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Astor Piazzolla: A Note
1998

Like Mahler, like Brecht, his soul is vast and imperfect. To paraphrase Neruda, a poet whose own Latin American soul is so similar in its black depths and flashes of blinding light, his is a music of the "flawed confusion of human beings...music worn away as by acid by the labor of hands, impregnated with sweat and smoke, smelling of lilies and of urine, splashed by the variety of what we do, legally or illegally..It is a music as impure as old clothes, as a body, with its foodstains and its shame, with wrinkles, obvservations, dreams, wakefulness, prophecies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks, idylls, political beliefs, negations, doubts, affirmations..."

Astor Piazzolla's art came into our Northern Hemisphere consciousness at roughly the same time as Neruda, Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Borges and the many other startling Latin American literary voices began to penetrate our normally insular ways of viewing the world. Their work shocked us with its mixture of brutality, magic, sensuality and humane honesty. The vitality of their expressive world, its emotional range, its unblinking vision of the human condition, its humor in the face of crushing economic and political weights, gave us a shock like a brilliant, life-giving jab of pain. In the musical world alone, the discovery of Piazzolla was like the finding of some exotic and dangerous potency drug, a drug that could bring with it the double-edged sword of ecstasy and the bitterest of remorse.

It is a rare musical mind that can elevate a single small musical form like the tango into an expressive vehicle of such depth and range. The impression we take away from experiencing these tangos is of a complete and indigenous native voice, one whose roots were as innately Buenos Aireian as Tchaikovsky's were Muscovite. We then learn with amazement that Piazzolla was far from being the home-grown phenomenon that his persona might suggest, but rather a highly cultured musician, a student of of the great French pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger (teacher of Aaron Copland and friend of Stravinsky), and a long-time resident of New York City. Piazzolla was a highly cultured composer of instrumental and theatrical music with a secure grasp of musical theory and possessing the practical technique to realize his ideas. But his music flourished more naturally in the cafes and bars of the urban centers of Argentina than in any concert hall. For him, composing and performing were inextricably woven together. One thinks of Bach and of Ellington for models of a creative musician who saw little or no separation between improvising, composing and performing. The joy for us is that Piazzolla's music makes the transition to other realizations, to other performers, as it does here in these extraordinary versions by Gidon Kremer.

The more time one spends with his music, the more the music's startling little perversities begin to reveal themselves. A loose, spontaneous tango will suddenly engage in a passage of carefully strategized counterpoint that brings with it an ambience of controlled rigor to a music of otherwise boldly erotic lyricism. Piazzolla shares with the Brazilian Heitor Villa Lobos a strong affinity for the sequential harmonic movement of Sebastian Bach. These harmonic sequences have a sense of inevitability in the way they pull inexorably toward the cadence, and it is the core of Piazzolla's art to arrange--or to postpone-- these arrivals in the most wrenchingly bittersweet of ways. It is as much as saying that you have finally arrived home, but home is no longer the same. Your house has been razed, and strangers now live in the neighborhood where you once played as a child.

Piazzola's music is fundamentally a tragic statement. Coming at a time when so much contemporary music has drifted either into irrelevent formalism or else toward a hectic romance with commercialism, these tangos speak to us with the authority of genuine feeling. Their roots lie in Buenos Aires's jumble of colliding cultures: Spanish, German, Jewish, Native American, Italian. It is a true "multi-culture" yet to smoothed out and neutered by self consciousness. It is a discovery like the best of all discoveries: unexpected, multi-faceted, volatile, generous.

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