Dark eyes

A beautiful song from the Golden Age of Argentine Tango with a storied past from the Golden Age of Russian Romance… A tango classic recorded in Buenos Aires by the prolific Francisco Canaro in 1935 is revealed to be a Spanish-German remix of a Russian song arranged by a Dane for a Romani choir, setting a verse of a Ukrainian poet to a Polish-Lithuanian waltz which successfully masqueraded as French. In other words, a vintage Rio Wang material.

Manuel Salina y Florian Rey 1934 Ojos negros que fascinan ojos negros que dominan ojos negros, dulces ojos son tan crueles y tan piadosos Ojos negros que arrebatan ojos negros que me matan ojos negros, dulces ojos, triste vida de mi corazón Voy pasando por mi vida atormentada bajo el fuego abrasador de tu mirada, voy cruzando por la vida como una pobre sombra perdida. En el fondo de mi alma ya no brilla más que el fuego abrasador de tu pupila en el fondo de mi alma, donde siempre tu amor vivirá.

Translation by Alejandro Sasha Vicente-Grabovetsky, creator of Tango Translation Database Dark eyes that enchant Dark eyes that dominate; dark eyes, sweet eyes; they are so cruel and so kind. Dark eyes that captivate; dark eyes that kill me; dark eyes, sweet eyes; sad life of my heart. I pass through my tormented life under the scorching fire of your gaze, I walk across life like a poor, lost shadow. In the bottom of my soul now shines but the scorching fire of your pupil in the bottom of my soul where your love will always live

I spent years trying to solve the riddles and mysteries surrounding Dark Eyes, a song about fatal love and perdition which almost prophetically touched most of the talents who ever touched it, making them vanish from history. The project is nearly complete. Let’s unravel this convoluted story thread, starting from near its end, from 1935. We’ll end up time-traveling a full century back in time before it’s over.

Odeon’s 1935 disk 4939-B describes Canaro’s “tango con estribillo” (tango with a short vocal section) as Ojos negros que fascinan, authored by Manuel Salina and Florian Rey. But peculiarly, no such song can be found in the SADAIC database. As it turns out, the song was first recorded a year earlier, under a completely different title. It was called simply Romanza rusa (Ojos negros), sobre un motivo popular ruso (“Russian romance (Dark eyes), inspired by a Russian folk motif”). This “Russian romance in Spanish” wasn’t issued on a disk. Instead, the recording came out in the revolutionary format of a “1934 Youtube”, a short standalone movie clip, one of the earliest “talkies” in Spanish language. Famous Spanish movie director Florian Rey cast his lead actress (and fiancee) Imperio Argentine in this film clip. Rey (born Antonio Martínez del Castillo) was a great fan of Russian culture (and a sworn enemy of the Left), who soon moved to Germany on Hitler’s personal invitation. But when the Führer started making advances at his beautiful Argentine wife, it ended up in a divorce and a low-key return of the director to oblivion in his home country.


Manuel Salina y Florian Rey: Ojos negros, performed by Imperio Argentina in the clip of 1934, which we, however, could not find and link here

Imperio Argentina, born Magdalena Nile del Rio and known to her friends as Malena, specialized in folkloric song and dance on stage and on screen. She proudly declared herself the only woman who ever sung together with Carlos Gardel, the iconic symbol of Argentine tango. (They performed together in a Spanish-language talkie made in Paris in 1935, Melodia de arrabal). She wrote that, although Gardel was rumored to be gay, his problem with female singers stemmed from simple dislike of their voices… but even Gardel couldn’t resist the feminine magic of his beautiful dark-eyed compatriot.

It was after the Parisian adventure that Florian Rey decided to cast her in a short movie with a Russian-Spanish folk song stylized as Argentine tango. The original Russian romance already reverberate across the world after Feodor Chaliapin’s tours. The legendary opera bass is said to have added several new stanzas, in adoration of his dark-eyed Italian wife Iola Tornagi. For Iperio Argentina’s Dark Eyes, the song was arranged by Manuel “Paco” Salina, a Spanish songwriter and composer of German extraction, whose birth name was Günther Ehrenfried Salinger. Salina was well known by his adaptation of other composers’ music to popular styles. With their only foray into tango, Salina and Rey have made quite a remarkable job. Of course, being true to the Argentine tradition of his day, Francisco Canaro has retained just one bridge-estribillo in his recording, completely skipping the verse stanzas.

Time to travel deeper into the past now. From this point on, the poems we’ll encounter will all be in Russian. We are going to 1928, to Paris and Riga! Or, for that matter, let’s head straight into 1893, to Dvinsk (presently Daugavpils in Latvia), then a county seat of Russia’s Vitebsk Gubernia. On the 17th of the month of Tevet, year 5653 of the Jewish calendar, the youngest son is born into a big family of a musician Dovid bar Morduch Strok. Little Osher will in time become Oscar Davidovich Strok, the King of Russian Tango.

Dvinsk was a garrison town with a giant fortress and army, and Dovid Strok moved there for a job of military musicians, but by the time of Oscar’s birth, his father and his older brother worked in a theater orchestra.

The Russian 1897 Census sheets were supposed to be destroyed, but the sheet enumerating the Stroks of Dvinsk has miraculously survived. Osher, age 4, is on line 8.

“Rigas Tango Karalis”: A memorial plaque honoring the King of Tango Oscar Strok is unveiled in Riga in 2013

Oscar Strok followed the footsteps of his musical clan, but he only wrote his first (and, in my opinion, the best) tango at the age of 35. It was Dark Eyes, a different tango drawing on the same Russian song.

A hot romance with a secretary of his Riga-based magazine, Leni Libman, lead Oscar to abandon his family and to escape to Paris with his dark-eyed girlfriend. That’s where he fell under the spell of tango. That’s where he composed his Dark Eyes, complete with an extensive musical quote from the classic Russian romance.

The love to the dark eyes, as every superstitious Eastern European knows, couldn’t portend any good. All what it gave Strok was a wounded heart, a pile of debts… and this one unforgettable tango, with the lyrics completed by Oscar’s friend and fellow Riga entertainer, a Cossack Yesaul (chieftain) Aleksandr Perfilyev, a heir to a famed line of Siberian explorers.

Оскар Строк, Александр Перфильев 1928 Был день осенний, и листья гpустно опадали В последних астpах Печаль хpустальная жила Гpусти тогда с тобою мы не знали Ведь мы любили и для нас весна цвела. Ах, эти чеpные глаза меня пленили, Их позабыть нигде нельзя, Они гоpят пеpедо мной. Ах, эти чеpные глаза меня любили Куда же вы скpылись бы тепеpь, Кто близок вам дpугой. Ах, эти чеpные глаза меня погубят, Их позабыть нигде нельзя Они гоpят пеpедо мной. Ах, эти чеpные глаза, кто вас полюбит, Тот потеpяет навсегда И сеpдце и покой. Очи чёрные, очи страстные, Очи милые и прекрасные! Как люблю я вас, как боюсь я вас! Знать, увидел вас в недобрый час! …Ах, эти чеpные глаза, кто вас полюбит, Тот потеpяет навсегда И сеpдце и покой.

Oscar Strok, Alexander Perfilyev Dark Eyes tango It was an autumn day With leaves falling, dejectedly, And in the last chrysanthemums Lurked a sad sparkle of frost But the two of us didn’t know sadness yet For we were in love, and our spring was abloom Oh the dark eyes that captivated me, One can’t forget them anywhere; They are ablaze before me. The dark eyes which once loved me, Where are you hiding now? Who else is close to you? Oh, the dark eyes will spell my doom, One can’t forget them anywhere; They are ablaze before me. Whoever falls in love with the dark eyes Shall lose forever One’s heart and one’s peace Dark eyes, eyes of passion, Dear and beautiful eyes! How I love you, how I fear you! I think I met you in an ill-fated hour! …Whoever falls in love with the dark eyes Shall lose forever One’s heart and one’s peace

Piotr Leschenko, a Russian singer from Romania, also drawn to Riga by a potent cocktail of love and tango, made the most famous recording of this song in Austria, with Frank Fox – born Franz Fux in today’s Czech Republic, then Moravia – who conducted an orchestra and composed music for dancing and for movies in Vienna.


Piotr Leschenko’s bootleg records were immensely popular – albeit technically illegal – in Russia, but he only set foot there under most tragic circumstances, as a Romanian conscript in the Nazi-allied occupation forces in WWII. Despite this stain of being a collaborationist, Leschenko was offered forgiveness and a clean slate in the Soviet Union after the end of the war. But at his farewell party, the singer confessed his love to Romania too eloquently. A snitch denounced him, and the Russians withdrew the invitation at the last moment. Instead, Leschenko has been sent to the Romanian labor camps. He died in a prison hospital, and his case remains classified even now. In a recent Russian bio-pic, Piotr Leschenko is pictured as a proud defender of Russian culture under the Nazi yoke, and Konstantin Khabensky re-enacts his Dark Eyes for the movie. Here he is still hot in love with his first wife, Zinaida Zakit from Riga, whom he would leave during the occupation of Odessa for the new singer of his cabaret, Vera Belousova.


Decades later, Strok’s Dark Eyes made it all the way to Argentina as well, in a powerful instrumental cover by Florindo Sassone’s orchestra:


Oscar Strok was once erased from the official history of the Russian song as well, when in the late Stalin’s years he was blacklisted and forbidden from composing as a punishment for his “bourgeois degraded music of tango”, and forced to earn living by private piano lessons. The very word “tango” was proscribed, replaced by a euphemistic “slow dance”. Still, now we know Strok’s biography in great detail. But after the next leg of our time travel, we are going to make do with lots of guesswork about all characters of the story.


Let’s hire a troika and order the coachman to race up Tverskaya Street! We are in the 1880s Moscow and we’re heading to the famous suburban restaurant, the “Yard”. We leave the old city boundaries, and the restrictions of the municipal ordinances, behind, once we pass the New Triumphal Gate Square. As a different folk song about the Yard wishes, “May the raven-black horses fly me away to the place where the girls are mischievous and the nights are full of fire”. The Yard, once extolled by Pushkin for its truffles, has by now become most famous for its Romani singing. It’s partly due to the discriminatory laws of the 1850s which essentially made concert performances off limits for the Gypsy entertainers, confining them to taverns for three long decades. Even the revered Sokolov Gypsy Choir, once the darlings of the illustrious 18th-century Count Orloff, had to settle on singing in a restaurant (although the most classy of them all, the Yard). It was the musical directors of the Yard’s Choir, prolific songwriters Sergey (Sofus) Herdahl (Gerdal) and Yakov Prigozhiy, who made Dark Eyes an exemplary Gypsy romance song.


In 1884, Sofus Gerdal publishes his “Gypsy romance for voice and piano”, Dark Eyes, Passionate Eyes, crediting long-deceased Evgeny Grebenka for the lyrics, and using the music of Florian Hermann’s Valse Hommage. The same year, Yakov Prigozhiy publishes a different arrangement of the same music as “a waltz for voice with piano accompaniment”, titled You’re My Heaven on Earth (Ты мой рай земной). The lyrics ought to be different in Prigozhiy’s waltz, but we’d need to go to the Russian National Library, which has the published score, to figure out if any of its lyrics were retained in the countless later covers of Dark Eyes. And there is one more Dark Eyes song by Sofus Gerdal, published a bit earlier, in 1881, “for choir and piano”, which doesn’t credit either Evgeny Grebenka or Florian Hermann, but attributes the lyrics to a female author known only by her initials. We don’t know yet if the 1881 score is essentially the same song or something entirely different; only a trip to the Russian National Library may sort it out. At least it’s clear that Gerdal was the first in styling the song as a Gypsy romance, and that the lyrics started changing very early on, perhaps in Gerdal’s own arrangements, perhaps in Prigozhiy’s. Only the immortal opening stanza of Grebenka’s lyrics remained a constant in all of the song’s versions.

Evgeny Grebenka (Yevhen Hrebinka) 1843 Очи чёрные, очи страстные, Очи жгучие и прекрасные! Как люблю я вас, как боюсь я вас! Знать, увидел вас я в недобрый час! Ох, недаром вы глубины темней! Вижу траур в вас по душе моей, Вижу пламя в вас я победное: Сожжено на нём сердце бедное. Но не грустен я, не печален я, Утешительна мне судьба моя: Всё, что лучшего в жизни Бог дал нам, В жертву отдал я огневым глазам!

Dark Eyes Metrical translation by Stefan Bogdanov Oh you dark black eyes, full-of-passion-eyes Oh you burning eyes, how you hypnotize Now I love you so, but I fear you though Since you glanced at me not so long ago. Oh I see you now, you are dark and deep I see grief and feel that my soul will weep I see now in you a winning burning glow In my poor heart will a fire grow. I’m not sorrowful, I’m not repenting I accept all that my fate’s presenting All the best in life, God has given us- this I sacrifice, to you dark black eyes.

But any semblance of clarity disappears once we turn to the published biographic info about the arrangers, Gerdal and Prigozhiy, and the composer Hermann.

The 1884 music sheet of Gerdal’s “Gypsy Romance” Dark Eyes, Passionate Eyes, from a livejournal entry of a Russian researcher

Sofus Gerdal published Gypsy romances in Moscow in the 1880s, and worked at the Yard restaurant, but who he was and from where? An Internet legend, which started out as an innocent joke, is now repeated all across the Russian Internet as a “true discovery”. The pianist sometimes russified his name as “Sergey”, and a few later editions misspelled his surname as “Gerdel”. And so once, a search engine showed that Sergey Gerdel was alive and well (a contemporary entrepreneur with exactly this name lives and works in Berdichev in Ukraine). A classic Russian meme is the joke that “all the imported goods were actually made in Jewish Odessa”. Likewise, a blogger who made the 2011 “Gerdel discovery” exclaimed, “What if all the classic Gypsy songs were, likewise, actually made in Jewish Berdichev?” Alas, a harmless internet joke, repeated and reposted over and over again, began to sound like truth. In reality though, there is no such Jewish surname as Gerdal, nor a Jewish personal name like Sofus (a rare Ashkenazi surname “Gerdel” does exist, but its area of origin was quite far from Berdichev, in Czarist Russia’s Taurida Governorate). Sofus or Sophus is a male name in Scandinavia, Germany, and Belgium, a masculine version of the name Sophie. Gerdal (Гердаль) is a regular Russian alphabet rendition of a common Scandinavian surname “Herdahl”, literally “Hay Valley”. In the Danish town of Maribo, there is even a record of a different Sofus Herdahl, a 19th-century barber. But whether our Gypsy pianist Sofus Herdahl was a Dane, or possibly a Swede, we cannot yet tell.

Yakov Fedorovich Prigozhiy (1840-1920, Moscow) – this is how encyclopedias define the author and arranger of countless Russian and Gypsy romances, another one of which (My campfire glows in the mist – Мой костер в тумане светит) also got a second life in Argentine tango music. Better than nothing, although who he was, where he came from and grew up, remains a riddle. A little is also known about Yakov’s relatives. His musician brother Adolf Prigozhiy was, at the peak of his fame, even better known than Yakov. All Russia danced to Adolf’s waltzes, he toured the provinces, at one time owned an operetta theater in Vilna, and was married to an operetta star Serafima Beletskaya (who, after Adolf’s untimely death in St Petersburg, remarried to a famous operetta actor, nobleman Gabel-Rodon). Adolf’s son, Georgy Prigozhiy clerked in the National Bank in St. Petersburg in 1899-1900. With these name / marriage / occupation tidbits we may conclude that Prigozhiy (which means “Handsome” in Russian) was their actual surname rather than a theatrical pseudonym, that they weren’t ethnic Romani, and that they were Christians. A surname “Prigozhiy” did exist in Czarist Russia, mostly in Eastern Belorussia, home to many other “Good / Nice / Pretty” names (Among my own relatives in that region, one of the surnames was “Neplokh”, literally Good-Enough). As with many other regional Slavic surnames, Prigozhiy was used both by Belorussians and Jews. The former mostly in Vitebsk Governorate, the latter mostly in Mogilev Governorate. Personal names Adolf, Yakov, and Fedor and especially Georgy weren’t yet used by the Jewish residents of Russia at the time, but could have been used by Christian converts. The name Adolf was traditionally Polish but perhaps occasionally used by educated Belorussians, emulating their Polish landlord class. All this said, we still don’t know the native community of the Prigozhiy family (and since the genealogical documents were kept by a parish, we don’t have a clear idea where to look for Yakov’s childhood, education, and personal life).

But there is an Internet legend about the origins of Yakov Prigozhiy, too, and a beautiful one. It is said that the Karaims of Crimea consider him one of their own, a scion of the Evpatoria Karaim community!

At a first glance, the Evpatoria hypothesis shows an intriguing similarity with the facts. In the city of Evpatoria, there was indeed a Jewish Prigozhiy family, even one Yakov Prigozhiy among them (albeit from a different generation). Yakov Prigozhiy the songwriter collaborated with musicians from Crimea. And the regional Gypsy, Tatar, and Jewish folk music was a nearly indivisible phenomenon, because Crimean Tatar Gypsy musicians – called the Dauldzhi, from the name of the traditional large double-headed drum known as daul or davul – performed all these ethnic styles. Whosoever celebrate a wedding, would get one’s folk music from the same band of Dauldzhis. “Same musicians, slightly different results”.

A band of Dauldzhi, Crimean Romani musicians

But the putative Evpatoria Prigozhiy connection failed a reality check. This family moved to Evpatoria much later, and they were Ashkenazi Jewish rather than Karaim. They came from Bryansk and Mglin counties, at the boundaries of the same Mogilev Governorate (with Yakov making the move to Evpatoria only after WWII, while his sisters stayed in Bryansk region). And no such surname ever existed among the Karaim.

Plaques with Hebrew inscriptions in the Marble Courtyard of the Grand Evpatoria Kenasa

But the Evpatoria hypothesis refuses to die. According to Karaim amateur historians, the Grand Kenasa (Karaim synagogue) of Evpatoria has a memorial plaque honoring a donation made by Yakov Prigozhiy the musician “to the community of his parents, may their memory be blessed”. However, the family name is said to be spelled differently on the plaque. It is Yefet rather than Prigozhiy. Yefet (יֶפֶת) is of course Japheth, the Biblical son of Noah and the mythical ancestor of Tatars, Armenians, Greeks and pretty much all the ethnic groups of old Crimea. Yefet was also the name of one of the most revered medieval Karaim scholars. And the male name Yefet was quite popular among the Crimean Karaim. But the surname Yefet appeared in Evpatoria only in the late 1830s, brought by a family of a repatriant from Istanbul, r. Yufuda Yefet Kosdini. Reb Yufuda, a.k.a. Yehuda Qustini Yefet, was an Istanbuli Karaim wise man of Crimean origin and a close associate of Avraham “Eru” Firkovich, a Lutsk Karaim pilgrim, historian and reformer of their belief system. Qustini or Kosdini was a Greko-Karaim for “Konstantinopoli”, that is, Istanbul. In fact, Firkovich spent the first half of the 1830s in Istanbul, then the prime center of Karaim learning, but his reform zeal eventually caused him and his followers to be expelled. They moved to Crimea, and, in 1837, made Evpatoria the center of Karaim religious autonomous community. That’s when the Grand Kenasa was built, too. Now, is it possible that the first sons of the religious zealot repatriants have become operetta and night club musicians? Before you tell me that I’m totally nuts, I shall ask you to travel to Crimea and to send me a picture of the יֶפֶת stone. And then, to your valid question, how could “Yefet” ever become “Prigozhiy”, the Karaim informants have a ready answer. Both words mean “Handsome”, the first one in Hebrew, the second one in Russian.

From the glossary of Karaim surnames from the 1913 volume of “Jewish antiquities” (Еврейская старина). It does mark “Yefet” as “handsome”, albeit with a question mark. The more recent sources just mark it as a surname derived from the male personal name Yefet in Istanbul.

In the end it’s the same story with Prigozhiy as with Gerdal… a cool legend finds no support, and we have no clue who they were.

If the scale of myth-making surrounding Sofus Gerdal and Yakov Prigozhiy surprises you, then just wait until you listen to the tall tales about Florian (or Feodor) Hermann, whose Valse Hommage has been arranged into a romance song by the Yard’s pianists!

Most often, we are told that Hermann was French, and came to Russia with Napoleon’s Grand Army. Sometimes we hear that his Valse Hommage started as a march of the advancing French troops in 1812. But sometimes, that it mourns the French army losses as it forded the icy Berezina river on retreat from Moscow. We even hear that Florian Hermann visited the home estate of Evgeny Grebenka, the author of the lyrics of the future song, during the Napoleonic Wars! But sometimes Florian Hermann turns out to be a German rather than Frenchman. We are even told that the lived in Strasbourg. One has to note that Valse Hommage is always titled in French in the international score catalogs, while some of the other Hermann’s compositions are titled in German. However, my research shows that Florian Hermann was a Russian patriot from the Wilno strip area of Poland / Lithuania, and that he composed some of his most popular pieces in 1870s through 1890s. And very recently, I was able to find out a few details about his youth and his family in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania).

The numbered lists of works of Florian Hermann are known from the sheet music publishers. Some of these compositions have obvious connections to historical events and geographical locations. For example, March over the Balkans and Totleben March (Забалканскiй Маршъ & Тодлебенъ-Маршъ) – Florian Hermann op. 37 & 39, resp. – are clearly linked to the Balkan Campaign of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, when the nation rose up in the wave of Pan-Slavic patriotism, the Czar’s army crossed the Balkan Mountains, and general Totleben gloriously defended Plevna). The March of Russian volunteers also glorifies the liberator warriors who saved the Balkan Slavs from the Turkish yoke. One of the latest compositions of Hermann honors the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896.

The scores of Hermann were being printed by the Moscow publishing house of Gutheil, which also issued the works of Gerdal and Prigozhiy. But the best source on Floriann Hermann is the St. Petersburg publishing house of Buttner, which in 1879 merged with D. Rahter Publishers of Hamburg. As a result, their catalogs were printed in Hamburg, and survived the ravages of time much better than the Russian rarities. We don't see any new works of Hermann after 1900.

Op. 60 – 2nd Lithuanian Quadrille – was inspired by the vocal polonaises of Stanisław Moniuszko, the leading composer of Polish Nationalist Romanticism, whose folkloric operas were all the rage in the 1860s. Op. 56, Evening Chant, has a dedication to Moniuszko as well. Stanisław Moniuszko died in 1872 and attained an even higher post-mortal glory as the Polish creator of the Pan-Slavic music. It’s easy to see that the same musical ideology attracted Florian Hermann as well. In addition to patriotic an Pan-Slavic marches and Western European themes, his list of compositions is thick with Lithuanian, Ukrainian/Belorussian, Polish and Russian folkloric-romantic themes. Polonaises, mazurkas, polkas… Op. 30 and 52 are “Little Russian polkas”. Op. 61 is dedicated to Rubno (a manor of the Dauksza family, now called Kirtimai, on the outskirts of Vilnius). The most remarkable edition of Florian Hermann’s music came out in 1881 from the famous Wilno publishing house of Eliza Orzeszkowa, a Polish freedom fighter (who barely avoided prison for her role in the Uprising of 1863), author, and an ideologist of positivism, a school of Polish nationalist thought which insisted that the future of Poland depended on its cultural growth and fostering cultural ties between its ethnic groups, rather than on continuing armed uprisings. Eliza Orzeszkowa’s publishing house was quickly shut down by the Czarist government, but not before they issued a beautiful booklet of Hermann’s “salon dances”, entitled “Wilno Carnival”, with a panoramic view of the city on its jacket, and 6 patriotic compositions inside: Lithuanian countradance, Fiery mazurka, two dances for the local rivers Vilia and Niemen, and two more glorifying Lithuania’s pre-Christian past (dedicated to a pagan priestess and the thunder-deity Perkun). Florian Hermann’s early compositions are dedicated to Lydia, Yulia, and Sofiya (presumably students of Florian) which makes it likely that the composer worked as a piano teacher in his youth. As to the Hommage Valse (future Dark eyes), Op. 21, it’s undoubtedly composed before the mid 1870s, and it was a very popular composition, judging by a variety of “updated” and orchestral arrangements in Rahter-Buttner catalogs.

The old Vilnius high school courtyard

I was lucky to find the earliest, student’s work of Florian Hermann in the catalog of the former Imperial Library. This is an 1840 polonaise, dedicated (in French) to Ustinov, the principal of Wilno Gymnasia (High Scool) “from his humblest pupil Florian Hermann”, printed at Michal Przybyłski’s lithography shop. („Dédiée du m-r Ustinoff, directeur du Gymnase imperial du gouvernement de Vilna, conseiller de la cour et membre de plusieurs ordres et composée pour le piano-forte par son très humble élève Florian Herrmann – Vilna: lith. de Przybyłski”). Yet is known that Alexandr Ustinov, a painter and an educator, remained the Principal of the 1st Wilno Men’s Gymnasia from 1836 to 1843. There are also other known lithographic sheet music editions by the Przybyłski shop, dated by the 1830s. Therefore it appears that Florian Hermann was the composer’s real name, and that he studied in a high school in Vilnius in the late 1830s. So the years of his life are approximately 1820-1900. Moreover, in the same school, other Hermann students are known from the records. Emilian Hermann (probably Florian’s brother) graduated with a Silver Medal in 1848, and Adam Hermann in 1861. The names are consistent with Polish self-identification of the family. But we can’t yet tell if they were ethnic Poles or Polish Germans, because the surname “Hermann” was shared by several ethnicities in this area. Of note, a leading Polish genealogist Iwona Dakiniewicz spotted this surname in the vital record books of the Catholic Deanery of Wilno as early as in the 1740s, so we can be reasonably sure that the ancestors of Florian Hermann were local Catholics rather than recent migrants or converts. Iwona wrote that their home parishes may have been just north of town, in Giedrojcie or Podbrzezie.

From the list of Nobleman Assembly electors, Wilno, 1834

“The Chase”, old Lithuanian coat of arms, graces the Holy (or Dawn) Gate

Only a privileged family could have sent their sons to a high school in the 1830s-1840s. So, having failed to find the Hermanns in the 19th-c. lists of local officials or merchants, I had to conclude that they must have belonged to the szlachta, the Polish-Lithuanian landed gentry. Indeed, I soon spotted a mention of a local Hermann nobleman in an 1844 Imperial government publication. Then a prominent Lithuanian genealogist Sigita Gasparaviciene told me that in the 19th c., the nobility family of the Hermans lived in Wilno proper. And, finally, at the website of Czeslaw Malewski, a specialist on Lithuania’s szlachta, we see in 1834 list of Nobleman Assembly voters that the former Head of Wilno Gentry, travelling to the assembly from a distant county, stopped at the Hermans’ house at Ostrobramska Street, right in the heart of Wilno’s Old Town, famous for its Holy / Sharp / Dawn Gate as it’s known in various local languages.

Florian Hermann lived here! (Ostrobramska street at the Gate in the 1840s)

Florian Hermann, 14, in his high school class roster

Update: Czeslaw Malewski confirmed that in 1835/36 school year, Florian Hermann, age 14. a Catholic Wilno nobleman, studied in the 4th grade of the Wilno Gymnasium. There were several Hermann families in the vicinity of Wilno. One of them owned properties in and around the village of Rubno in the late 1870s and 1880s, right when Florian Hermann composed his Souvenir de Roubno. It seems that Florian’s family were descendants of Karol Hermann and Antonina née Kozerowski. In this family Jan and Julian were known as government servants in Wilno. Jan, born ca. 1787, finished studies in Dresden and Breslau, and started teaching in Wilno in 1812. Notably, Jan Hermann taught in the only Polish-language high school still allowed in the city after the severe crackdown on Polish education in the wake of the 1831 Uprising. Florian Hermann had another very interesting teacher in his high school, a French expat Antoine Cui, who taught, of course, French. (Just like Florian, Antoine Cui is often said to be an ex-Napoleon Grand Armée soldier, stuck in Russia as the French forces disastrously retreated in 1812. But both stories are false. Antoine Cui actually swore allegiance to the Czar a year earlier). The oldest Cui children, Napoleon and Alexander, were Florian’s classmates, and the youngest, Cesar Cui, has become young Hermann’s piano student (and when Cesar developed a gift of composition, Stanisław Moniuszko started teaching the kid free of charge). Starting from the 1860s, this ex-student of Hermann and Moniuszko will become one of “The Five”, an innovating group of composers out to create truly Russian style of music, steeped in the folkloric styles. In so doing, Cesar Cui planted the seeds of his Polish teachers on Russian soil with the most profound effects on the nation’s musical heritage!

Rubno Manor and Rubno village on a 1933 Polish topo. “Las Rubionkowski”, the Rubno Woods, is now a suburban ornithology preserve, with the residential blocks of Vilnius rising right behind out. Inset: from Czeslaw Malewski’s book on Wilno area nobility

Now that our Tango Time Machine has covered a whole century, and transferred us from the 1930s to the 1830s, we no longer need to travel deeper into the past. The creators of the original Dark Eyes, Evgeny Grebenka and Nicholas DeVitte, are both alive and full of creative energy in this time period. And both of them are relatively well studied by the historians (although it doesn’t mean that the history of Dark Eyes has any fewer riddles or improbable twists).

Evgeny Grebenka, 1812-1848

Evgeny Grebenka (or Evhen Hrebinka, according to Ukrainian spelling of his name) is a classic of Ukrainian literature, an author of wonderful fables, folkloric poems, always funny but often touched by sadness, and historical novels in the style of National Romanticism. Grebenka published a handful of poems in Russian too, like a classic folkloric song about a village matron recognizing a heartthrob of her youth in a visiting gray-mustached general, and getting laid at last. In the corpus of Grebenka’s work, Dark eyes does not fit at all. No folksiness, no humor, but a burning sorrowful prescience of a well-deserved perdition. But love is capable of transforming poets in unpredictable ways… When the poem was published in January 1843, Grebenka was 31. His fiancee Maria Rostenberg, marooned at her father’s estate many provinces away, was 15. A year and a half later, they married, and she joined Evgeny in St Petersburg. Maria was a daughter of a Courlander German, a Russian army officer who received a Ukrainian estate not far from Grebenka’s family nest as a dowry when he married Maria’s mother. Alas, Mrs. Rostenberg died soon after Maria was born. Maria is said to have been on good terms with her stepmother and 9 half-siblings, but still, the money was an issue. The Grebenkas just couldn’t get any cut from the Rostenberg assets, and Evgeny Grebenka literally sacrificed his health on the family altar, working extra jobs and skipping vacations, to provide for his young wife’s luxurious live in the nation’s capital. At 36, Grebenka died of tuberculosis. The prophecy of Dark Eyes may be said to have come true, as he really died for his beloved woman.

Nicholas DeVitte, 1811-1844

Prominent historians of Russian romance song, Elena and Valery Ukolovs, are adamant that Dark Eyes could not have come from the pen of Grebenka. They note that barely a month after publication of the poem, the government censors were already reviewing a song with its lyrics, composed by a talented and mysterious poet and musician, Nicholas DeVitte. Both the subject and the choices of words of the poem were very typical for DeVitte, a bard of fatal, impossible, forbidden love, and suffering and death. The Ukolovs note that DeVitte was fond for literary mystification, both hiding behind nom-de-plumes and publishing under friends’ names, and hypothesize that he gifted the verse to Grebenka, too. A grandson of a Dutchman who went to serve the Russian Empire, Nicholas DeVitte created many timeless romance song, and was an unsurpassed harp virtuoso. An age-mate of Grebenka’s, DeVitte also died very young, at 32, only a year after publishing his score of Dark Eyes. The fire of the fatal eyes immolated everyone…


Regardless of the true authorship of the 1843 poem, we must note that DeVitte’s score of Dark Eyes has nothing in common with the classic romance we love. Nicholas DeVitte composed a mazurka, with a very different emotional tine, expressing a kind of fatalistic contentedness rather than a fateful prescient sadness of the Gypsy song. The Ukolovs note that Dark Eyes has been first mentioned as a Gypsy song in an 1859 book, decades before Gerdal’s arrangement. One may suspect that the Romani singers already relied on their emotional intuition to rework the music of “the Eyes”, long before Sofus Gerdal formalized the results. There are known precedents of this, such as another DeVitte’s romance What can I do, my heart, with you (Что делать, сердце, мне с тобою) which retained the lyrics but dramatically changed the music once it became a part of the Gypsy choirs repertoire. Perhaps Dark Eyes really owed its sound of an anguished and cruel waltz to the Gypsy musicians, even before the music of Hermann got connected with the old verse. But this a riddle which noone can ever solve…

Chamuyo de gotán: time travel through tango history with the lyrics of its songs

Tango and its roots – is it a point of contention (as befits its being “rite and religion”, per the famed quote) – or a point of connection? The connection which brings together ourselves, the music, the orchestras, the singers … and where the lyrics may be the most elusive of the interlocking connecting elements?

In a presentation combining printed handouts, a slide show, and music, and titled, in proper Lunfardo slang, Chamuyo de Gotán, Talking Too Much about Tango, Derrick del Pilar tries to cover the history of Argentine tango from its obscure beginnings to the storied Golden Age – through its lyrics. With Derrick’s permission, here are my annotated notes.

Enrique Binda, “Clarin” interview on the occasion of the 2nd edition of the book: “tango was born into a normal society, as existed in Buenos Aires at the time”; “[by 1910] it existed in the city center as well as in arrabal, in as many academias as prostibulos”; “who do you think was buying tango sheet music for piano by the thousands, hoodlums and whores or people who actually owned pianos?”

It all starts from the contention, obviously. The much-touted, much-discredited Borgesian brothel-to-Paris-to-high-society narrative is largely debunked, with the help of the 1998 book by Hugo Lamas & Enrique Binda, El tango en la sociedad porteña, 1880-1920, a product of 35 years of research which extensively analyzed the materials of the formative years of Argentine tango, from news reports to police records.

The brothel - to - Paris - to - beaux-mondes narrative of tango history may be traced back to a 1936 book of Hector and Luis Bates where they romanticized and exaggerated its outlaw, pimp-and-prostitute roots, and declared that tango remained totally unacceptable in the middle and upper class society at home until its return from Paris ca. 1913. However, Lamas and Binda prove that between 1902 and 1909, 3 millions copies of piano sheet music of tango have been sold, and at least 350 gramophone recordings pressed. Given that a gramophone cost several months worth of salary, not to mention what a piano cost, there is simply no question that tango was gaining very substantial following in the middle and upper classes of Buenos Aires much earlier. Even some of the earliest tangos from the 1870s and 1880s, formally anonymous, are thought to have been authored by a Spanish noblewoman and concert piano player, Eloise D’Hebril Da Silva.

The police reports and regulations show that dancing took place in “academias” (dance schools/clubs which often had women for hire, and which were aggressively pursued by the police for violations such as … staying open too late), drinking establishments, and theaters (including the most upscale ones, such as the Opera, where the parterre seats may have been removed for the occasions), rather than in BsAs brothels where the local law forbade dancing as well as drinking (one would have to leave the city to find brothels which also operated as bars and dancing halls).

This said, of course sensual borders sexual, and an ethnic and social mix of a big city with its city music and dances juxtaposes against the homogeneity of the provinces and their native-born folk dances … so it comes as no surprise that the early tango found many detractors among the conservatives and nativists, and was widely depicted as half-vulgar and déclassé in the media of the day. It also seems likely that upper-classes acceptance of tango as a national music form preceded the wider acceptance of tango dance and especially tango poetry. The macho underclass hero of the early tango letras (literally “letters”, as the Tango lyrics are known) tells us a compelling story of tango’s lowlife beginnings. Enter Villoldo’s 1903 El Porteñito, the Little Son of Buenos Aires:

El Porteñito (1903) Letra: Ángel Villoldo Soy hijo de Buenos Aires, Por apodo “El Porteñito” El criollo más compadrito Que en esta tierra nació. Cuando un tango en la vigüela Rasguea algún compañero, No hay nadie en el mundo entero Que baile mejor que yo…

Little Porteño translated by Derrick Del Pillar I’m a son of Buenos Aires, they call me Little Porteño, the toughest, coolest criollo ever born in this land. When one of my buddies strums a tango on his ol’ guitar, there’s no one in the whole world who dances better than me…

The most classy milongas of the late 1890s and 1900s may have been held nightly at Lo de Hansen, or Restaurante del Parque 3 de Febrero, in Palermo, in the city’s largest and fanciest park inspired by Paris’s Bois de Boulogne (and, of course, commonly known as Bosques de Palermo). Mr. Hansen, a German immigrant, remodeled his 1869 park restaurant in 1877, as a part of redevelopment of the park. The new concessioners in the 1900s kept a fleet of five cars to ferry the guests around town at night. The daytime orchestra from Milan was being replaced by a tango orchestra for the night, and the rich and pampered daytime clientele, by the tango crowd with its share of malevos and shushetas and occasional fights and shootouts. The tabletops were made of very heavy marble slabs, lest anybody swings a table in a brawl. A posted sign asked the customers to please avoid tapping spoons or plates or bottles to the beat of their most loved tango tune, Villoldo’s “El Esquinazo” (because the earlier ban on “tapping the rhythm with hands or shoes” proved to be inefficient, as the crazed guests invented other ways to accompaniment the music)! By 1908, quality tango salons started appearing elsewhere in the best neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, and the golden days of old Hansen were gradually winding down. It was demolished in 1912. But the scene of tangoing at Lo de Hansen is lovingly reenacted in a 1937 movie, complete with fighting over choices of music, quebradas, boleos, and even a soltada. And the location has even seen an archaeological excavation in 2009, which unearthed bits and pieces of French floor tiles! (but the Porteño historians still argue if it was “the” dancing floor - in fact some oldtimers even insisted that the tango music there was only for listening, that dancing wasn’t allowed and that there wasn’t even room for it; while others, like Leon Benaros, wrote that many “disallowed” things were simply relegated to the back of the building, with its outdoor patio floor of white and black tiles … and lots of bugs at night, so the women didn’t sit in there – they were out in the front).

If you listen to the recorded versions of El Porteñito, you’d quickly realize that the words of the 2nd and 3rd verses are just never the same. They are always improvised or perhaps intentionally tinkered with, as it would have been the rule in the era before the recordings, when the boastful and crude letras would change with the neighborhood. It was always the guys from this street who were the toughest fighters and the best dancers in their couplets.

Carlos Gardel, 1917
(foto Horacio Loriente)

Another accepted narrative links the birth of tango canción, tango as a romance with set lyrics rather than improvised in the old payadores tradition, with the 1917 Gardel’s performance of “Mi noche triste” (a.k.a. “Lita”). The fame may be exaggerated, what’s so special about a song bursting onto the scene of some 3rd rate cabaret – we don’t even know for sure which one – but there is no denying that “Mi noche triste” ended up being the first recorded tango romance, and that the talent of Carlos Gardel truly electrified this formative epoch of tango. The letras by Pascual Contursi are, well, sorrowful, even though the character may be the same porteñito of the previous decade, a pimp at the prime of his life, now speaking in Lunfardo of his lost chica (or rather percanta), in his empty bachelor pad (cotorro or bulin).


Mi noche triste, Carlos Gardel, 1917

Mi noche triste (1915) letra de Pascual Contursi Percanta que me amuraste En lo mejor de mi vida Dejándome el alma herida Y espina en el corazón. Sabiendo que te quería Que vos eras mi alegría Y mi sueño abrasador. Para mí ya no hay consuelo Y por eso me encurdelo Pa’ olvidarme de tu amor. Cuando voy a mi cotorro Y lo veo desarreglado Todo triste, abandonado Me dan ganas de llorar, Me detengo largo rato Campaneando tu retrato Pa’ poderme consolar…

My Sorrowful Night translated by Derrick Del Pilar Deceitful woman, you left me in the prime of my life, leaving my soul wounded and a thorn in my heart, knowing that I loved you, that you were my joy, my burning dream. For me there is no more comfort and so I’m getting wasted to forget about your love. When I go up to my pad and I see it all messy, everything sad, abandoned, it makes me want to cry; I hang back a long time, pining after your portrait so I can console myself.

Ever since the 1872 epic “El Gaucho Martín Fierro” by José Hernández immortalized the image of the fearless outlaw, poet, and dueler of the Pampas in a classic payada verse, the gaucho remained a poetic symbol of Argentine people. But the times change. The 1926 “Mandria” makes a gaucho of a different era throw a poncho in a duel challenge – and then refuse the fight.

Mandria (1926) Letra: Juan Miguel Velich y Francisco Brancatti … Esta es mi marca y me asujeto ¡Pa’ que peliar a un hombre mandria! Váyase con ella, ¡La cobarde! Dígale que es tarde Pero me cobré…

Wretched translated by Derrick Del Pilar … This is my mark and it has kept me in check – Why should I fight a wretched man? Go with her, that coward! Tell her that it’s late but I’ve made my claim.

“El Mocho”, “the Stub” David Undarz was called so because he lost a finger to an accident. El Mocho danced with his wife Amelia “La Portuguesa” (or sometimes remembered as “La Brasilera”) under the scenic name Los Undarz. In the cabarets of the 1910s, in the fine theaters of the 1920s, wildly popular. El Mocho’s trademark style was to showcase the follower, to make her moves and her footwork look stellar while the steps of leader himself remained understated. I’m sure you can recognize El Mocho’s legacy in the unwritten rules of gender roles of today’s tango dance! Progressing tuberculosis made El Mocho Undarz leave the city just before “Adiós Arrabal” was composed; soon, he died, aged only mid 30s. The other legendary dancer from the lines of Adiós, Arrabal, Ovidio José “Benito” Bianquet, was better known as El Cachafaz (“The Troublesome” / “The Outrageous” as the lunfardo word may be translated). In truth, both of his nicknames predated his tango fame – his mother called him “Buenito”, “sweet little boy”, to the cops who wanted to punish the nice little guy for some broken windows in the neighborhood, and his father called him “El Cachafaz”, “the incorrigible rascal”, after he’s got a bit older and got in trouble with the girls. El Cachafaz must have been the first Argentine to try teaching tango in the US, before WWI; not much came out of it. But in 1919 he went to Paris and dazzled the City of Lights – he was remembered in Discépolo’s lyrics of “El Choclo” as “Caracanfunfa”, a dancer with a fancy footwork who “carried the flag of tango across the ocean, and mixed Paris and Buenos Aires barrios into an intoxicating drink”. As it turns out El Cachafaz wasn’t finished at all in 1930, when Carlos Lenzi wrote the letras of “Adiós, Arrabal” – what happened was that he parted with Emma “La Francesita” Boveda, after more than a decade of dancing together. But in a year or two, “Cacha” met Carmencita, and they went on to win movie roles and awards together. Their photograph accompanies every article about El Cachafaz, but since we paused at a page of tango history when the two haven’t yet met, I’m not going to include this picture. El Cachafaz died in 1942, age 55, slumped at a piano dressed in his best dance attire, waiting for a drink after a performance.

The Great Depression delivers a final blow the the figures of the compadrito and the gaucho – actually a horrible blow to the whole fabric of the civil society in Argentina. September 1930 brings what’s known as Década Infame, the decade of corrupt governments and stolen elections. The 1930 “Adiós, Arrabal” is a song of longing for the sweetness and integrity of the days of the past.



“I won’t ever change, but the old life of my mother neighborhood is gone forever” – insist the verses. It mourns the departure of the best dancers, of El Mocho, El Cachafaz. It bids farewell to “Rodríguez Peña”, officially known as El Salón San Martín at Rodríguez Peña 344, just off Corrientes, which was one of the best tango salons of the early 20th c. (immortalized by a 1911 tango composed by Vicente Greco, who played there).

Adiós, Arrabal Letra: Carlos César Lenzi Mañanita arrabalera, Sin taitas por las veredas Ni pibas en el balcón. Tus faroles apagados Y los guapos retobados En tu viejo callejón. Yo te canto envenenao, Engrupido y amargao Hoy me separo de vos. Adiós, arrabal porteño, Yo fui tu esclavo y tu dueño Y te doy mi último adiós. … El baile “Rodríguez Peña” El Mocho y el Cachafaz, De la milonga porteña Que nunca más volverá. Carnavales de mi vida Noches bravas y al final, Los espiantes de las pibas En aquel viejo arrabal.

Goodbye, arrabal! translated by Derrick Del Pilar Sweet morning in the arrabal, no tough guys on the sidewalks, and no dames out on the balconies, your streetlamps all put out and the pretty boys all passed out in your old alleyway. I sing to you venomously, boastfully and bitterly – today I’m leaving you. Goodbye, arrabal of Buenos Aires! I was your slave and your master and here’s my last goodbye … The dances at Rodríguez Peña, el Mocho and el Cachafaz of the milongas of Buenos Aires that never shall return, my life’s great parties, awesome nights and in the end the blow-offs from all those dames in that old arrabal.

As the 1930s march on, the things look increasingly bleak for Argentina. In 1932 Great Britain, the main export marker for Argentine beef, institutes a trade barrier system of “Imperial Preference”, putting Argentine economy on its knees and forcing the country into a near-colonial dependence under Roca–Runciman Treaty. By 1935, Enrique Discépolo, perhaps the most pessimistic of the Great Bards of Tango, doesn’t see any hope. The life is a hopeless mess, a pile of things which lost their past meaning on a shelf of a pawnshop. All the human beings are piled together there, and honesty and wisdom do not matter anymore:

Cambalache (1935) Letras de Enrique Santos Discépolo ¡Que falta de respeto, que atropello a la razon! Cualquiera es un señor! Cualquiera es un ladron! Mezclao con Stavinsky va Don Bosco y La Mignon, Don Chicho y Napoleón, Carnera y San Martín… Igual que en la vidriera irrespetuosa de los cambalaches se ha mezcla’o la vida y herida por un sable sin remache ves llorar la Biblia contra un calefón.

Pawnshop translated by Derrick Del Pilar What a lack of respect, what an affront to reason! Anyone can be a baron! Anyone can be a bandit! Stavinsky and Saint John Bosco go hand in hand with La Mignon, Don Chicho and Napoleon, Carnera and San Martín, just as the rude window displays of every pawnshop have mixed up life itself and you can see a wounded Bible weep next to a boiler somewhere, hanging on a hook.

Juan “Chicho Grande” Galiffi was an infamous 1920s/30s hit man of the Sicilian Mafia in Argentina

(Derrick explains that Stavinsky was an infamous swindler; Saint John Bosco helped underprivileged youth; La Mignon was slang for a call girl; Don Chicho a mobster, Carnera an itinerant boxer, and General San Martín, a national hero of Argentina’s wars of independence; and the sable sin remache was a hook nailed on a toilet wall to spear newsprint or book pages for use as toiler paper.)

Tango is reborn and reinvented with a new generation of dancers of the 1930s, most notably the D’Arienzo fans; new role for vocalists in the danceable tango – not just tango canción – is pioneered by Canaro; Sebastián Piana revitalizes the obsolescent genre of a milonga, allowing it to become a vibrant dance.

Yet the new milonga laments the bygone 1900s, and the sympathies of its main character remain with the honesty of the past:

Milonga del 900 (1933) Letras: Homero Manzi Me gusta lo desparejo y no voy por la vedera; uso funghi a lo Massera, calzo bota militar. La quise porque la quise y por eso ando penando – se me fue ya ni se cuando, ni se cuando volverá. Me la nombran las guitarras cuando dicen su canción, las callecitas del barrio, y el filo de mi facón. Me la nombran las estrellas y el viento del arrabal; no se pa’ que me la nombran si no la puedo olvidar.

Milonga of the 1900s Translation by Derrick Del Pilar I like mismatched things and I don’t go out on the sidewalk; I wear a Massera porkpie hat and military boots on my feet. I loved her because I loved her and ’cause of that I’m hurting now – she’s left me and I don’t even know when, don’t even know when she’ll come back. Guitars remind me of her when they are speaking their songs, so do the little neighborhood streets, and the edge of my dagger. The stars remind her name to me and so does the wind of the arrabal, I don’t know why they remind me of her since I could never forget her…

The final verses of Manzi are almost never sung on the records, the lines there become palpably political, professing distrust to the changes of modernity, and loyalty to the legacy of Leandro Alem, founder of Radical Civic Union and the leader of 1890 Revolution, who took his own life in 1896.

Tristezas de la Calle Corrientes (Horacio Coppola – Buenos Aires 1936)

It’s hard to count all the tangos which sing of Avenida Corrientes; a simple search in the Argentine tango lyrics website returns 159 texts! They tell of the old, narrow street of tango’s formative years and the new wide Corrientes nearly purged of its tango history; of the grandeur and the squalor; of the real landmarks and the fictitious addresses, like the number 348, an illicit den of love, tango, and dimmed lights from Donato’s 1925 “A media luz”. The 1933 “Corrientes y Esmeralda” charts all the contrasts of the city to just this one intersection, two blocks East of the Obelisk, where grand theater Odeón (#782) and popular cabaret Royal Pigall (#825) faced across the street not 200 ft from one another … the street corner which was home to great poets and artists and to the thugs and drug-addicted call girls. In 1955 Julían Centeya recited a moving tribute to Café Dominguez, a few blocks West near the intersection of Corrientes and Parana, immortalizing the first Buenos Aires tango bar to stay open 24/7, where the quartet of the bandoneonist “Liendre” De Leone played in the 1910s and 1920s … the cafe which was no more. The actual verses of “Café Dominguez” belong to Enrique Cadícamo who lived a block away, at #1330. And Enrique Discépolo’s home was half mile further West, at #1990. The sense of loss of tango history turns most palpable in Osvaldo Pugliese’s 1961 tango, “Corrientes Bajo Cero”, “Corrientes Below Zero”. Roberto Chanel sings of Corrientes reborn as the crib of gotán, a place where Piazzolla’s bandoneon sounds again, where the doors of “El Olmo” (at #948) and “El Germinal” (at the corner of Maipú, where Juan Maglio Pacho once debuted) have reopened, where the music of Pugliese himself rings at Teatro el Nacional (#960) … but it turns out to be just a dream, and we wake up to find a frozen place where “El Marzoto”, “El Ruca”, and “El Tibidabo” are shattered, too! Yet, just close you eyes again, and then you may see a monument to Carlos Gardel rising side by side with the Obelisk…  (Needless to say Pugliese now got a plaza named after him, and a monument, at the corner of Corrientes and Scalabrini Ortiz). But the best known Osvaldo Pugliese monument must be the one at the very end of Avenida Corrientes – at his grave at Chacarita Cemetery, with the maestro’s piano traditionally graced by red carnations as a symbol of his absence (whenever Pugliese was detained – and there were times when the authorities locked him up almost every weekend – his orchestra kept playing, but with a red carnatios placed on his piano to signify that the maestro can’t be there with them, but is present in spirit). The whole world of tango’s past is there at Chacarita. Its first band leaders, Villolda and Arolas, are buried there; Gardel’s chapel crypt is there, as is the modest grave of El Cachafaz. A parcel purchased by Francisco Canaro has the graves of the greatest of tango’s golden years as well as his own. Its greatest poets are there, Cadicano, Contursi, Discépolo, Flores, Manzi, Exposito, Centeya… Orchestra leaders – Troilo, De Caro, Laurenz, Fresedo, De Angelis, Malerba, Gobbi, Maffia, Varela, Maderna, Pontier, Bianco, Filiberto, Cobian… And, ever a maverick, Juan D’Arienzo rests in a different section of Chacarita.

Corrientes Angosta

Teatro Odeon @ Corrientes & Esmeralda

At Royal Pigall, Canaro’s orchestra played alongside a US ragtime band

Old Corrientes by night

Avenida Corrientes

We return to Corrientes street and tally our losses.

In a decade which passed since “Adiós, Arrabal”, the famed avenida has lost more than half of its buildings, demolished in Depression-era public works for a massive widening of the old street, the street still remembered by the porteños with the one epithet, “Corrientes Angosta”, “the Narrow Corrientes”.

There is sadness, poverty, and despair under these street lines of the grand boulevard of the Obelisk and fine theaters and bookstores, and there is also acceptance of the fate. The song takes life as it is.

Tristezas de la calle Corrientes Letra: Homero Expósito (1942) Calle Como valle De monedas para el pan. Río sin desvío Donde sufre la ciudad. ¡Qué triste palidez tienen tus luces! Tus letreros sueñan cruces, Tus afiches, carcajadas de cartón. Risa Que precisa La confianza del alcohol. Llantos Hecho cantos Pa’ vendernos un amor. Mercado de las tristes alegrías Cambalache de caricias Donde cuelga la ilusión… Triste, sí, Por ser nuestra… Triste, sí, Porque sueñas… Tu alegría es tristeza Y el dolor de la espera Te atraviesa. Y con pálida luz Vivís llorando tus tristezas… Triste, sí, Por ser nuestra… Triste, sí, Por tu cruz…

Corrientes Street Blues translated by Derrick Del Pilar Street like a valley of coins for buying bread, dead end river where the city suffers – what sad pallor under your lights! Your signs dream of crosses, your posters, cardboard cackling Laughter that requires liquor’s confidence, laments become songs to sell us a love, market of sad joys, pawnshop of caresses where they hang up all our dreams. Sad? Yes. Because you’re ours… Sad? Yes. Because you dream… Your joy is sadness, and the pain of waiting cuts across you and with faint light you live weeping your sadness. Sad? Yes. Because you’re ours… Sad? Yes. That’s your cross…

Taking the cue from Homero Expósito, an actor, singer, and comedian Marcos Caplán, the Jewish enfant terrible of tango’s Golden Era, made the “premature rumors of the demise of tango” the centerpiece of his show at Teatro Maipo. “It’s a lie that tango has died!” – he would exclaim – “I’m going to slaughter it myself, right now!” – and then sing, mockingly, some tango hit of the season. Marcos Caplán

But has tango lost its soul? Its rough edge? Has it become tame and tired? (Have you heard the story of the newspaper article declaring that tango has died? “El tango ha muerto”, it appeared in “Caras y Caretas” … in 1903)

Yo soy el tango, 1941 Letra: Homero Expósito Soy, el tango milongón Nacido en los suburbios Malevos y turbios. Hoy, que estoy en el salón Me saben amansado Dulzón y cansado. Pa’ que creer Pa’ que mentir Que estoy cambiado, Si soy el mismo de ayer. Escuchen mi compás ¿No ven que soy gotán? Me quiebro en mi canción, Como un puñal de acero Pa’ cantar una traición. Me gusta compadrear Soy reo pa’ bailar, Escuchen mi compás Yo soy el viejo tango Que nació en el arrabal. Hoy, que tengo que callar, Que sufro el desengaño, La moda y los años. Voy, costumbre del gotán Mordiendo en mis adentros La rabia que siento. Pa’ que creer Pa’ que mentir Que estoy muriendo, Si yo jamás moriré.

I Am the Tango translated by Derrick Del Pilar I am the tango of the milongas born on the outskirts, rough and tough. Now that I’m in these fancy halls, they think I’m tamed, sappy and worn out. But why lie, why believe that I’ve changed, if I’m the same as yesterday? Listen to my beat: don’t you see that I am gotán? I bust myself in my song, like a steel dagger, to sing about a betrayal. I like to strut around, I’m cool for dancing, listen to me beat: I’m the same old tango born in the arrabal. Now that I have to quiet down, that I suffer from disillusionment, fashion and the years, I’ll follow the tango custom: I’ll bite my tongue at the anger I feel. But why think, why lie that I’m dying since I’ll never die?

In the days “Una emoción” was composed, the listeners might have read its message of cleaner, humbler tango as a call for purge of the remnants of the underclass origins of tango (culminated several years later with the ill-advised Peronist proscription of lunfardo, which replaced letras and even titles of the tango pieces with censorship-approved mediocrity) or maybe a jealous partisan attack on the irreverence of “El Rey de Compás” D’Arienzo and his followers. Indeed Raul Kaplán, its composer (and probably the only Jewish fiddler to ever direct a tango orquesta tipica), firmly belonged to the camp of tango romanticism. But we now see the message of “Una emoción” through the prism of Gavito’s legacy – as a passionate call for humble respect to tango’s roots and for the mutual respect and community-building.

Finally – Una emoción, 1943 – the beat of tango has permeated the city, its every corner. This nostalgic feeling, this loving and longing reflection of its past days, grows only more sweet and more enchanting every time when we hear it. Tango has become timeless; it no longer needs to pretend to be something convoluted, because it’s so natural for this humble and deep emotion to resonate in our hearts. That’s what we call Tango, and nothing more.

Una emoción (1943) Letra: José María Suñé …Envuelto en la ilusión anoche lo escuché, compuesta la emoción por cosas de mi ayer: La casa en que nací… la reja y el parral… la vieja calesita y el rosal. Su acento es la canción de voz sentimental… su ritmo es el compás que vive en mi ciudad. No tiene pretensión, no quiere ser procaz. se llama tango… y nada más.

An emotion translated by Derrick del Pilar Wrapped up in a dream last night I heard it – an emotion composed of things from my yesterdays: The house where I was born, the iron fence and the ivy, the old carousel, the rosebush. Its accent is the song of an emotional voice, its rhythm is the measure that lives in my city – it has no pretensions, it doesn’t want to be lewd, it’s called tango, and nothing more.

At the start of our era of the rebirth of tango, it was Gavito who carried the message of Una Emoción as an article of faith – so I must close this long post with an old, grainy video of Gavito’s dance. See you on the dance floor!

So that's why “Poema” is hard to fit into a tanda...

El Garron and its downstairs cabaret hall Palermo, 6 rue Fontain, just off Pigalle (1925)

Most of of the practicing and aspiring Argentine tango DJs must have noticed that Francisco Canaro’s superb (and much overplayed) 1935 “Poema” doesn’t quite fit seamlessly into tandas (as sets of tango records played for the dancers, typically from the same orchestra and the same time, are called). “Poema” is quite singular in its gently melancholic, softly nostalgic flow, while other Canaro’s hits of the period tend to be more insistent and dramatic in quality, energetically driving rather than softly soothing.

One can’t help noticing a few more peculiarities about this hit. Its popularity peaks overseas, especially in Europe, and reaches the low point in Buenos Aires. And no other orchestras in Argentine recorded the piece.

Thanks to German Nemoljakin’s constant flow of stories from tango’s past, I got an intriguing glimpse of “Poema”’s special history, and couldn’t resist digging deeper into it. To sum it up:

The beautiful “Poema” isn’t quite an Argentine tango, it is as much a European tango, composed by the expat musicians who were singularly successful in transplanting tango to the musical scene of Paris.

Furthermore, “Poema”’s lack of acceptance in Buenos Aires wasn’t helped by the dark political undertones of its story, and the fact that its lyrics are a thinly veiled confession of a banished murderer.

“Poema” is undoubtedly the best composition of Eduardo Bianco, an Argentine who lived in Europe for nearly 20 years, and who mastered the art of making the tango of Argentina sound the Parisian way. The oft-retold story says that Bianco and Mario Melfi, aided by others in their band, composed it on a train during a 1932 tour of Germany. What is rarely mentioned is that Bianco’s lyrics tell his personal, and thoroughly suppressed, story from his final year in Buenos Aires. In 1924, Eduardo Bianco played the first violin in the orchestra of the famous Teatro Apolo at Avenida Corrientes. Bianco learned that his wife cheated on him with the pianist of the orchestra, and shot his rival to death in a fit of jealousy. As translated into English by Alberto Paz, Bianco’s stanzas tell us how a dream of sweet love ended up awakening the heart’s monsters, the chimeras which can never be fully grasped; the words “intenso mal” which Alberto Paz translated as “intense misfortune” may be better interpreted as “overpowering evil”:


Francisco Canaro - Roberto Maida, Poema (1935)

Fué un ensueño de dulce amor, horas de dicha y de querer, fué el poema de ayer, que yo soñé, de dorado color, vanas quimeras del corazón, no logrará descifrar jamás, nido tan fugaz, fue un ensueño de amor y adoración. Cuando las flores de tu rosal, vuelvan mas bellas a florecer, recordarás mi querer, y has de saber, todo mi intenso mal. De aquel poema embriagador, ya nada queda entre los dos, doy mi triste adiós, sentiras la emoción, de mi dolor…

It was a dream of sweet love, hours of happiness and loving, it was the poem of yesterday, that I dreamed, of gilded color, vain chimeras of the heart, it will not manage to never decipher, so fleeting nest, it was a dream of love and adoration. When the flowers of your rose garden, bloom again ever so beautiful, you'll remember my love, and you will come to know, all my intense misfortune. Of that one intoxicating poem, nothing is left between us, I say my sad goodbye, you'll feel the emotion, of my pain…

Eduardo Bianco was jailed and tried for murder, and acquitted - according to José María Otero, owing to political connections of Bianco’s influential rich friend, Martin “Macoco” Álzaga Unzué, a race driver, bon vivant, and night club owner whose circle included top entertainers, aristocrats, and mobsters. But the acquitted violinist had to leave Argentina. Soon, he sailed for France.


In Paris, Bianco with the bandoneonist Juan Bautista Deambroggio “Bachicha” assembled Orquesta Típica Bianco-Bachicha, which started to play in the downstairs cabaret of the famed Argentine-themed Montmartre boîte, “El Garron”, and toured Europe, the Americas, and Middle East. He continued cultivating relationships with the rich and powerful, even dedicating his tango compositions to kings and queens, and (twice) to Benito Mussolini, and boasting of praise from Stalin and Hitler. It was the 1926 “Plegaria”, dedicated to Spanish king Alfonso XIII, “symbol of Spanish democracy” (who fled after the electoral victory of the Republicans, and supported Franco with the outbreak of Spanish Civil War), which brought Bianco most infamy.



Orquesta Típica Argentina “Eduardo Bianco”: Plegaria. Span. Refraingesang: Mario Visconti. Telefunken, Die Deutsche Weltmarke, E 2861, March 1939

The most detailed account of Bianco’s European years has been provided in Enrique Cadícamo’s 1975 La historia del tango en París (and summarized in a recent El Litoral article). Cadícamo, who toured Europe with the already presented Gardel, advised his tango friends to avoid discussing politics with Eduardo Bianco because Bianco supposedly informed for Gestapo (the French police detained and investigated him in 1937, but released him). Bianco associated himself with Eduardo Labougle Carranza, Argentine ambassador in the Third Reich Berlin and an avowed antisemite. They supposedly convinced Goebbels that tango should take place of the “racially tainted” Jazz music, and were invited to perform in Berlin’s “La scala”. Then, at an Argentine asado reception at the Embassy, Bianco’s orchestra got to entertain Hitler himself (even with a bandoneon player personally grilling meats for him), and the Führer asked for an encore performance of “Plegaria” (“Prayer” in Spanish). The sentimental monster must have enjoyed the play between the solemn sound of the piece and the frivolous, erotic perception of the word “tango”, because soon, he found a horrible use for Bianco’s score. In a short time, “Plegaria” would be dubbed “Tango of Death”, as the death camp prisoner bands were ordered to play it when the camp prisoners were led to execution. The horror of “Tango of Death” has been immortalized in the verses of Paul Celan under his post-war impressions of Lwów’s Janówska death camp (here it is read by himself in German). Although the Romanian translation of the poem, published before the German original, still had “tangul” in its title, in the final German version “Plegaria” turned into “Todesfuge”, “The Death Fugue”!

(A personal side note here … this is how I got to understand another allusion in Psoy Korolenko’s Ilimsky Ostrog, an amalgamation of quotes and allusions of three centuries of Russian and foreign classic poetry, folk song, pop and rock, where peeling off the layers of meaning never ends … “Meine Todesfuge” is heard near 4:55 in this concert record)

The Jewish members of the Lwów Philharmonics playing the “Tango of Death” in Lwów’s Janówska death camp (more about it here)

Mauthausen, 30. June 1942. Yad Vashem Archive, 2AO7

The WWII broke out, and Ambassador Labougle returned to Argentina to champion the cause of South American neutrality in the war, the cause which must have been largely anti-American and anti-Brazilian, rather than pro-Axis, in Argentina, since it traditionally allied itself with Great Britain, its main export market, and, after the Great Depression-era unfair trade treaties went into effect, also Argentina’s main supplier of manufactured goods. The United States, in the meantime, practiced the ideology of continental domination, the Manifest Destiny, and armed Argentina’s regional arch-rival, Brazil. Although truth be said, Argentine leaders sought to emulate many aspects of the Axis, from nationalist fervor to regional expansion plans (Argentina even covertly installed a friendly, pro-fascist government in Bolivia in a 1943 coup). But time was running out for the open sympathizers of the Reich, and in January 1944, Argentina had to break relations with Nazi Germany (although it didn’t declare war until a year later). In the meantime, Bianco played across occupied Europe for the Nazi troops, and on the Third Reich radio stations. As it’s become clear that Argentina will sever relations with the Reich soon, he left on a Spanish visa from King Alfonso’s times, and faced a lengthy investigation by the British intelligence services – Bianco himself wrote that he was only cleared owing to his investigator’s appreciation of the music of tango. He finally returned to Buenos Aires in 1943, at the peak of Tango’s Golden age, amid insane richness of tango orchestras. Bianco tried hard but has never succeeded in competing against the local talent; his remained a purely export version of Argentine tango.

Baron Tsunayoshi Megata, son of famed Japanese diplomat Tanetaro Megata, came to Paris in 1920 to cure a disfiguring blood vessel tumor on his face, and stayed until 1926. “El Barón” Megata, a playboy and accomplished ballroom dancer, first discovered El Garron, when Manuel Pizarro’s tango orchestra was paying here. Soon Megata has become a regular, and learned to dance. On return to Japan, he packed cases of tango records from Paris – Pizarro, Bachicha, Bianco… – and organized a dance school for the aristocracy, who were taught that tango was a Parisian dance.

Before we return to 1935, and to Canaro, let me mention that “Poema” has been recorded by one more Parisian band, the Orquesta Típica Auguste-Jean Pesenti du Coliseum de Paris (A.-J. Pesenti was a bandoneonist from Colombia known to us largely owing to the Japanese collectors; in fact pre-WWII tango dancers and listeners in Japan played French tango records of Bianco, Bachicha, Pizzarro, and others, and generally believed that tango was a genre of French music)

Canaro, of course, also famously chose Paris to be his base after 1925 (embarking on tours to New York, Berlin, Hamburg, and Madrid, and to a family roots discovery trip to Italy, from France). Sometimes people say that Canaro stayed abroad for a whole decade, and supposedly didn’t make a comeback to Buenos Aires until 1935! Technically, it’s very untrue, and yet in terms of Francisco Canaro’s legacy and influence, it may be true that the decade between 1925 and 1934 was the low-key part of his tango carrier. He tried diversifying into other genres – rancheras, maxixe, foxtrot, jazz, and even recorded such Americana pieces as “Red Red Robin” as “Francisco Canaro Jazz Band”. He toured the provincial towns, played a lot for the radio stations, launched a series of comedy musicals, and appeared in a movie with Gardel, all to regain his fame and to secure the grand dance halls of BsAs for himself again. Perhaps it was the chilling effect of the Great Depression on the porteño party scene. Or Canaro’s affiliation with the recording company Nacional Odeon, which pitted him against the more prominent RCA Victor. Or it could have been the continuing echo from yet another fatal gunshot story which may have played a role in Canaro’s departure to Paris in the first place.

This is a story which began almost exactly 100 years ago, in September 1914. Francisco Canaro’s lucky break into the ranks of most-listened-to tango orchestras was catalyzed by his invitation to highlight Primero Baile del Internado, the First Ball of Medical Interns, which marked the end of the spring break in the School of Medicine. The interns of Buenos Aires found their inspiration in Paris, in traditional medical students Bal de L’Internat held at Bullier Hall. To this rancorous celebration at the famous Palais de Glace, Canaro premiered a tango titled Matasano, “The Slayer of the Healthy” (as the medical students were humorously called), dedicated to Hospital Durand in Caballito neighborhood. The following year, Canaro premiered tango “El Internado”, “The Intern”, at the Intern’s Ball.

The tradition continued for 11 years, with many pranks and with tango titles such as “Aquí se vacuna” (”Immunizations shots here”, dedicated to Public Health Office), “Anatomia”, “Cloroformo”, “El termómetro”, “La biblioteca” (”The Medical Library”), “Hospital Durand”, “Mano Brava” and “Qué muñeca” (dedicated to outstanding surgeons’ hands), “La inyección” and “El microbio” (continued with tangos about specific pathogens, “El dengue” and “Ae. Aegypti”), even “Paraiso Artificial” (”Artificial Paradise”, obviously a tango about drugs). The tango which premiered in 1924 was titled “El once: el divertismento” – “The 11th: let’s have fun”.


But soon after the 1924 celebration, the medical students took part in a prank gone horribly wrong, and an intern Ernesto O’Farrel was shot and killed by an administrator at Hospital Piñero, triggering a physician strike at all municipal hospitals. The Baile del Internado was never held again. And Canaro’s memoirs mourn the things tango lost after 1924...

Yet Canaro’s tango also gained from being exposed to the music of the European expats, and he kept returning to the scores from Paris, starting from a 1928 recording, with Charlo, of “Bandoneón arrabalero”, a tango Canaro re-recorded several times. The 1925 score is signed by Juan Bautista Deambrogio Bachicha himself, although Enrique Cadícamo says in La historia del tango en París that it was Horacio Petorossi, a guitar player in Bianchi-Bachicha orchestra, who sold the score to Bachicha for a thousand franks. The 1935 recording of Bianco’s Poema continued the trend of cross-fertilization of Parisian and BsAs tango music, but failed to impress the listeners in Argentina.
The most powerful admission of Parisian influences Canaro himself made is his 1938 record of “El Garron”, “Tango Criollo-Parisian”:


Quinteto Don Pancho (Francisco Canaro), El Garron (Tango Criollo-Parisian) (1938)