Sprung from the barrios and arrabales of the cities and settlements along the banks of South America’s Río de la Plata, a melting pot of Spanish, Italian, African, and Indigenous cultures, tango’s rich history is like no other. One doesn’t merely dance tango, it embraces you, it inhabits you, you succumb to its spell!
© 2022 Karlos Bermann
In the late 19th Century, for the first three decades of
tango, there was no printed sheet music. Sound recording didn’t yet exist. Itinerant
musicians—duos or trios, usually—guitar, flute, violin—spread the music they
learned and played by ear for the most part. In 1866, in fact, the first tangos
were danced to
habanera, a musical genre from Cuba, with roots in Spain, West
Africa, and France. Perhaps you never heard of habanera, but in the 19th
Century it was popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Listen to the
aria “Habanera” from Georges Bizet’s 1871 opera
Carmen. You may recognize the
tune. You can easily hear its similarities to tango, including the drama of the
2/4 time signature they share. Here is an instrumental version of "Habanera":
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| Tango dancers circa 1897 |
The troubadour musicians borrowed from each other and
improvised, influenced by the dancers themselves as well as by musical genres
such as
candombe and the creole
milonga of the Argentine and Uruguayan pampas
(not to be confused with the music that is called milonga today). Some of the
musicians who composed or adapted the music wrote it down by hand. But it was
not until 1897 that the first tango sheet music was published—or rather
printed—by its author.
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| Anselmo Rosendo Mendizábal |
The composer is question was Anselmo Rosendo Mendizábal, one
of many colorful characters in tango’s history.
He was born in Buenos Aires in 1868, 16 months after tango’s debut as a
distinct dance. As a young man Mendizábal came into an inheritance of some
300,000 Argentine pesos, a very considerable sum for the time. But he liked
fast living and quickly burned through the money. Fortunately, he had been
taught to play the piano as a boy, and was able to survive by giving lessons to
the children of the rich. A few years later he was supplementing that income by
playing piano in the salon of Laura Montserrat. Tango was still a dance of
the lower classes at that time, shunned as immoral by the polite society of
Buenos Aires. But Montserrat’s establishment, it seems, was frequented by
well-to-do men, especially the horse-racing crowd. Given the circumstances and
reputation of tango at the time, Laura Montserrat's undoubtedly offered more in the way
of entertainment than dancing.
Like most tango musicians of his day, Mendizábal wasn’t
paid, he played for tips. In 1897, he got the idea to dedicate one of his
compositions to a wealthy cattleman and frequent patron of Laura Montserrat’s.
That man, one Ricardo Segovia, had his estancia in the Argentine province of
Entre Ríos. Mendizábal therefore named
his tango “El Entrerriano,” (the man from Entre Ríos). He had copies of the
sheet music printed with a dedication to Segovia. Duly flattered, Don Ricardo gave
Mendizábal 100 pesos. El Entrerriano was the first printed or published tango
sheet music, at least the oldest to have survived. Mendizábal would publish many
more, all under the pen name he used for “El Entrerriano,”
“A. Rosendo.”
[Here is “El Entrerriano” as performed by the Solo Tango Orchestra in concert in Moscow, January 2018, accompanied by the dancers Geraldine Rojas and Ezekiel Paludi.]
Mendizábal died in 1913 at the age of 45. El Entrerriano was
recorded by at least ten orchestras beginning in 1911. In all, ten of his tangos
and one milonga were published.
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Have you read [Tango--A Rustic Beginning]?
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