Carlos Gardel, photographed in 1930.
"Gardel sings better every day".
The man who changed tango forever died in 1935, but there are many Argentines who subscribe to this statement, among them the historian Felipe Pigna, author of the biography
Gardel
(Planet, 2022).
"He sings better because we listen to him better," she replies in an interview with EL PAÍS in Buenos Aires.
Pigna remembers that in the 1920s “to listen to him well you had to be very close to him”, whether in theaters or cafes, and the recordings that began to be made at that time were of much lower quality than today.
The commotion caused by the tragic death in a plane crash of what was "the first great Latin American idol", according to Pigna, and the fact that he remains the greatest figure in the world of tango a century later contribute to popular devotion.
Charles Romuald Gardes, later known worldwide as Carlos Gardel, was born on December 11, 1890 in the French city of Toulouse.
The son of Berthe, a single mother, he arrived in her arms in Buenos Aires after crossing the Atlantic on a steamboat when he was a two-year-old baby.
From a very young age, the future
Zorzal
"He would go to bed and wake up singing, he would take a broomstick as a guitar and repeat the songs and melodies that he listened to," Pigna writes in his biography.
At 11 or 12 years old he earned a few coins singing in cafes and received the applause of his listeners.
“I am going to be a great singer”, he liked to repeat to the annoyance of his mother, who “like most immigrants, dreamed of a doctor son”.
As a child and adolescent, Gardel sang folklore.
He had not yet come across tango, which grew in the underworld, surrounded by the bad reputation of its brothel origins and the "immoral dances" criticized in the newspapers of the time.
"Tango awaits you, at some point in life you find it," says Pigna, referring to a phrase that lovers of the 2x4 rhythm usually say to those who are fascinated for the first time with the most international of Argentine music. .
“The history of tango is closely linked to immigration.
It is a very eclectic music with Argentine folkloric elements, also elements of the habanera, Andalusian tango, Italian music.
There is a great mixture that reflects like few cultural expressions the fusion between the Argentine and the immigrant”, says Pigna.
Gardel, born in France and nationalized Argentine, is an example of this syncretism.
“Tango traveled to Paris in 1910, when it was still danced more than sung, and it triumphed in the midst of an intense moral debate about what it had to do with erotic dance.
Even the Pope spoke out against that dance.
But the triumph in Paris made the society of Buenos Aires, which always looked a lot at Paris, validate it and the girls well began to play tangos on the piano”, continues the historian.
“Tango has a tremendously deep and philosophical poetry.
The lyrics stopped talking about anecdotal or sex-related questions and began to talk about all the questions of the human being, such as love, loneliness, joy, sadness, the question of what we are doing here, questions that as a general rule the popular music does not consider it”, he details.
Carlos Gardel and Rosita Moreno, in 1935. ARCHIVE
the happiest night
Gardel's encounter with tango, at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, changed them both forever.
“He asks me what was the happiest day of my life.
It was not a day, it was a night, the happiest and of which I have the most pleasant memories.
It was when I sang my first successful tango, the tango that really gave me a chance.
With him I managed to draw the attention of the public and businessmen.
Do you want to see the irony of the title?
It was called
My sad night
”, declared Gardel to a Brazilian magazine in 1934.
Since then, they have not parted anymore.
The inventor of the tango-song wrote very few lyrics, but he composed some of the most famous melodies of this musical genre by ear.
For a head
is one of the most widespread tangos in the world.
It became a classic for a scene from the movie
Scent of a Woman
, in which Al Pacino and Gabrielle Anwar dance to this beautiful song.
The melody came to him at dawn and there he called his friend, the musician Terig Tucci, to ask him to get out of bed and go to the piano.
“Take a note, Beethoven”, he told her while he whistled it to her from the other phone.
It triumphed in Argentina, Spain, France, the United States and in much of the Latin American continent.
“Gardel was the first great Latin American idol.
Thousands of people were waiting for him in hotels and airports.
He would be a
rockstar
at a time when there was no Instagram or YouTube and he was known for his presence in the movies, on the radio, in the notes.
He received some 15,000 letters per month from fans, which he could not answer, and he learned to write with both hands to be able to autograph the photos that he distributed among his fans, ”says Pigna.
"When he returned from Paris after having sung at the Opera and having acted in French films, he was already Gardel, the triumphant Argentine," he remarks.
Even today, in Argentina the phrase “es Gardel” is used to refer to someone who is successful.
Argentine singer, Carlos Gardel.Bettmann/CORBIS
A lover of good food and nightlife, he resorted to the gym and discipline to maintain an always impeccable figure that many tried to imitate.
“Gardel, who was a guy from the popular sectors, ended up imposing fashion even on the upper classes, who dressed and combed their hair like Gardel,” he adds.
Pigna assures that
the Morocho del Abasto
was not interested in party politics, but he did always keep in mind his humble origins.
In 1933, in the midst of a serious economic crisis in Argentina, he was asked to take a photo of the launch [of an album] in one of the two most luxurious hotels in Buenos Aires.
"He rejected them and chose to be photographed in Villa Destrabajo, a very poor neighborhood," he says.
On Thursday, March 28, 1935,
the Magician
began what would be the last tour of his life.
Puerto Rico, Colombia, Havana and Mexico were some of the stops he had planned.
He didn't finish it.
On June 24, the tango singer died at the Medellín airport, when the plane in which he was preparing to travel to Cali left the central runway and crashed into another.
"Gardel is our first popular myth and this was clearly seen in the psychosis that caused his death, which included suicide attempts," Pigna writes in the prologue to his book.
"His wake at Luna Park was massive and included hours of tangos with the best orchestras, dancers and singers, endless speeches, hundreds of fainting spells and dozens of people hospitalized for decompensation," she continues.
Following his famous tango
De él Soledad
, an endless caravan accompanied him to the Chacarita cemetery.
“Gardel's influence on tango is still alive and his compositions are heard all over the world.
Rosalía in New York sang
Volver
a cappella, in a beautiful version, similar to the one by Estrella Morente in the [Pedro] Almodóvar movie”, he points out.
In New York, the famous singer met the Argentine who would cause the next revolution in tango, Astor Piazzolla.
He invited him to join the Latin American tour in which he met his death, but Piazzolla's father did not allow it.
“Do you remember that you sent me two telegrams asking me to join you with my bandoneon?” Piazzolla wrote in a public letter to the singer in 1978. “It was the spring of '35 and I was turning 14 years old.
The old men didn't give me permission and neither did the union.
Charlie, I saved myself!
Instead of playing the bandoneon I would be playing the harp”, he joked.
Funeral of Carlos Gardel in the Chacarita cemetery in Buenos Aires. General Archive of the Nation
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