Tango Locura

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...

This is my translation of Chapter 2 of La Orilla Oriental del Tango: H istoria del Tango Uruguayo (“Tango’s Eastern Shore: A History of Uruguayan Tango”) by Juan Carlos Legido ( Montevideo: Ediciones de la Plaza, 1994). Legido (1923-2011) was an Uruguayan dramatist and Professor of Literature and Art History. In Chapter 2 the author relates an oral history recounting the first tango danced in Uruguay—or anywhere for that matter, because the date given, Sunday, December 2, 1866, predates any account that has yet come to light concerning the origin of the tango dance we know today. Legido himself makes no claim for the veracity of this account; he is skeptical of the protagonists portrayed because they seem too iconic, too neatly symbolic. Nevertheless, those facts and circumstances of this very detailed account that can be verified do, in fact, check out. December 2, 1866 was, indeed, a Sunday ( https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=1866&country=59 ). Likewise,...