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No
sooner had Astor Piazzolla returned from his studies in Paris than he embarked
upon a successful international career with his own personal redefinition
of the tango and the milonga. His move to New York in 1959 at the behest
of record companies, radio and television, must have seemed like an insult
to the critics and the establishmentfor what he was 'exporting' had little
or nothing to do with the timehonoured forms.
The
man causing all the trouble carried on regardless. The
attacks of the traditionalists on Piazzolla induced him to launch a counteroffensive.
Reproached for composing pieces that were no longer proper tangos, he conceded
the point to his critics, replying that this works were really Musica popular
contemporanea de la ciudad de Buenos Aires ('contemporary folk music of
the city of Buenos Aires'). At first it seemed as if he intended to make
peace with his opponents - yet behind this 'contemporary folk music' was
nothing other than tango nuevo in its purest form.
Working with one new
ensemble after another, he was constantly discovering new tonal possibilities. At
about this time, Piazzolla founded a new ensemble, the Conjunto 9, a successful
synthesis of all the elements he had used over the years in his Octeto.
In it the same percussion instruments that he called for in Maria de Buenos
Aires were employed. In 1972 Astor Piazzolla and his Conjunto 9 accepted
an invitation to Rome from the Italian Latin-American Institute (IILA)
and gave their first concerts in Italy. Radio and television also showed
an interest in the fifty-one-year-old 'newcomer'.
Not
all the representatives of the 'golden age of tango' turned against their
innovative compatriot, as is shown by the composition entitled Vardarito.
This title honours the great tango violinist Elvino Vardaro, who died in
1971 at the age of sixty-eight. He influenced not only Piazzolla, but also
Antonio Agri, who played this homage to Vardaro in 1972 as a member of
Conjunto 9. Although Vardaro belonged to the generation of the traditional
tango musicians, he was apparently able to come to terms with Piazzolla's
style so well that he even performed in his Quinteto in 1962.
In
1972 Bernardo Bertolucci contacted Piazzolla and commissioned him to write
music for the film Last Tango in Paris, which was to be released the next
year. This came just at a time when the composer was being subjected to
a barrage of criticism in his own country; illness prevented the joint
project, and only two promising fragments of it are extant, Jeanne y Paul,
the double portrait of the two main characters, and El penultimo ('The
Penultimate'), which was presumably intended to be the film's theme tune.
On
the other hand, the music to Marco Bellocchio's film Enrico IV (with Marcella
Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale) is complete. Oblivion was nominated
as late as 1993 for a Grammy Award as 'best instrumental composition'.
In addition to the title piece Enrico IV, the same project also produced
Remembrance, the descriptive Cavalcata ('Ride on horseback') and the Ave
Maria, which seems to nestle up like a silhouette to its famous earlier
counterpart, the Ave Maria which Charles Gounod wrote over an 'accompaniment'
by Johann Sebastian Bach.
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