Nadia Boulanger told him to stop hiding the tango
Astor Piazzolla almost abandoned the bandoneon for classical respectability. In Paris, Nadia Boulanger heard his earnest concert pieces, then lit up when he played the tango Triunfal and told him that was where his gift lived. Nuevo tango followed: jazz, counterpoint, and chamber textures inside a dance tradition that many Argentines found scandalous.
Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata on March 11, 1921, the only child of Italian-descended parents. In 1925 the family moved to New York's Greenwich Village; his father found a bandoneon in a pawn shop in 1929. At home he heard Carlos Gardel and Julio de Caro alongside Bach and jazz. In 1934 he met Gardel and appeared as a paper boy in El día que me quieras; his father refused to let him join Gardel's tour, which ended in a fatal plane crash in 1935. Piazzolla later joked that he would have played the harp instead of the bandoneon.
Back in Argentina he joined Aníbal Troilo's orchestra in Buenos Aires at seventeen, arranged for Troilo, and studied orchestration with Alberto Ginastera while working tango clubs at night. Troilo grew wary of his advanced ideas; Piazzolla left in 1944 for Francisco Fiorentino's band, then formed his own Orquesta Típica in 1946. A 1953 performance of his Buenos Aires Symphony, featuring two bandoneons, sparked a fight in the audience—and won him a French grant to study with Boulanger. She redirected him to tango; he learned standing bandoneon technique in Paris and returned to found the Octeto Buenos Aires in 1955, a singerless chamber group with electric guitar and jazz-like improvisation.
Nuevo tango made him controversial at home even as Europe and North America embraced it. After his father's death in 1959 he wrote Adiós Nonino in under an hour. His first Quinteto, assembled in 1960, became the formation that best voiced his approach. Collaborations followed with Jorge Luis Borges and poet Horacio Ferrer, including the operita María de Buenos Aires and the popular Balada para un loco. He died on July 4, 1992; Stephen Holden that year called him the world's foremost tango composer.
Source: Astor Piazzolla
