Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla (March 11, 1921 – July 4, 1992) was an Argentine tango composer, bandoneon player, and arranger. His works revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music. A virtuoso bandoneonist, he regularly performed his own compositions with a variety of ensembles. He has more than 1000 musical compositions to his credit which are regarded as enduring classics. In 1992, American music critic Stephen Holden described Piazzolla as "the world's foremost composer of Tango music".
Astor Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, near Buenos Aires. When he was still an infant his family moved to the Bronx, New York. Exposed to both classical music and jazz as a young person, Piazzolla began studying the bandoneón, a melancholic-sounding relative of the accordion, which was the lead instrument of tango ensembles and gave the music its characteristic passionate and yearning flavor. Even as a teenager, Piazzolla displayed such virtuosity with the instrument that Carlos Gardel, the legendary tango vocalist, requested him as an accompanist.
Piazzolla spent some ten years under the tutelage of Ginastéra, studying the formal structures of classical music by crafting symphonies, overtures, piano concerti, chamber music, and sonatas. During this period Piazzolla temporarily turned away from the tango. In 1943 he started piano lessons with the Argentine classical pianist Raúl Spivak, which would continue for the next five years, and wrote his first classical works Preludio No. 1 for Violin and Piano and Suite for Strings and Harps. That same year he married his first wife, Dedé Wolff.
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| Boulanger and Piazzolla 1955 |
In 1953 Ginastéra suggested Piazzolla enter a competition for young composers. Piazzolla agreed to enter one of his symphonic pieces. The composition took first place and won Piazzolla a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the renowned composition teacher. Boulanger instantly recognized Piazzolla’s talent for classical composition, but she also sensed a lack of personal expression in his work. When she heard Piazzolla play a tango he had written, she knew that his gift for the tango had been the missing element in his scholarly compositions. She encouraged him to fuse his outside musical influences—jazz and classical music—with his native tango. Piazzolla then began to compose tangos that melded dance and concert musics.
Upon his return to Buenos Aires, he formed his own band. The music they played was an innovative fusion of styles Piazzolla christened tango nuevo (new tango). His seminal group Quintetto Nuevo Tango (New Tango Quintet) formed in 1960; it was with this group that Piazzolla wrote one his most famous compositions, Adios Nonino.
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| Amelita Baltar |
Tango nuevo outraged aficionados of the old-style tango; however, Piazzolla’s contributions revitalized the genre, the popularity of which was nearly extinct in Latin America and Europe, where rock and roll replaced more traditional music. In 1968, he left his wife for a singer, Amelita Baltar, for whom he wrote a body of work, including his opera, Maria de Buenos Aires.
In 1976 he met Laura Escalada, a television presenter, whom he later married. Piazzolla’s reworking of the tango introduced harmonies typical of such classical composers as Maurice Ravel, Olivier Messiaen, and Béla Bartók. Three-part fugues and jazz-style improvisations enlivened melodic lines, while underneath, Stravinsky-inspired syncopation blended with the tango’s traditional pulsing rhythms. Piazzolla also incorporated a walking-bass line in some of his compositions.
By the early 1980s, tango nuevo had enjoyed more than 20 years of popularity, and Piazzolla was at the height of his musical career. In Argentina his music had ushered in a new generation of tango composers and was featured in film scores, televisions, and commercials. The restructured New Tango Quintet (with Piazzolla on bandoneón, Pablo Zeigler on piano, Fernando Suarez Paz on violin, Heracio Malviciono on semi-acoustic guitar, and Hector Console on double bass) performed intense, creatively charged new tango nuevo works captured on two notable studio albums: Tango: Zero Hour, and La Camorra. In 1989 Piazzolla formed the New Tango Sextet, which incorporated an additional bandoneón. Piazzolla continued to compose and perform new works with the sextet.
He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in Paris on August 4, 1990, which left him in a coma, and died in Buenos Aires, just under two years later on July 4, 1992, without regaining consciousness.
(Edited from Britannia, The Guardian & Wikpedia)