, in effect, hostilities: tango would now be written for listeners. The reaction was ferocious. Purists picketed, radio stations boycotted him, and he received threats; a famous quip held that in Argentina you could change anything except the tango. Piazzolla changed the tango. Through the 1960s his Quinteto Nuevo Tango — bandoneón, violin, piano, electric guitar and double bass — became the perfect vehicle for a torrent of new pieces, among them the elegy for his father, Adiós Nonino, which he wrote in 1959 on learning of Nonino's death and considered the best thing he ever composed.
Milan, Paris and the last decade
The 1970s took him to Italy, where he recorded the fiercely electric Libertango, and to collaborations with jazz musicians and lyricists. His final great ensemble, the second quintet of 1978–1988, produced the album he named his finest, Tango: Zero Hour. In August 1990 he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in Paris; he died in Buenos Aires on 4 July 1992, leaving roughly three thousand works and a form of music that no longer needed anyone's permission. For the authoritative record of his life and catalogue, see the Fundación Astor Piazzolla, with which this journal has no affiliation.