Horacio Ferrer

"At the very center of the question, the 'why' of the tango's being so attractive to poets, is, I think, the fact that the tango is itself entirely poetic."

Horacio Ferrer, who passed away in 2014, was to contemporary tango what Ira Gershwin was to Tin Pan Alley. And maybe more. He was a recognized poet, a tango lyricist of formidable talent, and a noted historian—of promethean output—of tango music and dance. His best-known lyrics are those for Chiquilín de Bachín and Balada para un loco, both composed by Astor Piazzolla. Each is instantly tanguero although distinctly unique…true modern classics. Horacio also wrote the lyrics to the libretto for Piazzolla's opera María de Buenos Aires. The two men were very close friends.

I had the pleasure of seeing María de Buenos Aires in Berkeley, California in 1998, and joining in on the long, standing ovation at the end. The musical ensemble of bandoneón, strings, percussion and singers was led by Gidon Kremer, the renowned Latvian concert violinist who is also a devoted Piazzolla fan. The spoken portion of the opera, which is a very important element of it, was handled by Horacio himself.

I had met with him the day before the Berkeley performance. He was a smallish man with a well-trimmed moustache and goatee, dressed in a well-ironed white shirt buttoned to the throat, a smoothly pressed white wool scarf, a navy-blue blazer and black slacks. A small red rose flourished from his lapel. The conversation was conducted in Spanish, which I translated for this article.

When you met Horacio Ferrer, the first thing you would notice about him was his voice, which had the depth and color of that of a very fine stage actor….

**

Horacio: (arranging the scarf about his neck) My voice has tightened up so much, Terry, that it sounds like a double base, when really it's more like a violin-cello. (Laughter.)

Terry: I'm here today with Horacio Ferrer, the most famous man in the world…the world of the tango, of course, and I have a half-dozen questions that I'd like to ask you.

Horacio: (Laughter.) To which I'd very much like to respond.

Terry: I think it's not very usual to find a popular music tradition that attracts lyricists of such high quality as the tango has attracted, poets like Discépolo, Manzí, Borges, Blázques, Espósito and yourself. Why in your opinion has the tango brought in poets of such quality?

Horacio: At the very center of the question, the "why" of the tango's being so attractive to poets, is, I think, the fact that the tango is itself entirely poetic. The music is poetic, the dance is poetic, the singing is poetic, and the world from which the tango evolves is poetic. It's the world of the night, it's the bohemian world where money has little importance, and to be sure where love has a great deal of importance, triumphant love or destroyed love, the affections, distant affection, a love of looking back through space and time.

So, they're all colors taken from the poetic palette. And besides, the tango is one of the few song-forms in this century that undertakes not only a lyric excursion but a reflective one as well. The tango thinks. The tango thinks about the truth without claiming to modify it. It simply meditates upon it, which is also part of poetry.

Terry: Here in the United States some of us sometimes feel a little sequestered in the past, when it comes to the tango, especially in the milongas where the kind of music they play is always from the thirties, forties or fifties. The same forty tangos, over and over. It's the same in Buenos Aires?

Horacio: Yes, it's the same.

Terry: Frequently the music of more modern composers like Piazzolla and the others doesn't get the respect it deserves. Can you help us with your opinion of contemporary tango, especially the reason that no one dances, or wishes to dance, to the more modern tango tempos?

Horacio: There are many who do want to dance to contemporary tango. But there has existed a dance tradition in the tango from the very beginning of the tango itself, that has gone through diverse stages, but that has always been quite attached to the kind of ambiance from which it originally came. So that the dance did not accompany the great poetic and musical evolution of the tango, and it has now been seized upon, instead of by milongueros, by dancers of classic and modern ballet. The stage shows. But in the milongas, every milonguero chooses his own music and type of tango. That's no sin. But it would be a sin were the more modern kind of music to go on without the milongueros to dance to it. I don’t mean that stage dance. I mean, what is danced in the milongas.

Actually, Piazzolla is marvelous for dancing, because besides his being a musician of many tempos (he very much liked tempo), he changed the internal metronome of the tango itself. Piazzolla liked his singers to be musicians capable of many tempos as well, in as much as it's rhythmically a very rich music and should be danced to. So, yes, the dance has been taken over, at least on stage, by classic modern ballet dancers instead of by milongueros, and they have occasionally achieved marvelous things, like the work of Miguel Zotto and Milena Kreb…who's a veritable creation herself, no? Also, some of the work that el maestro Juan Carlos Copes has done, as well as other dancers who aren't tangueros, but who…like this chica from Tango Kinesis, Ana María Stekelman, who's been so passionate about the tango without being part of the tango world itself.

Because, you know, the tango has always profited from people, talents, and situations that don't belong to the tango. For instance, the tango has stolen some of rock's instruments: the electric guitar, the electric keyboard, the drum set. The tango's always been a bit of a thief, in that it enriches itself without losing its virtue, and that's what happens in the case of the dance as well.

Terry: You write about the influence of rock music….

Horacio: Of course. Why not? Fundamentally, all cultures contain vessels that communicate with each other. And sometimes cultures clash with each other. And in the case of rock music, a true clash took place in 1960 or so, with such extraordinary talents as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, to be sure, and others. But in Buenos Aires—with so defined a personality, everything porteño, with its tango, its night, its bohemian ways—it was a clash that afterwards took on distinct consequences. Since the kids who were doing the rock music were living in the same places, the same city, the same night, with the same incitements as the tangueros, they started imitating the tangueros. And they began to find out that that art with which they had had such a run-in was worthy of respect…given their abilities, because not all of them were good musicians or very good singers, and the tango is musically schooled while rock music is not.

Terry: Quite the contrary.

Horacio: The rock people started talking to each other, to figure out the harmonies the tango had, the tango's counterpoint, its polyrhythms, the tango poetic…and the singers, they began to like all that. And since they belonged in the same starry enclave, eh?, in the same night and the same pizza parlors and the same little black holes-in-the-wall and the same bars, they started going around with the tangueros. And I think they're much better off for it, because it's made them more human and made them much more of their own place and, therefore, more universal.

OK. Shall we talk about señor Piazzolla?

Terry: Yes. When he was a young man, he was in the United States, in New York.

Horacio: Yes, a long, long time.

Terry: Do you know that in English he had a Lower East Side accent? I heard him speaking on the radio, and his accent is quite New York, especially when you consider that he's Argentine. A lot of fun. Can you give us some comments about the elements of North American music, especially jazz, in Piazzolla's music?

Horacio: I think that really there are not too many jazz elements in Piazzolla's music. They're there, but they're not central. I think that Piazzolla's idea—well, maybe he attained something different from what he proposed—I think he was very essentially a tanguista, playing the bandoneón. That instrument is very specific to the tango. Other things can be played on the bandoneón, like Bach's music, but the bandoneón is the very face of the tango, and he played the bandoneón. Besides, he came from a race of tanguistas, because he played in Troilo's orchestra, who was a great innovator, and he was an admirer of Pugliese and De Caro, who had been the greatest of previous innovators. So that he was very involved, and all the elements of Piazzolla's music are of the tango.

What happens is that, in the harmonic and contrapuntal parts of his music, he finds things from other musical springs, like jazz, also from European classical music, with which he garnishes the dish. But the beef, the churrasco, is from Buenos Aires. The accompaniment, the decoration is from others…because, besides, he liked differentiating himself from the tangueros because he was so different.

I believe he changed the very scale…the size… of the tango. And by changing the scale I mean that, before, in the western tradition, there was the 78 r.p.m. record that could hold six or seven phrases of sixteen measures each. He extended that. And he is always passionate in whatever he does, in the beginning, the middle and the end, and so, that way, there are works that last six or eight minutes or longer. So, he changed the scale of the tango, but always with the same depth of feeling. Because there are musicians that have a kind of elastic that is red in color, but when they stretch it, it gets pink. Not him. He's always red, what he does is always intense, it's always very human and very profound in its poetic musical discourse.

Terry: You come from Montevideo, don't you?

Horacio: I was born in Montevideo. I could have been born in Montevideo or Buenos Aires, which in reality are the same city.

Terry: But are there different musical elements in the tango montevideano?

Horacio: No, no. The school of the tango is porteño (i.e. from Buenos Aires). What we do have in Montevideo is more black people. They've disappeared from Buenos Aires…in total, in all of Argentina now there remain only three thousand black families.

So, in Montevideo, there's a lot of candombe and a lot of milonga. Because the milonga is Black. The tango has nothing of the Blacks in it; the milonga is totally Black. It contains the essence of the Blacks. And so, Montevideo is more milonguera and more candombera than it is tanguera. But one doesn't know, in the end, which city is more or less tanguera, because the fact is it's the same cultural region, the same substance of customs and habits, with small differences.

Terry: I want to ask about Chiquilín de Bachín (The Kid from the Bachín). It's one of my favorite tangos, especially in terms of the poetry of the lyrics. For me, the vision of this kid looking through the window of the Bachín boliche (cafe/bar)…he's probably thirsty…well, hungry…he's very poor, probably….

Horacio: Yes, yes, he's very poor.

Terry: And the idea of his poverty, and the riches of the people on the other side of the windowpane, that's like a transparent barrier…and the difference between them….

Horacio: Right, right. The street simply continues being cruel, while through the windowpane inside everything is much more hospitable and affectionate, and there's a lot more food.

Terry: It's a poem?

Horacio: No. It was written to the music, eh? I wrote it to Piazzolla's music. When he passed it by me, la-la-la la-la-la (Note: Horacio sings a few notes of the melody.) he says "Do you like it?" And I said, "It's lovely! But what does it mean to suggest? Because I'll write something from the inside of your feelings, from inside what you're thinking." He said to me, "It sounds to me like a children's round." From that, the idea occurred to me of this little kid selling flowers (whom indeed I still know now…he's so much older now. He's forty. He was eight then.) And that's why I wrote those lyrics, no? Because of Piazzolla's idea that this was a children's round, and because of what happened in that Bachín cantina to which Piazzolla and I used to go to eat, into which all those characters of the night would come, no?

Terry: And the Balada para un loco (Ballad for a Crazy Man)?

Horacio: A similar idea. A crazy man chattering at you. I suggested a few of the lyrics to Piazzolla, and musically he did the rest. Marvelous! Especially when Roberto Goyeneche was the voice.

Terry: And what's the state of contemporary tango in Buenos Aires now? For example, are there musicians who are writing tangos now?

Horacio: There are two great orchestras, a national one and a municipal one, that are both excellent. That never existed in the tango. The tango was always like. . . anti-official, right? And that's changed a little in recent years, and there's the Orquesta del Tango de Buenos Aires directed by Carlitos Garcia and Raul Garello and the Orquesta Nacional de Música Argentina, that plays only the tango, that's directed by maestro Osvaldo Piro, and they're both very good. And then there are the classic orchestras, like Salgan's, like the Quinteto Real, Mariano Mores's orchestra; and there are many new orchestras, like Tangata Rea, Siglo XXX, quite young groups. For which we have work to do at the Academy, and that's what we're there for, to conserve the different styles. That's why there's the Orchesta Académica.

And now we've got the entrance of women into the orchestras. Orchestras were always all men. And now there are many women playing in Argentine orchestras and everywhere in the world. And with that, the old tradition of European tango, that was a very hardened sort of tango, a less affectionate one, you might put it, has given way. Also because the maestros of the Rio de La Plata (the areas around Buenos Aires and Montevideo) have been to Holland, Belgium, the U.S., Germany, Spain, France, Canada, and have given dance lessons, music lessons, how to conduct, how to play the bandoneón. The language of the tango has been profoundly understood, so now it's a subject with real sensitivity.

You know, the young guy playing the bandoneón in our María de Buenos Aires presentation…he's Norwegian! Learned Spanish in order to be able to speak with the tangueros, with his proper masters.

Terry: That's my story, too. I was studying Spanish just so that I could escape from a life crisis a number of years ago, and I liked the tango lyrics because I thought I could learn Spanish better through the lyrics, and the music as well. But a friend of mine, Sonia Fava, the woman who taught me to speak Spanish, told me one day, "You can't study the tango without dancing it." And I, who had not danced a step in my life, told her, "No, I can't dance. I just can't." But after a while of insisting on it, she convinced me, and I went very, very nervously to a tango lesson. Sonia had introduced me to Nora Olivera, and I've been studying with her ever since.

Horacio: Well, to dance the tango, you have to listen to it, to listen to the music well, to what the rhythms and the lyrics are saying, to what each tango is saying, no?

Terry: I'm going to go see María de Buenos Aires this Saturday, and I'd like to know how you wrote it. Where'd the idea come from?

Horacio: It came from two places: one is that, in 1965, I had written a book called Romancero Canyengue.

Terry: Yes, it's poetry . . .

Horacio: It's poetry. And it was the first book, or the first poems that had the good fortune to be in that book, in which I found that I had my own voice. I found myself…the voice in the tango, and Piazzolla liked it so much that he told me, "From now on you're working with me, because what you're doing in words, I'm doing in music." He invited me to do a piece. He said, "No, no, not a tango. Do a big work. I want to do something like West Side Story," he told me. So, I went about writing what he'd asked me to write.

Terry: I imagine your heart was beating.

Horacio: Please. Please. Of course! But that meant I would abandon everything else, and it happens that I like that kind of thing. And, well, I wrote it in 1967, starting in August or September. And in December, Piazzolla came to Montevideo and I read what I had written to him…it was almost everything. And we went to a little bar in Uruguay, and on my bandoneón…because I play the bandoneon, too…he wrote the music. We finished it in Buenos Aires and put it on for the first time on May 8, 1968. And it was so revolutionary. Raul Lavié was going to sing it for us, because he was in Mexico City doing Man of La Mancha, but then he couldn't come. So now, for the first time, years later, he's singing with us on this tour now in the United States. It's fantastic, no?

So, it was the first such work we'd done with Astor, whom I'd known since 1948 when I was fifteen years old and I went to see his orchestra. I was a friend of his, and more so when I did La Guardia Nueva, which he loved. He always came to play, to talk, to feel like he was with the young people, which he liked.

Terry: There are moments in the history of the arts when a group of artists arrives in some particular place, like Paris in the twenties, for example. . . Hemingway, Richard Wright, the writers . . .

Horacio: Picasso and Dali . . .

Terry: To be sure! Here in San Francisco in the fifties with the—

Horacio: The Beatniks.

Terry: Exactly. And at those times, there's…they're not very frequent in the history of the arts…there's a gigantic and sudden flourishing of artistic activity. New York in the fifties, with Jackson Pollack and Motherwell and Klein. The South American Boom of the sixties and seventies, with the works of Garcia Marquez, Vargas Lllosa, Manuel Puig, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende, Borges. . . the list is very long. Jose Donoso. Eduardo Galeano. Ernesto Sabato. It was an extraordinary advance of ideas and works. It's my theory that that's the way it was also during the Golden Age of the tango.

Horacio: But the Golden Age isn't done with yet, eh?

Terry: (Laughter) I agree. So, how can you explain it, in the case of Buenos Aires?

Horacio: Because there's a circumstance that makes Buenos Aires into the Paris of the Americas, but one which has a much richer root system, I think. Because Paris, which to be sure is a center of Anglo-Latin culture, like the French race itself, doesn't contain anything that the Buenos Aires tango contains in a very powerful way. The tango is a combination of the Indian and the American, which includes the Indian who has now disappeared, but who still remains in the gaucho and in the compadrito. And it exists in the very essence itself of the tango and the idea of the city, with its port, and the great abundance of culture from the rest of the world. And that's very strong. The immigration and the scholars and musicians who came, cultivated musicians who came, too. They all came. I include everyone here in this port city. It became a kind of council, because Buenos Aires has that additional attractiveness, that it's an American city, an Indo-American city. And even though the black people have disappeared from Buenos Aires, the indigenous blood, with all the importance it carries of our national poem "Martín Fierro" and all the gaucho poetry, has not.

I was thinking yesterday that if the Cowboy is the equivalent of the Gaucho, the Cowboy nonetheless doesn't have a literature. He's got the movies, but no literature. The Cowboy doesn't have a fundamentally great work like the Argentine epic poem "Martin Fierro". Gaucho literature is a unique case, and it's the very basis of the tango. And that's where the attractiveness of Buenos Aires comes from, no? the city with a European aspect and an American content. That's why it seems to me logical that it's such a magnet.

Terry: I have a theory about the tango: the tango is porteño (i.e. from the port city of Buenos Aires), naturally. But there's been a great deal of emigration from Buenos Aires….

Horacio: A lot of political emigration from 1976 on, because of the military takeover, when many intellectuals who left Buenos Aires arrived elsewhere, to explain the tango. That was a very important instance. It's a great idea, that, the idea of emigration. Incidentally, that is why the Blacks left Buenos Aires…or were forced out. The military government closed down all the black milongas and clubs and made it very difficult for the black people in Argentina. Many of them went to Montevideo.

Terry: And what was the situation in the seventies? What were the effects of it on your work?

Horacio: They prohibited some of my songs, but through circumstances so stupid that the head on the censor's shoulders appeared to be no head at all. But that's the way it is! Or maybe it's the censor's wife, telling him, "No, don't let that through! Censor it, or I'll slap you!" (Laughter)

Terry: My family is Irish, and I have a friend who's an Irish writer who says that, until recently, if the government in Ireland liked your work, you were no writer at all. (Laughter) You had to go to jail in order to become a real writer.

Horacio: How terrific! That's good!

Terry: Well, the Argentine censor—

Horacio: No, no, that was a horrifying thing. Horrifying. The Spanish philosopher Ortega said, "A military man is a warrior turned into a bureaucrat." And those are bureaucrats, not warriors. They've lost all the guts the warrior has, and now are desk-bound cowards. Sadly, that's the way it is. They're afraid of war, when the warrior is someone who loves war, whether or not it has a valid motive. So, they brought their bellicose spirit to the Argentine citizenry, to the TV stations, to the ministries, the schools…a very lamentable thing. What happened, I hope we never forget it, because that happened in our beloved country, and it had better not ever happen again! No? It better not happen again! It's an historical instance from which we can learn much, no? so that we can build a present that serves us into the future.

(Terence Clarke wishes to thank guitarist Guillermo García for his invaluable help with the translation of this interview.)

Copyright © 1998 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

Note: No Plagiarism Software, also known as Artificial Intelligence, was used in the composition of this piece.

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