Part of the difficulty comes, I think, from the fact that I'm
addicted to words. So anything with lyrics has instant and infinite
sources of distraction: the first mention of noche or corazon and I'm lost.
Even when I think I'm listening, I'm not: in my last lesson, it was only
the mention of 'the way the piano holds back' that I was aware there was a
piano in the mix at all.
So I thought, maybe a song a week. I've chosen a
long-standing favourite of mine, one
which I almost always recognise, and tried to collect together what I know and
find out a bit more.
I love the way it begins!
Even on the page it looks exciting, all those semi-quavers running down
so insistently. It always makes me think of rain, because one of my first
memories of dancing to it is a from lesson almost two years ago, when the music
was augmented by the sound of torrential rain through the open windows.
Its origins are a puzzle, though: for some time it was classed as
one of a group of ‘anonymous tangos’ based on popular songs. The earliest recording I've found, by
Orquesta Vicente Greco in1910, is just about recognizable. Eventually (1932) its composition seemed to
fall at the door of Feliciano Latasa, a Spanish pianist and violinist who
settled in Rosario around the start of the twentieth century and gave his name to
various tunes of various kinds but no other tangos as far I've discovered. By now it had also acquired lyrics of a
familiar sort, attributed to Carlos Pesce (who also penned El Esquinazo), and beginning with an address to the ‘old hotel of
my joys and dreams’, witness to the narrator’s heartbreak at the rough hands of
love.
The hotel in question is thought to be the Hotel Victoria in
Córdoba, and here’s another personal resonance for me: almost three years ago
Fred and I were in Córdoba on a research trip for the novel I was writing. We’d prebooked a hotel that proved so
uninspiring when we actually saw it that we trailed the pretty city’s streets
looking for an alternative. Our arrival
had coincided with some kind of public holiday, so there were crowds and market
stalls and the pavements were cluttered with merchandise spread out on
blankets. The favourite seemed to be
socks – calcetines – you know, the
five-for-a-pound nylon variety that you would never let anywhere near a dancing
foot. We picked our way through the bargains to a grand frontage
on Avenida 25 de Mayo, the Hotel Victoria itself. Unfortunately, behind the
facade it was in the throes of a major rebuild.
They did offer us a room, the kind of room you would envisage, with two
balconied and shuttered floor-to-ceiling windows looking onto the sock-sellers
below. Even for a romantic like me, though,
the roar of the reconstruction and the layers of brickdust would have been, as
the song describes, golpes de piquet,
pickaxe blows (honestly!) to our poor old hearts. We went back to Plan A.
As for the song, there appear to be getting on for 30 different versions,
several by Orquesta Juan D’Arienzo (el rey
del compas, the ‘king of the beat’).
As well as a driving four-beats-to-a-bar rhythm, he was famous apparently
for his extravagant performance as a conductor.
According to D’Arienzo, tango is ‘above all rhythm, nerve, strength and
character’. I found one recording, possibly
later, which positively romps along, whilst his 1935 standard is more measured. Some djs favour Canaro’s version, also 1935,
slower still and a real plod by comparison, but it has delicious twiddly bits
on what I think is a muted trumpet that kick in half way through. This version is best also, I think, at the
hiatus that occurs two or three times in the song. I don’t know the technical term for this, but
it’s a point in the music that makes the dancer, wait, savour the moment, just
for a moment –before stepping on.
And if, like me, you really want the words, I think D’Agostino’s
1945 recording with Angel Vargas singing is the one. Even though the sentiments are heavy, the
music has at times a delightful lightness, lovely if you can capture the feeling
in your dancing. Personally I like a chance to get
the measure of the song a bit, to feel my way into its nuances before moving,
so I favour the Buenos Aires convention of standing around for a few bars at the
start, though I know others get impatient with the delay. Whether
or not you’re a slow starter, though, the lugubrious last four lines are left
to your imagination, or your memory, pickaxe blows and all.
What has all this to do with love? According to Pesce, love leaves us with only recuerdos amargos, bitter memories. Some lovely tunes, though.
