Carlos Gardel
Carlos Gardel was an Argentine nationalized singer, composer and film actor in 1923. He is the best-known representative of the genre in the history of tango. Initiator and greatest exponent of the tango song, he was one of the most important performers of world popular music in the first half of the 20th century, due to the quality of his voice, the number of records sold (as a singer and as a composer), for his numerous films related to tango and for his worldwide impact.
There is no unanimity about the place and date of his birth. The Uruguayan hypothesis holds that he was born in Tacuarembó (Uruguay), on December 11 between 1883 and 1887. The French hypothesis holds that he was born in Toulouse (France) on December 11, 1890. There is unanimity in the fact that he lived in Buenos Aires since his childhood and became an Argentine national in 1923. He died on June 24, 1935 in Medellín, Colombia, in a plane crash.
The person and image of Gardel have been the object of popular idolatry, especially in Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia in a place of myth and cultural symbol that is still valid.
In 2003, Gardel's voice was registered by Unesco in the Memory of the World program, dedicated to the preservation of documents belonging to the historical heritage of the peoples of the world. At the same time, reference is made to his voice and his I remember with the phrase "every day she sings better".
Biography
Childhood and adolescence
The date and country of Gardel's birth is subject to historical controversy (see section Controversies about his place of birth). According to the Uruguayan hypothesis, he was born in Tacuarembó (Uruguay) between 1883 and 1887, while according to the French hypothesis, he was born in Toulouse (France) in 1890. As a consequence of these discrepancies, each of the hypotheses maintains different accounts of the events of his childhood. and adolescence.
For the Frenchist hypothesis, Marie Berthe Gardes, whose Spanish name was Berta Gardés, was the biological mother of Charles Romuald Gardes, whose name was Spanish-speaking in Buenos Aires as Carlos Gardés and who he himself later transformed into Carlos Romualdo Gardel. In this version, Gardel would have studied at the Colegio Salesiano Pío IX in Buenos Aires, where he remained a pupil in 1901 and 1902 and was a choir partner of Ceferino Namuncurá, future Argentine blessed.
The Uruguayan hypothesis maintains that Marie Berthe Gardes acted as the adoptive mother of Carlos Gardel and that Charles Romuald Gardes was a biological son of Berthe, younger than Carlos. The Montevideo Departmental Board officially recognized Carlitos Gardel's attendance at the 2nd Grade School for Boys in the Palermo neighborhood of Montevideo between 1891 and 1893.
Both hypotheses coincide in the fact that Gardel was abandoned by his father and that he lived in Buenos Aires at least since 1893, in tenement rooms that he shared with his mother, although with intermittencies that vary depending on the historian. Only in 1927 did Gardel buy a house in the Abasto neighborhood, where he would move in with his mother.
Both hypotheses also agree that the young Gardel, during the first decade of the XX century, could have had behaviors and frequenting areas located on the margins of legality, as evidenced by police records from 1904 and 1915 that mention him and whose fingerprints match his, as proved by an investigation carried out by the criminologist Raúl Torre and the forensic doctor Juan José Fenoglio.
Artistic beginnings
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References
1. Uruguay 162 (Barrio de San Nicolás). First home of Gardel (1893-1904).
2. Corrientes 1553 (Barrio de San Nicolás). Second home of Gardel (1904-1914).
3. Corrientes 1714 (Barrio de San Nicolás). Third place of Gardel (1914-1918).
4. Jean Jaurés 733 (Barrio del Abasto). Gardel's office since 1927. Casa Museo Carlos Gardel
5. Humahuaca and Agüero (esq. sur-Barrio del Abasto). Bar O'Rondeman, administered by Giggio Traverso
6. Width 666 (Barrio del Abasto). Conservative Committee and House of Constancio Traverso
7. Abasto Market (1889-1985)
8. Pasaje Carlos Gardel (Barrio del Abasto). 1.♪ I find Gardel-Razzan.
9. Tucumán 2646 (Barrio de Balvanera). San Estanislao College (1904)1
10. Rivadavia and Rincón (Barrio de Balvanera). Coffee of the Angelitos.
During his childhood and adolescence, Gardel lived in very poor tenement houses or tenements, located in the San Nicolás neighborhood: first at Uruguay 162 and then at Corrientes 1553. With his first income as a professional musician in 1914 he moved, always with his mother, to a modest apartment in Corrientes 1714. The extreme poverty and degrading living conditions of the Buenos Aires tenements at the time of the great immigration have been studied in sociological works, and represented in artistic works, such as The tenement house of La Paloma. His friend and driver Antonio Sumaje has recounted that when Gardel was already a star he used to ask him to take him to the tenements where he had lived as a child, especially the one on Uruguay 162, where he would get out and stare at the facade:
Suddenly, excited to tears, he quickly got in the car again. And then he remained silent for a very long time.Antonio Sumaje (chofer of Gardel)
The neighborhood in which Gardel grew up is the area of Buenos Aires theaters that has its axis in Corrientes street, later transformed into an avenue. That allowed him from a very young age to be in contact with the theatrical world. His mother worked ironing clothes, sometimes for some of those theaters, and he himself was recruited by a character known as "Patasanta", who organized claques of clappers in the theaters, charging money for providing that service. With the "troupe of entertainers" of Patasanta, Gardel was a tap, props and comparsista (extra), in exchange for being able to attend the shows and receive tickets. In this way he managed to be in contact with actors and singers, whose vocalization exercises and other behaviors that would be important for his future artistic training would be imitated:
Those were my first artistic knowledge and that's how I got that white voice I made known to.Carlos Gardel
Thus, among many other informal jobs, he worked as a stagehand at the Teatro de la Victoria, where he heard the Spanish zarzuela player Sagi Barba, with whom he even took his first informal singing lessons, and in 1902 he moved to the Teatro Ópera, where he met the Italian baritone Titta Ruffo.
At that time, as a teenager, he began to frequent the Abasto neighborhood, a recently organized popular neighborhood around the then new market, opened in 1893. Gardel was invited by a group of young people (José "El Tanito" Oriente, Domingo "Daguita" Vito) to join the "bar" of the cafe O'Rondeman, which was in Agüero and Humahuaca. The cafe was owned by the Traverso brothers (Alberto or "Giggio", Constancio, Félix and José or "Sweetheart"). It was managed by the first of them, "Gordo" Giggio or Yiyo, who would establish a relationship of great mutual affection with Gardel, with paternal-child characteristics, to the point that when he died in 1923, Carlos was one of those who held the coffin. The Traverso brothers, led by Constancio, politically dominated the Abasto neighborhood, on behalf of the National Autonomist Party, the conservative party founded by Julio Argentino Roca that ruled the country without alternation, based on electoral fraud, between 1874 and 1916. Young Gardel was a protégé of the Traverso brothers, who valued from the beginning the quality of his singing -of great importance for organizing popular sociability-, and promoted his performance both in the Bar O'Rondeman, and in the conservative committees from the neighborhood, from other areas of the city, and even from Avellaneda, where he was related to the strongman of Buenos Aires conservatism, Alberto Barceló, and his famous bully, Ruggierito.
Gardel began to sing semi-professionally in the Traverso café and in the conservative committee of Anchorena 666. Years later, in 1927, he moved with his mother to a house that he bought right around the corner from the committee, now the Casa Museo Carlos Gardel. At that time, popular singing was dominated by the art of payada, whose greatest figure was Gabino Ezeiza. Gardel did not have the ability to invent his own verses as he sang, which was the decisive characteristic for the success of the payadores, but the quality of his voice gradually opened the way for him. «Gardel was never a payador; he was a singer", says the historian Pablo Taboada.
From that time comes Gardel's relationship with the payada, especially with José Betinotti, who is credited with giving him the nickname "Zorzalito" or "Zorzal Criollo", that is, the name of one of the characteristic birds from the Pampas region, such as the thrush, noted for the beauty of its song. One of the first songs Gardel recorded was "Pobre mi madre querida", Betinotti's most famous song. Also from this time comes the relationship with the payador Arturo de Nava. In 1922, the Gardel-Razzano duo would record De Nava's most famous work, "El cartero", which became Gardel's main hit on his first tour of France (1928/1929). and which was later included among the famous musical film shorts made in 1930, where Gardel appears talking to the payador, already at the point of decline in his career, who thanks him for singing his song.
During his first decade as a singer, Gardel never sang a tango, although he danced it. He built his singing style from payada and country songs, but also from the Neapolitan canzonetta and opera.
In 1910, while he was still unknown to the public, he sang one night for a regular gathering of jockeys and thoroughbred horse keepers at La Frazenda confectionery, in Bajo Belgrano, on the occasion of having bet on a mare that won the race, obtaining an important profit. In 1936 a certain Laureano Gómez, who was present that night, published an account of Gardel's presentation:
He presented himself as a very similar and discreetly suited boy. He was introduced to the tertulia by a master Vedoya, owner of stables at the old National Hippodrome. [...] This young morocchi puts a deep feeling in the criollas tones. It's nice to hear it. [...] The present asked him to continue singing, at the cry of "Morocho, sing what", "Morocho, sing such", "Morocho de aquí", etc.Laureano Gómez
By the second decade of the XX century, Gardel was commonly referred to as El Morocho del Abasto.
The Gardel-Razzano duo
At the beginning of the second decade of the XX century, Carlos Gardel and the Uruguayan José Razzano, The Oriental. In Memories of him , Razzano locates that meeting in 1911, at a friend's house located on Guardia Vieja street, a few meters from the Mercado de Abasto. Years later that part of the street, between Jean Jaurés and Anchorena, will be renamed as Carlos Gardel passage.
Gardel had already begun to sing a duet with Francisco Martino, joined by Razzano and shortly after by Saúl Salinas from Cuyo. The truth is that the four of them remained linked, singing alternately in duo, trio and quartet, in various neighborhoods and cities in Argentina in a semi-professional manner, until little by little the Gardel-Razzano duo began to decant, establishing their bar of friends and their artistic base in the Café de los Angelitos, an intermediate point between Abasto -where Gardel stopped- and Balvanera Sur, where the Café del Pelado of Moreno and Entre Ríos was located (still standing), in which stood Razzano.
In that period, Casa Tagini, which was represented by Columbia Records and had become the main record company in Argentina, hired Gardel to record seven double discs in 1912 with songs of his choice, which were released to the market in 1913, when he was still unknown. Those records are the first record of the presentation of the young singer under the name Carlos Gardel. The seven records were as follows:
- T594: "La mañanita" (anonymous), style / "You left me" (read: A. Cepeda; music: anonymous), style
- T595: «My dear mother» (Betinotti), style / «It is in vain» (letra: F. Curlando; music: Gardel), song
- T637: «Poor flower» (read: anonymous; music: C. Gardel), style / «The butterfly» (read: A. Cepeda; music: Gardel/Razzano), style
- T638: "El almohadon" (letra: A. Cepeda; music: Gardel), waltz / "Brisas de la tarde" (letra: J. Marmol; music: Gardel/Razzano), song.
- T728: "The silver shooter" (letra: O. Orozco; music: Gardel/Razzano), style / "I know how to do" (letra: A. Cepeda; music: C. Gardel), figure
- T729: «My Chinese goat» (read: anonymous; music: C. Gardel), style / «Poor mother» (read: Cepeda; music: Gardel), style
- T730: «The dream» (letra: Cepeda; music: F. Martino), style / «A Mitre» (letra: J. Etchepare; music: P. Vázquez), waltz.
The expression «style» is the one used at the time to refer to country and rural rhythms. For this reason, singers like Gardel were called "stylists." Some decades later, in Argentina the expression "folklore" began to be used to name these musical genres. In the repertoire chosen by Gardel, "Mi madre querida" stands out - an emblematic song by the payador José Betinotti - and six poems set to music by Andrés Cepeda ―a poet assassinated two years earlier and harassed by the police due to his anarchist ideas and his homosexual condition, which moved the sensitivity of the young Gardel―. The commercial result was not as expected and Gardel would have to wait until 1917 to record again.
In 1914 Gardel and Razzano were hired to sing at the sumptuous Armenonville cabaret in Buenos Aires, for a cache of 70 pesos a night, an unexpected sum that Gardel initially thought was the fortnightly remuneration. Gobello considers that this was Gardel's first professional performance. The success of their performances at the Armenonville opened the doors for the duo to the great stages of the Buenos Aires show. A few days later, the famous Pablo Podestá hired them to sing for two weeks in the show that was about to premiere at the National Theater, his first performance on Corrientes Street.
Years later, in a letter to Razzano written from Paris, Gardel would remember that debut at Armenonville as follows:
My dear old Pepe: Yesterday I was two hours between cups, talks and jarana, in "El Garrón" of Rue Fontaine. It's a fire like the Eleven, no more or less. But in these days it is filled with franchutes, Americans, even Japanese, with an impressive shipment of silver. The tango fever takes them there. I remembered that Gardel-Razzano duo debut in the old Armenonville... Do you remember what he had? Now here, suddenly converted into a master, I realize that, with all the fulries we spent, in the old "Armenonville" we were among people equal to us, who felt the tango as much as ourselves. Here, instead, the gout is a passing and capricious fashion like all. Enter: to sing tangos, you have to wear gaucho.Carlos Gardel
1915 was a complex year for Gardel, in which the difficulties of the past and the successes of the future seemed to be confused. In the middle of the year they were contacted by the Uruguayan businessman Manuel Barca, who had gone to Buenos Aires to hire them to act in Montevideo. The young people received the offer incredulous and insecure. The prominent Montevidean historian Julio César Puppo recounts that meeting as follows:
That's where Gardel comes: he's a fat, round mug.
At least we'll have to go back to Buenos Aires?
It is a historical phrase: I thought if they would get for the passage at that time, which cost three pesos round and round, with the right to dinner and breakfast. There were people who made the trip nothing but to eat. However, these boys were concerned about uncertainty. It is that a very hard experience weighed on them. And Barca, who had also been educated at the rigorous street school, understood it immediately.
"How much do you want to win?" he asks.
Men look among them, meditate an instant, after which Razzano is expiated:
"With frankness, tell me, is there a lot to ask for?
It was Argentine pesos.
"You don't know what they're worth," says Barca. And the deal was closed.Julius Caesar Puppo (July César Puppo)That world of bass1966)
Montevideo received them as if they were celebrities, with the city papered with their portraits and a program of activities that included being received at the port, taken to breakfast, interviews with the press and a performance reserved for influential people. On June 18, 1915, they made their debut at the Teatro Royal, to a full house, and for the first time the audience asked them to repeat the songs shouting "play another one, Carlitos". Puppo says that at the end of the performance Gardel began to cry with emotion in the dressing room. Since then Gardel would feel at home in Montevideo, with his own bar of friends, he would sing again and again and at the end of his days he had a house built in which he never lived due to the accident that it cost my life
A few days later, his undocumented status led him to provide false information to obtain documents that would allow him to travel to Brazil, on a tour of the Rio de la Plata Dramatic Company headed by Elías Alippi, in which the duo had to perform the final partying. On the ship he met Neapolitan opera tenor Enrico Caruso, who praised Gardel's voice, but the company's presentation in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro could not overcome the language barrier, although the duo's performance received praise from the press. Brazilian. Unfortunately, Gardel was arrested by the Brazilian police after being found in the company of Argentine criminals who had established themselves there. From the file formed to process the documentation, it also emerged that Gardel had a record as a small-time swindler for making "uncle's stories". Years later, these data would block the project of naming Corrientes Avenue after him.
On the ship back from Brazil, Alippi offers the duo to participate in a new production of Juan Moreira, a famous founding work of the Argentine theater, successfully premiered on the following November 12 at the San Martín theater. Los Gardel Razzano sang in an always celebrated musical scene in a grocery store where Moreira dances, premiering on that occasion the cueca “Corazones partidos”, by his ex-partner Saúl Salinas. On that occasion the duo was accompanied by 20 guitarists, led by José Ricardo and Horacio Pettorossi. The difference in quality led them to hire Ricardo from then on as the duo's permanent guitarist, while Pettorossi would join Gardel's group of guitarists in the 1930s.
Before the end of the year, on the night of December 10-11, 1915, he was shot in a confusing episode. The event happened during a disturbance in the street after celebrating his birthday at the Palais de Glace (a ballroom at the time in the Recoleta neighborhood), when he was accompanied by the actors Elías Alippi and Carlos Morganti. By then Gardel was already known and the incident appeared in the police chronicle of the newspapers La Prensa and La Razón (“Attack on Gardel”), where it was stated that the attackers were a certain Roberto Guevara -the author of the shot- and Moreno Gallegos Serna, probable thugs of the underworld, the latter mentioned by Eduardo Arolas when dedicating his tango "Suipacha" to him. The causes and events after the attack remain unclear. His friend Edmundo Guibourg recounts that after the attack Gardel went to Tacuarembó to recover, where he met the younger brother of the caudillo Traverso, "Cielito Traverso", hiding there for having murdered a man in the Armenonville cabaret. False information has also been spread that the thug Roberto Guevara was actually Roberto Guevara Lynch, uncle of the still unborn Che Guevara and member of a wealthy Buenos Aires family. Finally, when Gardel died, the bullet would appear in his autopsy, also giving rise to the hypothesis of an armed confrontation on the plane that would have caused the accident that cost him his life.
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In the second decade of the XX century, the Buenos Aires entertainment world was characterized by an enormous diffusion of varieté , a modality that emerged in France and taken over from Spain, which consisted of a succession of short performances of the most diverse types (musical, dramatic, humorous, circus, magic, etc.). After beginning in 1916, during the summer season in Mar del Plata, in the middle of the year they are hired to perform at the Teatro Esmeralda (later Teatro Maipo), located a few meters from the famous tango corner of Corrientes and Esmeralda, and at the beginning of the year The following year they also made their debut at the neighboring Empire Theatre, on Corrientes and Maipú streets, aimed at an audience with greater purchasing power. The success was consecration and their performances would extend in both theaters for six years.
In that early period, the performance of the Gardel-Razzano duo alternated songs sung as soloists and songs as a duet. The famous folklorist Osvaldo Sosa Cordero remembers having seen them when he was a teenager and said that they opened the presentation as a duet interpreting "Brisas de la tarde", the first song by the duo based on a poem by José Mármol, after which Razzano sang the number " Between colors», one of the songs with which he was identified. Then they sang as a duet "Cantar eterno", by Villoldo, and the cat "El sol del 25". Gardel's favorites to close were two songs about horses, Gardel's great passion: "El moro" (based on a poem by Juan María Gutiérrez) and "El pangaré". Precisely, in the event in which he was shot, the gunman had shouted "You're not going to sing anymore & # 34; El moro & # 34;!".
Simultaneously, Gardel would record again and would not stop doing so from now on. Once the leonine contract with the Tagini-Columbia record company expired, he reached an agreement with Max Glücksmann's company, under labels such as Disco Nacional and Odeon. The contract established an amount of four cents per disc sold (simple double-sided). On those 1917 records the duo recorded their repertoire, including "Mi noche triste", the first tango recorded by Gardel. The records were sold massively, in quantities that exceeded 50,000 units each, with profits in the order of 8,000 pesos for each one.
Finally, Gardel would cap off that exceptional year by starring in the silent film Peach Blossom, based on a successful novel by Hugo Wast, which was directed by Francisco Defilippis Novoa and in which he played the protagonist, Fabian. It is one of the first feature films of Latin American cinema, when it was still silent, which indicates the comprehensive vision of the show that Gardel was developing. Gardel was about to leave the filming, unhappy with his acting performance, but was convinced to stay by the director, with the argument of including several sequences of him singing, an uncertain argument if one takes into account that it was a silent film, although there is information that in 1940 a sound version of the film was projected, which perhaps included those fragments. Peach Blossom was released on September 28, 1917, with an excellent response from the public, remaining on the bill for several years and exceeding 800 performances.
Gardel's growing concern for his image, which had its antecedents in his famous smile and the sympathy that characterized him from the beginning, will also be evident in the first studio photos that he begins to commission, especially of those who his favorite photographer would return, the Spanish-Uruguayan José María Silva, and in the work he would start to stylize his body, taking into account that Gardel was a short man (less than 1.70 meters tall) and that at that time he weighed around 120 kilos. The biographers Julián and Osvaldo Barsky say that these behaviors of Gardel indicated "his effort to build the gallant-singer, a figure that will project him internationally."
The massive success of the duo and of Gardel in particular, as well as his entry into tango, coincide with a moment of great importance in the political and social life of Argentina: the conquest of democracy. Political and union pressure had forced the Conservative government to pass a secret and compulsory voting law (only for men), which gave victory in 1916 to the Radical Party, a widely popular movement that brought Hipólito Yrigoyen to the presidency.
Tango singer
In 1917 Gardel sang and recorded a tango for the first time. It was the tango «Mi noche triste», a musical theme composed by Samuel Castriota entitled «Lita» to which Pascual Contursi had put lyrics. The interpretation of «Mi noche triste» by Gardel is considered the date of birth of the tango song: after decades of evolution, the tango had begun to find singers and lyricists capable of interpreting the same emotional cadence already expressed by the music and the tango dance.
The success of the new style of tango song was not immediate. «My sad night», with its lunfarda lyrics and its theme about the man of the town abandoned by his wife («Percanta que me amuraste...»), was received by the public without any overflowing enthusiasm. On the other hand, the "pure" they frowned upon that language of the street and that prosaic and tasteless sensuality, which strayed from "true criollo art". Gabino Ezeiza clearly established his rejection of tango when advising Carlos Marambio Catán:
Tango is a caricature of music and literature, of bastard and dirty origin. You must sing ours, not that invention of the Advents who want to impose their demonic customs and vices. Don't do that, young man, don't mess up your performance with such a desecration of art and good taste.Gabino Ezeiza
The following year (1918) the farce Los dientes del perro, staged by the Muiño-Alippi company, included a scene in which the very young actress Manolita Poli sang " My sad night". The number caused a sensation and was decisive for both the work and Gardel's version, released on record that year, to be a great success. Since then the sainete and the tango would establish a close link, promoting each other.
That year Gardel recorded another tango, "A fuego lento", also by Contursi, and little by little he built a repertoire composed mainly of tangos.
Gardel's voice and way of singing also evolved as he became a tango singer. Gardel takes advantage of his origins in the field of payada and his taste for the Neapolitan canzonetta and opera, in a city considered "the most Italian outside of Italy", in which people of Italian origin, especially the young, had become the largest ethnic group, to develop a slower, deeper, melancholic and less anxious song, characterized by an emotional interpretation that linked it to the feelings of the listener.
Slowly, Gardel is becoming a tango singer. You must create a way to sing them because no one, except Contursi, has done it before him. What were singing Villoldo, Gobbi, Mathon, the coupletists, were not tangos such as we now understand, but a hybrid of couplé and milonga... He did not reach the summit but seven years later, in 1924, when he sang "Prince".José Gobello
In 1919 only one of the thirteen songs that Gardel recorded that year was a tango. In 1920 there were already six out of twenty-four (25%) and in 1921, eight out of twenty-two (30%). Until in 1922 tangos exceeded half: twelve out of twenty-one recorded songs. During this period the duo adds a second guitarist, Guillermo Barbieri, and in 1923 Gardel premieres the tango "Mano a mano" ("Bowling in my sadness..."), with lyrics by Celedonio Flores, a notable poet discovered by Gardel in 1920, of whom he had already recorded & # 34; Margot & # 34;. "Hand in hand" it became one of Gardel's greatest successes, marking the moment when the tango song had finished prevailing and, together with the instrumental transformations of musicians such as Julio de Caro, an era of fullness for the genre was opening: the Guardia Nueva. In total Gardel would record 21 tangos by El Negro Cele, among them "El bulín de calle Ayacucho", "Malevito", "Viejo smoking&# 34;, "Bad entrails", "Canchero" and "Bread". Flores is also the author of the lyrics of the famous tango "Corrientes y Esmeralda" (1933), which says: "In your royal corner, any cockatoo dreams of looking like Carlos Gardel". Out of humility, Gardel refrained from singing that famous tango that idolized him in life.
Gardel, however, would never stop singing the most varied popular rhythms. Through musicians such as Cristino Tapia from Córdoba and Andrés Chazarreta from Santiago, he included new songs from northern Argentine folklore, while incorporating Chilean cuecas, Colombian bambucos, foxtrots, shimmys, waltzes, Spanish tangos, songs in Italian, French and English, and even a Russian ballad like "Sonia", composed by a Hungarian and an Austrian Jew who years later would be murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz, or a tango with expressions in Guarani like "Los indios", from Canaro and Caruso. Researcher Félix Scolatti, who accompanied the duo on their only tour of Chile in 1917, recounted that Gardel was constantly looking for new popular rhythms and that he listened carefully to what ordinary people sang in the streets and squares, memorizing them and taking notes, to later identify them.
In 1920, he applied to the Uruguayan consulate in Buenos Aires for a certification of nationality and an identity card, where he declared that he had been born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, in 1887. In 1923, with the Uruguayan documents obtained, he applied for Argentine nationality, which It was granted immediately, and the Argentine passport that he would use to travel was issued.
Spain and France
Consolidated in his mastery of the tango song and with his duo with Razzano at the highest point of celebrity in Argentina, Gardel was already in a position to target Europe and the international music market created by the record, a market that in the immediate future will be amplified by the cinema and the radio.
Tango had been spreading as a fashionable dance in Europe since the first decade of the XX century, exploding the tangomania shortly before the First World War (1914-1918). In 1921 the Italian Rodolfo Valentino, adopting the identity of an Argentine tango dancer dressed as a gaucho, caused a worldwide sensation with the film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Spain in particular had a tango history that even preceded Argentine tango (flamenco tango), and would develop an important autonomous aspect of the genre, with its epicenter in Barcelona and with paradigmatic songs, such as «Fumando espero», by the Catalan Juan Viladomat Masanas (lyrics from Félix Garzo), and specialized magazines such as Tango Moda. In this context, Gardel was about to show the world a way of singing tango that would make him famous in the history of popular music.
In 1923 the Gardel-Razzano duo had the opportunity to make their first tour of Europe, specifically to Spain, accompanying the theater company headed by the actress Matilde Rivera and her husband, the actor Enrique de Rosas. As a stage strategy derived from the international stereotype of Argentina, theatrical managers insisted that the musicians appear dressed as gauchos, even though in Buenos Aires they performed dressed in tuxedos. For this reason, before leaving in Montevideo, a new series of photos was taken with José María Silva, dressed as gauchos. They made their debut on December 10 of that year at the Teatro Apolo in Madrid, performing with their two guitarists as the "end of the party", after the dramatic performance that the company put on every night. The reviews about the duo were good and after 40 performances and with the mission of having landed in Europe accomplished, they left the company to go to France, where they got to know Paris and Gardel visited the Gardes family in Toulouse.
In September 1925, after 12 years of singing together and due to an injury to Razzano's larynx, the duo decided to separate, leaving Razzano to carry out business functions. Years later, after strict phoniatric work, Razzano would try to return to singing, but to no avail. From that final attempt would remain the last two recordings of the duo, "Claveles mendocinos", by Alfredo Pelaia, and "Serrana impía", by José del Valle, recorded on the last day of 1929.
Meanwhile, already as a soloist, Gardel returned to tour Europe, performing again in Spain (1925/1926 and 1927) and then in France (1928/1929). The 1925/1926 tour, with the same theater company as the one carried out two years earlier, this time also included Barcelona, a city that would establish a very special link with Gardel. The success obtained there led him to extend his performances from the initial ten days to two months. In Barcelona Gardel also recorded twenty-one songs, including a tango offered to him at that time by the Madrid pianist Teodoro Diez Cepeda, "Dolor", the first of several tangos and Spanish songs that Gardel would record in the future, an expression of his vocation. constant connection with the popular song of each place. On the 1925/1926 tour, Gardel also appeared with moderate success in Madrid and in Vitoria, in the Basque Country, where until then he had been completely unknown.
While in Barcelona, Gardel recorded several songs for the Odeón label using for the first time electric recording with a microphone (previously a pickup horn was used), the most significant technological change until the development of the LP in the late 1940s. In Argentina, Gardel would begin to record using this system in November 1926. The quality of his recordings has improved remarkably since then. The years 1926 and 1927 were the years in which he recorded the most albums, exceeding 100 songs in both. Of the hits of that time, "Bajo Belgrano" and "Siga el corso" ("That Colombina put smoke from the bonfire of her heart in her dark circles..."), both by Aieta and García Jiménez, the first version of «Caminito», «A media luz» («Corrientes 348, second floor elevator...»), «Old times» («Do you remember, brother? What times those!...»), by Canaro and Romero, as well as the first songs by young lyricists who would become classics, such as Enrique Cadícamo and Enrique Santos Discépolo (“Que vachaché”).
In 1927, Gardel bought his first and only home for himself and his mother, located at 735 Bermejo (later Jean Jaurés) street, a simple house in the heart of his spiritual neighborhood, Abasto, just around the corner from the conservative committee in which he began to sing.
At the end of 1927 Gardel began a new tour of Spain, his third, performing in Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao and Santander, with overwhelming success. "Gardel came and we found out what Argentine tangos were", summed up the Catalan journalist and musician Brauli Solsona at the time. Before returning to Buenos Aires, Gardel passed through Paris, where he signed a contract to perform in that city in the second half of 1928.
Her stay in Buenos Aires was brief and after recording several albums (among them Discépolo's first hit, "Esta noche me emborracho"), singing on Prieto radio, appearing at the Solís Theater in Montevideo and hiring a third guitarist, "Indio" José Aguilar, set sail again for Europe, this time bound for Paris.
When Gardel made his debut in Paris, tango in France already had more than two decades of history and, together with jazz, was the protagonist of the Parisian nightlife. The center of nightlife in Paris was Montmartre and the nearby Plaza Pigalle, and the center of tango life was the restaurant "El Garrón", where for almost a decade the musician Manuel Pizarro had shone, playing a crucial role promoting the Gardel's hiring. "However -say the Barsky brothers-, all that tango display of almost three decades (in Paris) lacked a great voice".
Gardel and his three guitarists (Ricardo, Barbieri and Aguilar) made their Paris debut on September 30, 1928, in a charity performance at the Fémina theater on Les Champs-Élysées and then on October 2 at the Florida cabaret, in Montmartre. His presentations lasted until April 1929, also performing at the Empire and Paramount theaters, as well as in the cities of Cannes and Monte Carlo, the highest point being the invitation to participate in the distinguished Bal des Petit Lits Blancs charity event at the Opera de Paris. He performed a varied repertoire, including songs in French, which were very well received. Of that repertoire, the tangos "Adiós muchachos" and "Siga el corso" stood out, but above all the country song by Arturo de Nava "El cartero", which Gardel interpreted with whistles, as if he himself were driving the oxen of the cart.. The success was resounding, record sales exceeded all expectations and Parisians whistled "El cartero" through the streets. At Christmas of that year, his photo was on the cover of La Rampe, the main entertainment magazine in France, while the largest French newspaper, Le Figaro, had already described its presentation in the city of light as a "triumphant success" and explained the sensation it generated on the public as follows:
You have the impression that you exercise a kind of magnetic charm over the public.Le Figaro
After performing for six months in Paris, Gardel performed for another month in Barcelona and Madrid, before returning to Buenos Aires, where he arrived on June 16, 1929, nine months after his departure. In Madrid, after fourteen years with Gardel, Ricardo decided to leave the group of guitarists, apparently displeased with the instrumental role that Aguilar wanted.
He will remain in Buenos Aires for a year and a half. During that time, he appeared in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, made an extensive tour of the Argentine provinces, sang on Radio Nacional, underwent a small operation on his vocal cords, and hired Domingo Riverol to replace Ricardo.
On September 6, 1930, a civic-military coup took place in Argentina that overthrew the democratic president Hipólito Yrigoyen. It was the first of a series of interruptions of the democratic institutionality that would last until 1983. On that occasion, Gardel assumed a position of support for the coup recording the tango "¡Viva la patria!", by Aieta and García Jiménez, which He confronted him with the Yrigoyenista sectors of the Radical Civic Union, who boycotted his performances at least on a couple of occasions. Simultaneously, Gardel begins to have economic difficulties and differences with Razzano, who worked as his representative, which earn him enmities in the bar of friends they shared and in the artistic and journalistic environment.
Finally, in 1930 Gardel would initiate a new modality to disseminate his singing, which would radically redefine his career and the massiveness of his art: cinema.
Movie Star
At the end of the 1920s, the Argentine film industry showed enormous vitality that made it one of the three most important in Latin America, along with Mexico and Brazil. Carlos Gardel, for his part, had already had an important incursion when cinema was silent, demonstrating his sensitivity to detect modern mechanisms for building mass popularity, even beyond national borders. His friend Enrique Cadícamo would say that:
...Gardel, at the time of his apogee, did not think of anything other than the cinema.Enrique Cadícamo
In many ways, Gardel would anticipate by decades mass cultural phenomena in which passion, personal identification and music come together, such as the Beatlemania of the 1960s, or equivalent Latino phenomena such as Sandro, Soda Stereo and Luis Miguel, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The critic Claudio Iván Remeseira has even used the word "gardelmanía" to refer to this last stage of Gardel's life.
The Argentine musical short films of the 1930s
In 1930, Gardel starred in fifteen sound musical short films, each one based on a song, directed by Eduardo Morera and produced by Federico Valle, one of the pioneers of Latin American cinema. Valle was born in Italy in 1880, and after working with the Lumière Brothers and taking classes with Georges Méliès, he emigrated to Argentina in 1911 and since then has produced dozens of highly valued cinematographic works, including the first newsreels and animated feature films of Quirino Cristiani, the first in the history of world cinema in its genre.
Of the fifteen shorts, five were ruined in the laboratory, among them one entitled Leguisamo solo, in which the jockey Irineo Leguisamo appeared. In 1995 another of the unreleased shorts was found, El quinielero, by Luis Cluzeau Mortet and Roberto Aubriot Barboza.
The ten shorts released were: El cartero, Añoranzas, Autumn Roses, Mano a mano, Yira, yira, I'm scared, Padrino pelao, Sheath the mandolin, Canchero and Old Tuxedo.
The most elaborate of all is Viejo smoking, a tango with lyrics by Celedonio Flores and music by his guitarist Guillermo Barbieri, in which Gardel, before singing, stars in a dramatic skit with César Fiaschi and Inés Murray on unemployment, poverty and eviction, in the context of the Great Depression. Also noteworthy are Yira, yira, El cartero, Mano a mano and Rosas de otoño, in which Gardel holds very significant dialogues with its authors, Enrique Santos Discépolo, the payador Arturo de Nava, Celedonio Flores and Francisco Canaro, respectively.
The short films were filmed in Buenos Aires between October 23 and November 3, 1930 and premiered on May 3, 1931 at the Astral cinema on Corrientes street. In some cases they were presented as "dramatized tangos".
It has been claimed that Gardel's short films were the first video clips in the history of cinema and the first sound film production in Argentina and eventually Latin America. The statement is partially true. Gardel's short films were the first sound film production with a soundtrack incorporated into the film (Movietone system) made in Latin America, but since 1927 in the world (El cantor de jazz) and 1929 in Latin America (Mosaico criollo) musical sound films had been made, using the synchronized disc system (Vitaphone system), and previously the Movietone system (soundtrack) had been used to film musical clips by Sofía Bozán directed by José Bohr, although made in New York. Beyond the debate on chronological priority, Gardel's ten short films, directed by Morera and produced by Valle, constitute a pioneering effort both in the Latin American film industry and in music video.
French movies
In January 1931 Gardel undertook a new tour of France, which began with two months of successful performances in Nice, where he fired his guitarist Aguilar for a homophobic comment against him. At the end of April, he arrived in Paris with the firm determination to shoot a film in the studios that the American company Paramount had in the town of Joinville-le-Pont, 40 kilometers southwest of the French capital, dedicated to producing films for the non-US markets. A few days later, on May 1, he achieved his goal and signed a contract that included him in a musical feature starring the figures of the magazine company of the Teatro Sarmiento in Buenos Aires, owned by Augusto Álvarez, headed by Manuel Romero and Luis Bayon Herrera. The film was finished at the end of the month and was called The lights of Buenos Aires.
The director was the Chilean Adelqui Millar and the scriptwriters Manuel Romero and Luis Bayón Herrera. The main actors were Gardel, in the leading role of rancher Anselmo Torres, and Sofía Bozán, as his girlfriend who is about to be corrupted by a Buenos Aires businessman, like her friend, played by Gloria Guzmán, who ends up being rescued by the gauchos, to return it to the rancher (Gardel). The cast was completed with Vicente Padula, Pedro Quartucci and Carlos Baeza, among others.
The film includes scenes of singing and dancing (tango, malambo and other folk dances). Gerardo Matos Rodríguez, the author of “La cumparsita”, was hired to compose the music, and Julio de Caro (violin), his brother Francisco de Caro (piano) and Pedro Laurenz (bandoneon) to play it. Gardel sings two songs, his own tango entitled "Tomo y obligo", with lyrics by Romero, who sings in a cantina in La Boca in a famous scene that generated popular delirium, and the waltz "El rosal", by Matos Rodríguez and Romero, which is the romantic theme with which the film closes, while Gardel kisses his girlfriend (Bozán). Bozán also sings two songs, while Guzmán sings one.
Las luces de Buenos Aires was released in Buenos Aires on September 23, 1931. First in the most important cinemas in Buenos Aires and then in neighborhood cinemas and the rest of the country, with huge success. But the most important thing was the reception of the film in Spanish-speaking countries that had never been able to see Gardel. In Guatemala it was shown for three years, in Madrid every day for three months, and in Barcelona and New York the public forced the operators to rewind the film over and over again to hear "Tomo y obligo" again. In Ecuador, the writer Ricardo Descalzi remembered that moment:
It was at this time when we were impressed by the voice and figure of Carlos Gardel in his first film: "The lights of Buenos Aires", with such impact on the environment, that we immediately began to admire and love. This film brought us "Tomo y obligo", that the audience attending the cinemas applauded with such vehemence that the operator was forced to stop the projection to reprisal it two or three times... Since then the announcement of a film by Carlos Gardel overwhelmed the rooms, transforming itself into the tango idol.Ricardo Descalzi
Gardel was beginning to materialize the image of a gallant-singer that had been the core of his artistic project from the beginning. His figure had slimmed down and would continue to slim down until he weighed 76 kilos, after having reached 120 kilos.
In August 1931 he returned to Buenos Aires, where he would stay for nine weeks. Paradoxically, at the same time that his popularity in Argentina, Uruguay and the entire Spanish-speaking world began to reach proportions never seen before, in the art world and the media in Buenos Aires a feeling of rejection of Gardel was growing for what was perceived as a loss of contact with their "Creole" roots. On September 15, 1931, his friend, the writer Carlos de la Púa, published a harsh open letter in the newspaper Crítica , entitled “Che Carlitos, largá la canzoneta”:
Larga the gringadas that will be very pretty, but that we did not conceive them sung by you. Do not desecrate, brother, our things that gave you glory and guidance by altering them with those Franco-Napolitan plains that do not interest us, we do not feel them and that... well... Your dear Buenos Aires, Corrientes Street, La Cortada, burros, tango, milonga, that is your life, your true life, the rest is group. Open up those weird things... and one day you're gonna thank me.Carlos de la Púa, 1931.
Never as in those very short nine weeks that he was in Buenos Aires, he so strongly perceived the hostility of the pharaoh and the Portuguese journalism.
Upon returning to Paris, Gardel found the French Paramount in the midst of a crisis, in the context of the world depression and a political climate that was becoming rare, a few months before Hitler took power in Germany. After the first semester of 1932 passed without any news and when Gardel had already decided to return to Buenos Aires, the company decided to make new films with the Argentine singer. To this end, he appointed the experienced French director Louis Gasnier, defined a script adapted from another from the United States, and set the filming date for September 1932 for a film that would bear the title Wait for Me, with the subtitle from Andanzas de un criollo en España.
It is at this moment that the presence of Alfredo Le Pera, with whom Gardel had begun to get along in December of the previous year, becomes important. Le Pera assumed the burden of rewriting in a very short time a script full of cultural and geographical inconsistencies, the product of American stereotypes about the Spanish-American world, and of fighting against the director to bring everyday humanity to the scenes, a role that he would reiterate in subsequent films., but that would never leave him satisfied. But also, the meeting between Gardel and Le Pera would give life to a large part of the songs with which his world fame would be associated.
The musical team organized by Gardel was made up of the brilliant pianist Juan Cruz Mateo, with whom he had already been performing and recording records, José Sentis (alias Teruel), one of the Argentines who had installed tango in Paris, the French composer Marcel Lattès, who would be assassinated by the Nazis in Auschwitz, the Cuban conductor Don Aspiazú, the guitarist Héctor Pettorossi, who accompanied him years before in Juan Moreira, and the composer Mario Battistella, who would become a crucial author for Gardel.
Despite Le Pera's efforts, the film finally could not overcome the weakness of the original script, with mediocre actors that detract from the final result. Gardel plays Carlos Acuña, a singer in love with a young woman (Goyita Herrero) who in turn finds herself extorted by a rich rancher. Finally, the rancher is publicly exposed and the singer stays with the young woman. Gardel sings four songs, including the main theme of the film, the rumba "Por tus ojos negros", which was composed by Aspiazú, Le Pera and Carlos Lenzi, the author of "A media luz". The other three songs are "Estudiante", "I feel sorry to confess it" and "Criollita de mis ensueños", by Gardel, Le Pera and Battistella.
Paramount became aware that it was necessary to accompany Gardel with a cast of a higher artistic level and that Le Pera had to be given more freedom as a screenwriter. However -as would happen with all of Gardel's films for Paramount-, the decisions of the director and those in charge of editing would limit Le Pera's efforts to build films with human depth and would restore stereotypes. None of this, in any case, would prevent Gardel's films from reaching a deep insertion into the soul of Spanish-speaking peoples.
As soon as the filming of Wait for Me finished, Paramount summoned the famous Argentine-Spanish actress Imperio Argentina to face the next film. In October 1932 Gardel and Imperio Argentina made a picaresque short film, with some daring dialogues for the time, entitled The house is serious, directed by Jaquelux (Lucien Jaquelux). Gardel sings in the short two songs that he composed with Le Pera, the tango "Recuerdo malevo" and "Quiéreme". In 1940, when Paris was occupied, the tape was destroyed by German troops. However, some Vitaphone discs that had been recorded survived, recording all the dialogues and songs of the film.
Immediately afterwards, the filming of Melodía de arrabal began, again directed by Gasnier and a script by Le Pera, which would include essential songs from Gardel's songbook, such as the tango «Melodía de arrabal» («Silver neighborhood by the moon, rumors of milonga»), by Gardel, Le Pera and Battistella, and «Silencio», by Gardel, Le Pera and Pettorossi. The film is a detective story designed by Le Pera, in which Gardel plays a tango singer (Ramírez) in a cantina in La Boca, who by another name is also a professional card player. His girlfriend is Imperio Argentina. In a fight, Ramírez kills a thug and disposes of the body with a clever ruse using a match. The commissioner in charge of the investigation discovers that Ramírez is the same person who had saved his life years ago and in the last scene returns the match to him. In this short, Gardel also sings "Cuando tú no estás" and "Mañanita de sol", the latter a duet with Imperio Argentina, the only woman he sang with.
Gardel returned to Buenos Aires on December 30, 1932, before the films were released. On April 5, 1933, Melodía de arrabal was released, on May 19 The house is serious, and on October 5 Wait for me i>. As expected, Melodía de arrabal was better received than Wait for me, and after three months it had surpassed the box office success that The Lights of Buenos Aires had achieved.
Gardel was rapidly consolidating his position as the main star of the Spanish-speaking cinema. It looked like that at the end of 1932.
In 1933, his relationship with Razzano ended due to economic differences, aggravated by the disorder in his accounts and debts. She then appointed Armando Defino, one of her friends from the Café de los Angelitos bar, before he was famous, as her representative. That year he concentrated his presentations in the interior of Argentina (Rosario, Santa Fe, Paraná, Arrecifes, San Pedro, Azul, Olavarría, Mendoza, San Juan, Córdoba, Villa María, among other cities), he sang on the radio with an unheard-of audience, participated in Buenos Aires in the magazine De Gabino a Gardel, and recorded several albums released under the title Gardel sings to Gardel, in which, using innovative technology, he sang duet with himself.
In September 1933, he met Hugo Mariani on the radio, a Uruguayan who had lived in New York for years, where he had created and directed the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) Symphony Orchestra, which even had a program called The romantic tango. They both hit it off immediately and Mariani suggested going to New York to sing for NBC. A few days later the contract arrived.
On the night of November 7, 1933, Gardel left for Europe on the ship Conte Biancamano, before going to the United States. In the morning, Defino, his representative, had asked him to write a holographic will, that is, written in his own handwriting. That was Gardel's last day in Buenos Aires.
American movies
On November 7, 1933, he went on tour again: it was the last time he was in Argentina. He first went to Barcelona and Paris, and then he traveled accompanied by the talented pianist Alberto Castellanos to the United States, where he made his debut on the radio of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in New York on the following December 30. In his radio performances in New York, Gardel dispensed with his guitarists, with the exception of the audition on May 5, 1934, in which he sang from New York, being accompanied by the guitarists of Barbieri, Vivas and Riverol, who were in Buenos Aires. Aires, through a link between NBC and LS5 Radio Rivadavia of Buenos Aires, an unprecedented event in the history of radiophony.
On NBC, Gardel sang accompanied by the prominent New York radio orchestra, directed by Hugo Mariani, with the Argentinian musician Terig Tucci, who had lived in the United States for years, serving as arranger, who gave him a new sound based on innovative harmonies. Tucci and Castellanos hit it off immediately and they were the ones who suggested to Gardel a major change in his singing: that he extend the register of his voice towards the low tones, to reach a high baritone. It is with that voice that Gardel would record his latest and most famous songs. Gardel went through a period of adjusting to the orchestra and Tucci's new harmonies, but when it came time to form the team of musicians that would accompany him on his American films, he brought it to Tucci as musical arranger and director.
Gardel's auditions were well received by the large Latino community in New York, which at the time numbered about 500,000 people, at a time when the population of Latino origin in the United States was very small.
Gardel summoned Le Pera to New York to act as his representative in the negotiations with Paramount, at a time when the United States was suffering from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The contract was signed on March 20, 1934, agreeing to create a subsidiary production company of the American film giant under the name of Éxito Corporation, whose sole shareholder would be the Argentine singer. Initially, two films would be made that same year: Cuesta abajo and El tango en Broadway.
Cuesta abajo should have been filmed in two weeks, with a script written by Le Pera, based on his own autobiographical experience. Gardel and Le Pera were clear that they were not going to repeat the European imposition that the characters had to dress like gauchos. The director was once again the Frenchman Louis Gasnier, imposed by Paramount. Finding actors who spoke Spanish was one of the big production problems. For the main roles they hired Mona Maris, an Argentine who lived in Europe from a very young age, Vicente Padula, Manuel Peluffo and Anita del Campillo. For supporting roles, Gardel convinced diplomats from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru to act in his film.
The plot is about a tango singer (Gardel as Carlos Acosta) who leaves his girlfriend (Anita del Campillo) after falling in love with a prostitute (Mona Maris). In the climactic moment of the film, Gardel faces a duel with the cafisho (Manuel Peluffo) and tries to kill her, in a famous scene in which he sings & # 34; Downhill & # 3. 4; ("If I dragged through this world, the shame of having been and the pain of no longer being..."), by Gardel and Le Pera.
In the main songs of the film ("Cuesta abajo", "My dear Buenos Aires", "Amores de estudiante" and "Criollita decí que sí"), Gardel is accompanied by a remarkable quintet led by Alberto Castellanos on piano, along with Remo Bolognini and Hugo Mariani, as first and second violin, Washington Castro on cello and Humberto Di Tata on double bass.
Gardel, Le Pera and Castellanos were not entirely satisfied with the film, especially since in the editing process, Gasnier and the Paramount technicians removed many of the funniest and most sparkling scenes. Despite this, the film was a tremendous success, both in the United States and in Latin America. In New York, thousands of people overflowed the cinema, occupying the streets, to the point that the exhibiting company placed speakers in the street so that the public that had not been able to enter the room could hear the songs.
Paradoxically, criticism of the film was raised only in the media in Buenos Aires, especially among the upper class. While the public overflowed the cinemas and demanded that the songs be repeated, the traditional newspapers La Nación and La Prensa questioned the film because of the bad image it gave of Argentina. The lyricist Homero Manzi would also harshly criticize the film, in an article published in the Antena magazine, for lacking "nationalist value".
Tango on Broadway, for its part, was filmed between the end of June and the third week of July 1934 and the director was once again Louis Gasnier. For this occasion, Gardel and Le Pera sought to make a sitcom that would change the tone of the previous films and that in turn would reflect the situation of Latino artists in the United States.
Once again they had trouble getting actors and actresses who spoke Spanish. The main roles were played by the Spanish Jaime Devesa (the uncle), a find, again the Argentine Vicente Padula, the Guatemalan Blanca Visher (Laurita) and the Mexican Trini Ramos (Celia). In the film, Gardel plays Carlos Bazán, a representative of Latino artists.
The plot is about a group of Latino artists in New York gathered around Gardel, when the uncle arrives, in front of whom he tries to pretend that he is a businessman. Laurita then pretends to be Carlos's girlfriend, and her girlfriend, Celia, pretends to be her secretary, generating successive entanglements. Carlos realizes that he really loves Laurita in one of the climactic scenes of the film, when he sings the tango & # 34; Soledad & # 34; (& # 34; In the painful shadow of my room while waiting, his footsteps that may not return... & # 34;).
The songs that Gardel performs in the film are "Soledad", the foxtrot "Rubias de New York", "Golondrinas" and "Sunny Path". In the first three he was accompanied by the Terig Tucci orchestra and in the last one by Castellano on piano and Cáceres, Ayala and Cornejo on guitar.
Once again, Gardel and Le Pera were not fully satisfied with the film and made the decision to do without Gasnier in the following ones. This did not prevent the film from once again being enormously successful, consolidating the gardelmania that was brewing in the American Latino community and in Latin American countries.
After going to France for a short time, he returned to New York at the end of 1934, appearing on NBC and filming the musical Starcatchers (original title The Big Broadcast of 1936), a catalog of Paramount's musical stars, including Bing Crosby, Richard Tauber, Ray Noble's Orchestra with Glenn Miller on trombone, and the Vienna Boys' Choir, among other greats. In this film, Gardel worked alongside Celia Villa, daughter of the famous Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, whom Gardel admired. There Gardel sang two of his songs with Le Pera: a country theme, "Apure frontero buey", and "Amargura", in a bilingual Spanish-English version with the title " Cheating little girl". The film was released shortly after Gardel's death and for that reason Paramount decided to remove the fragments in which he appeared. The cut sections in which the King of Tango appears are very difficult to find, although some copies of them are known to be in the possession of private collectors.
Enthusiastic with the success of Gardel's films, Paramount decided to film two more films in 1935, which would be his last films. Gardel and Le Pera had already decided that their period of work with Gasnier was exhausted and they chose John Reinhardt, a young director of Austrian origin, who had directed several films with Latino actors and who was much more receptive to Gardel's and Le Pera's suggestions. Le Pera. Two central characteristics stand out in these last two films: the first is the decision to record Gardel's singing live, eliminating the traditional dubbing in post-production; the second is the decision to direct the tone of the films towards audiences in Spanish-speaking countries, moving away from both the porteñista tone and European-North American stereotypes.
El día que me quieras was filmed in January 1935, with Reinhardt as director and Le Pera as librettist, due to the failure of the scripts that Paramount commissioned from Argentine and Spanish-American authors, seeking to improve the level.
It also improved the quality of the selected actors. In the main roles that accompany Gardel (Julio Argüelles) are the Spanish actress Rosita Moreno (who plays Margarita and her daughter Marga), Tito Lusiardo (Rocamora), Fernando Adelantado (Carlos Argüelles) and Mario Peluffo (Saturnino). He also acts in a brief scene, at the request of Gardel, the child Ástor Piazzolla.
In the script, Gardel is the son of a billionaire, who rejects him for dedicating himself to singing and for having formed a couple with an artist (Rosita Moreno as Margarita), to whom he declares his love with the song El day you love me. Reduced to poverty, Margarita falls seriously ill and Gardel is forced to steal his father to survive. Despite this, Margarita dies in a historic scene in which Gardel sings His eyes closed, which, due to the degree of emotion that his interpretation reached, left the studio in silence for several minutes before bursting into applause.. Gardel's character is then left alone in the care of his daughter, Marga. The story restarts years later, when Gardel and his daughter have become successful artists. Repeating the story of her mother, Marga falls in love with a young Argentine, whose millionaire father opposes the relationship ("I see her as vulgar and too free"). They all agree on the trip back to Buenos Aires where, in another famous scene, leaning on the ship's rail, Gardel sings the tango Volver ("Come back with a withered forehead, the snows of the time they silvered my temple). Finally, Gardel's character reveals that he is the heir to the company where he works, which leads the young man's father to cynically change his mind and authorize the marriage. In the last scene, Gardel, hugging his daughter and his future son-in-law, at night and looking at the sea, sings the second part of El día que me quieras .
Le Pera again complained about the post-production cuts, but the film had clearly improved in quality compared to the previous ones. The film was released a few days after Gardel's death. In a letter written to Defino's representative four days before he died, Gardel tells him:
The news you sent about The day you love me I was very pleased. I saw the film here in Bogota, in private, and Paramount is crazy with the film. To tell you they're going to throw it in 5 theaters at the same time, in a city where there are only 15 cinemas!... The film again made me an unbeatable impression and I still believe that it is my best film work and that we have killed the point with the songs. I'm happy with the news that it's being held in July, and I hope I'll get to Buenos Aires with the fresquito laurels.Carlos Gardel
Tango Bar, Gardel's last film, was filmed in February 1935. Rainhardt was once again the director and Le Pera the librettist. The production continued to improve the level of acting, incorporating the Argentine actor Enrique de Rosas, who joined Rosita Moreno, Tito Luisardo, Fernando Adelantado and Manuel Peluffo. The plot is a romantic detective story, which revolves around a horse racing bettor (Gardel) who opens a tango bar in Barcelona and a jewel thief (Rosita Moreno), who is blackmailed. Among the songs that the Gardel-Le Pera duo composes for the film are the hits Por una cabeza and Arrabal amargo.
After filming was over and in the midst of the success with which his art and his angel were recognized, Gardel began to prepare a tour of several Latin American countries.
Gardelmanía and the Latin American tour
Gardel's American films ended up consolidating a phenomenon of popular idolatry in the Spanish-speaking public, completely unusual for the time.
Then they came. Wait for me., The house is serious., Melody of arrabal, Cuesta down and Tango on BroadwayWhat started "Gardelmania." The men sinned "to the Gardel", wearing the hat inclined to a side like him, and some even talked about "vos" and "che." Everyone wanted to learn to dance tango.Arturo Yépez
Gardelmania also produced the strange encounter between Gardel and Ástor Piazzola, the two greatest references in the history of tango, when the latter was barely twelve years old. Piazzolla's father was an Argentine immigrant to the United States, who worked as a hairdresser in Manhattan. When he found out that Gardel had settled in New York, Piazzolla Sr. carved a figure especially for Gardel and sent it to his son to deliver it to him. The mischief of the boy, who treated Gardel as Charlie and knew how to play the bandoneon, generated Gardel's immediate sympathy, and an unusual friendship was established between the two, in which Ástor worked many times as translator. As a result of it, Gardel invited the boy Piazzolla to appear as a newsboy in El día que me quieras and then he went further, inviting him to be part of the entourage that he would accompany him on his Latin American tour, although his father thought he was still too young for it. As if it were a movie script, that father's refusal meant that Ástor was not in the plane crash and decades later he became the great innovator of Argentine tango.
In 1978 Ástor Piazzolla wrote an imaginary letter to Gardel:
Dear Charlie...I'll never forget the night you offered a barbecue at the end of the filming. The day you love me. It was an honor of the Argentines and Uruguayans who lived in New York. I remember Alberto Castellano had to play the piano and I the bandoneon, of course to accompany you singing. I had the crazy luck that the piano was so bad that I had to play alone and you sang the songs of the film. What a night, Charlie! There was my baptism with tango.
First tango of my life and accompanying Gardel! I'll never forget. Soon you left with Lepera and your guitarists to Hollywood. You remember you sent me two telegrams to join you with my bandoneon? It was the spring of 35 and I was 14 years old. The old people didn't give me permission and the union either. Charlie, I saved myself! Instead of playing the bandoneon I'd be playing the harp...Ástor Piazzolla
At midnight on March 28, 1935, Gardel left New York on the yacht Coamo to begin his Latin American tour through Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Aruba, Curacao, Colombia, Panama, Cuba, and Mexico. He was accompanied by Le Pera, his guitarists Barbieri, Aguilar and Riverol, the Argentine boxer José Corpas Moreno as his secretary and the Spaniard José Plaja as his English teacher. In Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican Alfonso Azzaf would join the group, as a masseuse and in charge of lighting.
Gardel arrived in Puerto Rico on April 1 at 5 in the morning. More than forty thousand people were waiting for him at the port, surprising a delegation that was just beginning to take on the dimension of the popular idolatry that the Argentine actor had unleashed on the Latin public. He had been contracted for a week, but the popular demand was of such magnitude that he postponed his arrival in Venezuela to perform for two more weeks. He sang at the Paramount theaters in the capital, Yaguez de Mayagüez, Broadway de Ponce, as well as in the cities of Yauco, Manatí, Río Piedras, Cayey, Guayama, Cataño and Arecibo.
Gardel conquered Puerto Ricans for their sympathy and simplicity. Automotive homes, avid advertising, fought to provide Gardel with one of his cars, but the singer preferred to walk with "his village". On several occasions, seeing that many people were left without being able to enter their performances, he sang to them from the town square. Inclusive, he came to ask Rafael Ramos Cobián, the businessman who had brought him to the island, to lower the price of the lockers "because he wanted to be available to everyone," and that, to the detriment of his own pocket.Arturo Yépez
On April 25, he arrived in Venezuela on the motor ship "Lara". Another crowd awaited them at the docks of La Guaira and from there by train to the Caño Amarillo station in Caracas. The popular pressure on the idol was of such magnitude that it greatly delayed its arrival. Thousands of women, especially adolescents, tried to hug him and pinch him, and people even smashed the hood of the car he was in to be able to see him, triggering a police crackdown in which Le Pera received a saber blow to the face. Currently in that place a statue of Gardel and two guitarists, by the artist Marisol Escobar, commemorates the reception of the Venezuelan people to the Argentine. He stayed in Venezuela for twelve days, performing at the Principal and Rialto theaters, as well as at the Majestic Hotel and on Radio de Caracas. He also sang in Valencia, in the oil town of Cabimas, where the public destroyed the circus in which he performed, demanding that he sing more songs, before President Juan Vicente Gómez at his residence in Maracay, and finally in Maracaibo.
On May 23, Gardel arrives in Curacao, where he performs five nights. There he donates to the group of Venezuelan exiles the sum of ten thousand bolivars that President Gómez had given him.
On May 28, he arrived by boat in Aruba. In Aruba, the public took him out of the box and carried him on a litter throughout the city. In that situation, Gardel managed to convince people to take him to the port breakwater, where he boarded the plane that would take him back to Curaçao.
On June 2, Gardel arrived in Colombia, disembarking in Puerto Colombia, which at that time was the maritime terminal of Barranquilla. The Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo, when announcing the arrival of the "Jilguero de las Pampas", said that "the arrival of the Argentine singer saturated Barranquilla, which is living tango rhythm". Again popular affection was expressed in crowds that followed him everywhere, to hug and kiss him, with scenes of collective delirium that once again forced the police forces to intervene. In Bogotá, more than ten people invaded the runway at the moment of landing.
From Bogotá, Barbieri wrote to his wife telling her what was happening:
The reception was a thing never seen; there were in the field of aviation thousands of people who lived Carlos and Argentina; in the theater there was no alfiler, attended the President of the Republic; you can't imagine old, the affection that there is for Carlos and the admiration; there is no artist who likes more than he in the Latin countries; it is a legend that I will tell you...Guillermo Barbieri
In Medellín, one of the businessmen had tried to apologize for the inconvenience of the popular outpouring:
- Entrepreneur: How unpleasant to be for an artist to have to endure all this.
- Carlos Gardel: It's not like that. I am happy and satisfied with the homage of the people, because it is my people who suffer and laugh with me and applaud me, the people who have formed my pedestal, my prestige and my glory.
He performed in the Colombian cities of Barranquilla, Cartagena, Medellín and Bogotá. On Sunday, June 23, she sang La voz de la Victor on the radio, before an immense audience that filled the studios and the Plaza de Bolívar, where the station set up loudspeakers. Among other songs, she sang the tangos & # 34; Cuesta abajo & # 34;, & # 34; Insomnio & # 34;, & # 34; El carretero & # 34; and "Don't fool yourself, heart", to close with "I take and force". It was his last performance. Before closing she had said goodbye with these words:
Before I sing my last song, I mean I have felt great emotions in Colombia. Thanks for so much kindness. I find in the smiles of the children, the looks of the women and the kindness of the Colombians a loving affection for me. I'm leaving with the impression of staying in the heart of the Bogotans. I'll see my old lady soon. I don't know if I'm coming back, because man proposes and God disposes. But it is such the charm of this land that received me and sends me away as if I were your own child, that I cannot say goodbye, but always.Carlos Gardel
The next day, June 24, Gardel and his companions were to continue the tour in Cali. To do this, they took a plane piloted by Stanley Harvey, which headed first to Medellín, so that the famous aviator Ernesto Samper Mendoza, owner of the SACO company, would take over the flight. At the time of taking off from the Medellín airport, the plane suffered an accident that cost the lives of Gardel and his companions, with the exception of Aguilar and Plaja.
Plane crash and death
On June 24, 1935 Carlos Gardel, along with Alfredo Le Pera, his guitarist Guillermo Barbieri and his secretary Corpas Moreno, died in the collision of two planes at the time of takeoff, on the runway of the Olaya Herrera airport, which it was then known as Aerodrome "Las Playas", in the city of Medellín (Colombia). Days later, Alfonso Azzaf and the guitarist Ángel Domingo Riverol would also die. Also killed in the accident were Colombian aviation ace and SACO owner Ernesto Samper Mendoza, radio operator Willis Foster, Chilean businessman Celedonio Palacios and entertainment promoter Henry Swartz, as well as the seven occupants of the other plane. In total 17 dead. There were only three survivors: guitarist José María Aguilar, José Plaja and Grant Flynt, a SACO official.
The accident occurred when the plane in which Gardel was traveling, a Ford trimotor from the SACO company, diverted in the middle of the takeoff taxi and rammed another similar plane from the German company SCADTA, which was waiting its turn to take off both igniting.
The causes of the accident were never clearly established. Both aeronautical companies maintained a tough competition, behind which were the strategic-military interests of the United States and Germany. As soon as the accident happened, each of the companies was quick to attribute responsibility to the other. The president of Colombia himself harshly blamed the German company. The court, for its part, decided that the causes of the accident were due to the characteristics of the runway and a strong wind from the southeast.
Gardel was first buried in Medellín, but then Armando Defino ―his executor― managed to have the body repatriated. For this purpose, the coffin that contained the mortal remains of Carlos Gardel had to make a long journey that included trips on the back of a donkey, cart, train, and boat. His body wandered through the inland towns of Colombia, then went to Panama, was laid to rest in the United States, and finally arrived in Argentina by boat around 1936. After a massive funeral at the Luna Park stadium, he was taken along from Corrientes Avenue to the Chacarita Cemetery, where he remains in a vault together with his mother.
Gardel's guitarists
Gardel and Razzano first and then Gardel as a soloist, were characterized by the exclusive accompaniment of guitars. The accompaniment with guitars was unusual in tango, since although the guitar was never entirely excluded from tango orchestration, its weight fell centrally on the bandoneon, and secondarily on the piano and violin, instruments that formed the band. called «typical tango orchestra». Gardel's guitars do not come from the tango world, but from the world of country music and payada, from which the duo came. The use of guitar accompaniment and the quality of the chosen guitarists have given rise to frequent aesthetic debates.
Initially Gardel and Razzano accompanied themselves with borrowed guitars, but as they consolidated professionally, they resorted to hiring expert guitarists. The first was José Ricardo, El Negro José, an Afro-Argentine musician born in the Balvanera neighborhood of Buenos Aires, who was hired in 1916 and stayed until May 1929. In 1921 the duo hired as guitarist Argentine Guillermo Barbieri, who assumed the role of second guitar until Ricardo's retirement. In 1928, Gardel hired the Uruguayan José María Aguilar, El Indio, who served until December 1930, when he was fired by Gardel for a homophobic comment against him, reintegrating in 1935. March 1930 Gardel hired Ángel Domingo Riverol, who would accompany him ever since. Between September 1931 and November 1933 Julio Vivas joined the group of guitarists and during this last year Horacio Pettorossi also joined, forming a brilliant quartet with Barbieri, Riverol and Vivas.
Gardel's guitarists were consummate musicians and Gardel recorded many songs composed by them, some of which became classics, as well as introducing guitar solos to show them off, gestures that were highly valued by the musicians themselves and critics, for the artistic and economic significance of that conduct.
Ricardo composed 11 songs recorded by Gardel, including "Margot" (music with Gardel), "Pobre gallo bataraz" and "Resignate hermano" (with Barbieri).
Barbieri composed 32 tangos recorded by Gardel, among them: Anclao en París, «Viejo smoking», «Incurable», «Mar bravío», «Quién tenera 18 años», «El que He set the clock back", "Beggars", "Country Idyll", "Cruz de palo", "Poor friend", "The absent girlfriend", "Prepare for Sunday", "Resignate brother" (with Ricardo), "Kisses that kill", "Barrio viejo", "Cariñito", "Viejo curda" and "Olvidao".
Aguilar composed 11 tangos recorded by Gardel, among which are «Al mundo le falta un tornillo» (with lyrics by Cadícamo), «I am afraid», «Lloró como una mujer» and «Milonguera».
Among Vivas' own or co-authored songs recorded by Gardel, "El olivo", "Salto mortal", "Quejas del alma" and "Amante, corazón" stand out.
Pettorossi was the composer of Gardel's famous tangos, such as «Silencio» (in co-authorship with Gardel and Le Pera), «Angustia», «Esclavas blancas» and «Lo haven visto con otra».
Riverol composed 3 tangos recorded by Gardel, among them "Falsas promises" and "Trovas".
Barbieri, Riverol and Aguilar accompanied Gardel on the flight that caused his death. Barbieri died instantly, Riverol died two days later and Aguilar was the only survivor of the accident, suffering very serious injuries.
Personal relationships
The main personal relationship in Gardel's life was with his mother, the French immigrant Marie Berthe Gardes or Berta Gardés, according to the Spanish version, who for the French hypothesis was his biological mother and for the Uruguayan hypothesis acted as his mother adoptive. Gardel lived his entire life with his mother, although for some time as a teenager she appears to have run away from home. On the other hand, Gardel always expressed devotion to his mother, although some ambivalent aspects of the relationship point to complex edges that are not entirely revealed. When Gardel became a well-paid artist, he provided Berta with the money necessary to visit his mother, his brother and other French relatives in Toulouse every year, whom he also visited, although notably they never traveled together. Berta was just in Toulouse at the time of her son's death. When Carlos died, it was Berta who inherited all of his son's assets, including the house that he bought for both of them in the Abasto neighborhood, at 735 Jean Jaurés street.
Gardel was an outgoing and likeable person, who tended to establish strong friendships, although as often happens with people of fame and fortune, they were not always truly reciprocated. Among his most important friends, his relationship with José Razzano stands out, maintained according to him from 1911 until his death, although in recent years it weakened for economic reasons. Other good friends were Edmundo Guibourg, with whom they knew each other as boys but who began to be his friend in 1915, the jockey Irineo Leguizamo, to whom Gardel would dedicate the tango «Leguisamo solo», composed by Modesto Papavero; Francisco Maschio, a caretaker of racehorses with whom Gardel shared his passion for "donkeys", as he called it in Lunfardo; and the actors Elías Alippi and César Ratti.
His representative until 1932 was his friend and colleague José Razzano. In this last year they distanced themselves and Gardel appointed Armando Defino in his place. When Gardel died, Defino and his wife Adela Blasco constituted Berta's spiritual support, even living together in the Casa del Abasto. Berta, who died in 1943, bequeathed all of her assets to Defino, who in turn did the same to her wife when she died in 1958. Adela lived until 1984 and died without forced heirs, bequeathing all of her assets to Nuria de Fortuny.
Regarding his relationships, Gardel was extremely reserved with them, not publicly disclosing any relationship. Gardel's reserve about his intimate life has given rise to various and contradictory rumors and studies about the nature of his affective and sexual relationships. In his private correspondence there are extensive records about Isabel del Valle, a 13-year-old girl with whom Gardel had an affair in 1920 and with whom he maintained an ambiguous relationship until 1933. On the other hand, there is unanimity in the fact that Gardel did not have children.
Betting and sports
Horse racing was Gardel's great passion and it was forcefully reflected in his songbook in what has come to be called «burreros tangos», taking the Lunfarda expression of «donkeys» to refer to turf.
Many of his friends belonged to the world of horse racing, such as the famous jockey Irineo Leguisamo, the Tortercio brothers, the caretaker Francisco Maschio and the jockey Alfredo Peluffo. Gardel owned eight racehorses: Lunático (his favorite, ridden by Leguisamo and cared for by Maschio), La Pastora, Cancionero, Amargura, Theresa, Guitarrista, Explotó and Mocoroa, the latter two shared ownership with Leguisamo and Maschio.
Among the «burrero tangos» of the Gardelian repertoire, the most noteworthy are «Por una cabeza», written by him with lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera in 1935, the only one composed by him in this thematic series, and «Leguisamo solo», by Modesto Papavero, in homage to his friend and in which Gardel, when interpreting him, mentions his friends Francisco Maschio and El Pulpo Leguisamo, and his horse Lunatico:
-Gardel: Well, old Francis, tell the Pulpo that I'm going to take him back to winter barracks... Your chicks have already been won, and the bar is completely grateful. I felt the bar:
-Ricardo and Barbieri: All right!
-Gardel: Salute!"Leguisamo solo", recording of September 23, 1927.
Other "burreros" tangos from Gardel's songbook are "Palermo", by Enrique Pedro Delfino and Juan Villalba and Hermido Braga; "La catedrática" (& # 34; I am a beast & # 34;), by his ex-partner Francisco Martino; "One and One", by Traverso and Pollero; "Paquetín, paquetón", by Carlos Dedico, Germán Ziclis and Salvador Merico; "Under Belgrano", by Francisco García Jiménez and Anselmo Aieta; "Prepare pa'l domingo", by its guitarist Guillermo Barbieri and José Rial (h). Guillermo Barbieri and Eugenio Cárdenas composed the tango "Lunático", which was recorded by Gardel for the Records label, and in 1935 the film of the same name was released.
In addition to his fondness for turf, he regularly played Basque pelota and bowls, went jogging and attended gym classes.
Regarding soccer, Gardel did not have a special fondness for this sport, but he was no stranger to it, at a time when passion for soccer became widespread, closely linked to the Rio de la Plata identity. In Argentina he was a partner and a supporter of the Racing Club. In Uruguay he was a supporter of the National Football Club, which remembers him with a statue sitting in the Delgado tribune in the Great Central Park. In the city of Rosario, he knew how to visit the stadium of Club Atlético Newell's Old Boys. In Spain he was a supporter of Barcelona One of his tangos futboleros is & # 34;Patadura & # 34;.
He also enjoyed boxing. Among the tangos sung by Gardel linked to boxing, are "Knock out de amor", by Iván Diez and Vicente San Lorenzo.
Her singing
In 1915, the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso arrived in Argentina to sing at the Teatro Colón, and when he returned to Brazil by boat it happened that Carlos Gardel was there, who was a friend of many of the professors of the Stable Orchestra. Some of them convinced him to meet the famous Italian. He did so and once Caruso heard him sing a tango, a zamba and a cueca, the Italian told him: “If you had studied seriously, you would be the best baritone in the world”. Over time, indeed, Carlos Gardel chose the prestigious professor Alberto Castellanos as his teacher, who changed his register from tenor to baritone. For this reason, in Gardel's first records, his singing is perceived in a more acute tone, while in the last ones he is heard more comfortably in the appropriate register.
Her voice evolved, adjusting her diction to changes in acoustic recording systems. Maestro Eduardo Bonessi, who was Gardel's singing teacher, said around 1963:
It was of an extraordinary quality and of a marvellous ring for tango. He had a record of brilliant baritone and never dissentered. As for his tesitura, his extension reached "two octaves", which he handled with full satisfaction. It's a good extension for a popular singer. Gardel possessed a great temperament – expressive to the maximum – and was naturally endowed with an instrument in the throat. An instrument that then perfected and knew how to keep. He was an acquaintance of his value, who did not overthrow his voice as many suppose. He had a completely healthy larynx and that was one of the reasons why it was easy for him to move from the grave to the acute and vice versa... He was academic and responsible. He knew unique in the genre and cared for his voice. Aware that the voice is also cared for by physical care, he did gymnastics daily for an hour or more... According to the voice he had and how to use it, if Gardel had lived a hundred years, he would have continued to sing the same.Eduardo Bonessi
In his book Carlos Gardel: in the light of History, from the BankBoston Foundation (Montevideo, 2000), the architect Nelson Bayardo, who for more than thirty years investigated his life and his origins, describes his voice highlighting five aspects:
- An innate musical sense, which allowed him to venture effortlessly into more than 30 different musical genres.
- An exceptional vocal bell, which changed tenor, at first, to approach the baritone at the end of his life, even when he sang the second part in duo with Razzano, which allowed him, later, to record the unforgettable duets with himself, in which he sang both parts.
- An unparalleled versatility, thanks to which he could perform a wide range of styles, whether dramatic or comical, sentimental or ironic, evocative or grotesque. Each time, as Ayestarán used to say (Uruguayan musicologist), similar but different at the same time. The lively Gardel in “You left, Khajá!” does not look like the anguish voice of “My sad night”, two songs with identical content, a man abandoned by his wife, but in which the sound of the first two words (You left. and Percanta) is enough for the listener to immediately guess the joyful or sad tone of each song.
- An unlimited creativity, which was able to use simply because he was the one who had invented the tango-canción, and therefore was the only person who could determine his style. He used several tricks, including small speeches before or during his songs, laughter, coughing and interruptions; the classic "jmmm" that spread throughout his songs; spontaneous silences that swept the dramatic, as in Last night at two. (a song that, if it were not Gardel who would sing it, would be immediately forgetable), in which he adapts his voice to sing the lines of the betrayed husband, of an attentive client in a coffee and a police officer: something that, without his original way of performing an art that was so own, would have bordered the ridiculous, as other pieces that were sometimes simply not good enough for the singer.
- Finally, his expressiveness, which, according to the famous Rubén Pesce, made him a «songwitch actor». Casto Canel said in this regard that “he escapes from the mechanical rules of the metro, coming sooner, sooner or later, shortening or lengthening a sentence, sometimes he can be heard a rigorous refinement, or a powerful and suffocating silence; with a word he can create a deeper musical experience than the attainable by pure arithmetic patterns”.
Regarding the «N» that Gardel pronounced as an «R», the Argentine singer Edmundo Rivero, in a book dedicated exclusively to the technical analysis of his singing, gave the following explanation:
It is because the "n" is a liquid consonant and can lose its sound when it meets a deaf consonant [a "t" or a "p"], from which they obstruct the passage of the air (they are occlusive), and by uttering before them the "n", it rests on the nose and "knowing that in the elevated chant this is unesthetic and reproached" Gardel sent the air directly forward (always supported).
Tributes
In 1985 the Konex Foundation honored him with the Konex Honor Award for his incalculable contribution to the history of Argentine popular music.
In Medellín there is the Barrio and the Gardel MetroPlus station. Also in this city The Grand Lodge of Freemasonry in Antioquia annually awards the Merit Order in arts, culture and letters, Carlos Gardel.
Carlos Gardel Day
On June 24, 2005, by joint decision of the municipal authorities of the cities of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Tacuarembó and Medellín (where he died), the 70th anniversary of the death of Carlos Gardel was remembered. For the first time, the commemoration of the so-called Carlos Gardel Day in the French city of Toulouse was ignored.
Tango Day
In Argentina, Tango Day is celebrated every December 11, because Julio de Caro and Carlos Gardel were born on that day.
Monuments
In 1983, a monument was installed in his memory in the French city of Toulouse, managed by Martha Báez, Norberto Perlmutter and the mayor of the city, Dominique Baudis.
Controversies over his place of birth
There are two versions of the birth of Carlos Gardel: one maintains that he was born in France and the other that he was born in Uruguay. The first is known as the "Francesista hypothesis" and the second as the "Uruguayista hypothesis." Both also differ in the year of birth and in a large number of facts of his personal life, related to his identity, mainly during his childhood and adolescence. But both versions agree on the fact that he became an Argentine national in 1923.
Gardel, for his part, in his public statements, was generally reticent to answer what his nationality was and when he did, he used to express himself ambiguously and without providing details.
Frenchist hypothesis
The «Frenchist hypothesis» maintains that Carlos Gardel was born in Toulouse, France, on December 11, 1890, under the name of Charles Romuald Gardes, his biological mother being Marie Berthe Gardes and his father Paul Jean Lasserre, who did not name him. acknowledged. In 1893 Berthe emigrated to Argentina with her son, settling in Buenos Aires. They also maintain that his name was Spanishized in Argentina as Carlos Romualdo Gardés and that he adopted Carlos Gardel as his stage name, therefore all three names corresponding to the same person.
The main documentary evidence of the "Francesista hypothesis" is the birth certificate of Charles Romuald Gardes in Toulouse, the authenticity of which is not disputed, and the holographic will of Carlos Gardel, where he declares that he is Charles Romuald Gardes, Jr. by Berthe Gardes, born in Toulouse.
The "Frenchist hypothesis" maintains that Gardel's documents in which it appears that he was born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, such as the nationality registry managed in 1920, his identity card and his passports, contain false information provided by Gardel himself for not have enlisted in the French forces to do military service, nor to fight for France during World War I. If Gardel had been identified as a French citizen by birth, he would have risked jail time as a deserter if he traveled to France or any country that had an extradition treaty with France.
This current constitutes the traditional biographical position, presented in the first biography of Gardel, written in 1946 by his friend Francisco García Jiménez, based on the memoirs of José Razzano. After the presentation of the "Uruguayista hypothesis" in 1967, authors dedicated to confirming the "Frenchist hypothesis" arose, such as the Argentine Augusto Fernández, the Argentine Carlos Esteban and the French Monique Ruffié and Georges Galopa, the French Christiane Bricheteau, Raúl Torre and Juan Fenoglio, Enrique Espina Rawson and Norberto Regueira. Among the biographers of Gardel who accept the hypothesis of the birth in Toulouse are the British Simon Collier, the Argentines Julián and Osvaldo Barsky, and Felipe Pigna.
Uruguayist hypothesis
The "Uruguayan hypothesis" maintains that Carlos Gardel was born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, probably on December 11, his mother being María Lelia Oliva, pregnant by the husband of his sister Blanca, Carlos Félix Escayola Medina, military and political chief of Tacuarembó. The year of birth varies, according to the authors, between 1883, when María Lelia was 13 years old and her sister Blanca was alive, and 1887, when María Lelia was 17 years old and her sister Blanca had already died.
The “Uruguayista hypothesis” maintains that when the child was born, he was not recognized by either of his parents and was left without registration. Berthe Gardes would have been in Tacuarembó at that time, initially taking care of the child, but then she traveled again to Toulouse where in 1890 she had a son not recognized by the father, whom she named Charles Romuald Gardes, with whom she emigrated to Argentina, where she returned to take care of Carlos, the Uruguayan boy.
A few years later, according to the Uruguayan version, Gardel's biological parents, Carlos Escayola and María Lelia Oliva, would formalize their relationship, marrying and having six children, Gardel's siblings. Gardel, for his part, would have always known his true affiliation and would have even met his brothers a few times.
The basis of the "Uruguayista hypothesis" is that Charles Romuald Gardes, Berthe's son born in 1890 in Toulouse, and Carlos Gardel, partially raised by Berthe and born several years earlier in Tacuarembó, were different people and that finally Gardel he ended up taking the identity of Charles, Berthe's biological son.
The main documentary evidence of the "Uruguayan hypothesis" is the Uruguayan and Argentine documents, processed by Gardel in 1920 and 1923, in which Carlos Gardel himself declares that he was born in Tacuarembó on December 11, 1887, identifying his parents like Carlos Gardel and María Gardel.
The “Uruguayista hypothesis” maintains that the content of Gardel's will is false and that it was part of a legal maneuver so that Berthe Gardes could inherit it in accordance with the Argentine laws of the time. They have also petitioned with negative results for the exhumation of the remains of Gardel and his mother, in order to carry out studies that establish his genetic identity.
This current was initiated by the Uruguayan journalist Erasmo Silva Cabrera, alias Avlis, the first to support the hypothesis from 1967. Other scholars belonging to the Uruguayan current are the Argentine Blas Matamoro, the Uruguayan Nelson Bayardo, the Uruguayan Eduardo Payssé González, the Argentine Martina Iñíguez, the Argentine Ricardo Ostuni, the Uruguayan Nelson Sica dell'Isola, and the Uruguayan Gonzalo Vázquez Gabor.
In 1997, Susana Cabrera published the book Los secretos del Coronel, which narrates and documents this hypothesis, about which the documentary El padre de Gardel (Ricardo Antonio Casas, 2013).
Popular idolatry
Much of the celebrity and passion aroused by Gardel in life and after death is due to his concern to care for and spread his image. The poet Celedonio Flores writes in the famous tango "Corrientes y Esmeralda", composed in 1933, when Gardel was still alive, that "any cockatoo dreams of looking like Carlos Gardel". In this image, the photographs taken by the Spanish-Uruguayan photographer José María Silva play a very important role, especially the famous portraits of 1933.
Argentine rock musician Luis Alberto Spinetta reflects the popular idolatry of Gardel in one of his best-known songs, "El anillo del Capitán Beto", in which he describes the cabin of a bus driver, where they live together the famous photo of Gardel with his soccer passion and religious beliefs.
There goes Captain Beto through space,
Carlitos' photo on the command,
a River Plate bander,
and the sad stamp of a saint.Captain Beto's ring.
Luis Alberto Spinetta
Silva met Gardel almost by chance, when in 1917, when the Gardel-Razzano duo were in Montevideo, they decided to take photos to spread their image. In this way, walking along Avenida 18 de Julio, the main avenue in the city, they enter a photographic business where Silva worked as an employee, when he was still a young man of 20 years. Gardel was surprised by the unusual quality of Silva's photos for the time, and since then he turned to him, already independent, to take the photos with which he would spread his image worldwide.
After 1917, Gardel took two other large batches of photos with Silva: the first in 1923, before leaving on his first tour of Europe, in which he took the well-known photo dressed as a gaucho -because in the & #34;old continent" the tango was stereotypically associated with the gaucho-; and the last one in 1933, where a sequence of portraits of the face is taken, which constitute the famous portraits with which the image of Gardel is universally associated. Silva never charged a penny for the reproduction rights.
Silva would say about Gardel:
The smile was the hallmark of his personality and had a warmth that earned, from the pique, the affection of anyone.
In 1995, musicians Eduardo Suárez ("Korneta"), Eli Suárez, Bruno Suárez and Jorge Rossi, natives of the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Bajo Flores, founded the tango-rock band Los Gardelitos, which It was named in clear homage to Carlos Gardel. The theme of this band is the fusion of two of the most popular rhythms of Argentine music, such as national rock with tango, having in its lyrics tinges that recall the tango jargon of Buenos Aires society. "Korneta" Suárez died in 2004 and the leadership of the band was assumed by his son, Eli Suárez, on vocals and lead guitar, while after continuous changes in the names of the initial formation (including Korneta's second son, Bruno, who left the band in 2001), the formation was established since 2017 by Yamil Salvador (acoustic guitar and choirs), Pablo Fernández (bass) and Jerónimo Sica (drums). Due to populism, this band is also often referred to simply as "Gardeles".
Discography
Gardel made 957 recordings, covering 792 different topics.
He not only recorded tangos; he also folk music, milongas, zambas, rancheras, tunes, styles, etc. (thirty genera in total). He recorded some foxtrots, a tango in Spanish and English, and also some traditional songs in French and Italian and even a tango in Guarani.
Own songs
- Back
- For a head
Hits by other composers
- You're my silver shooter. (1912). First song recorded by Gardel, which will repeat twice more. From Oscar Orozco, a holy poet.
- Brisas de la tarde (1912).
- Poor my dear mother (1912).
- My sad night (1917).
- Fango Flower (1917).
- Griseta (1924)
- Caminito (1926).
- Follow the corset (1926)
- Isla de Flores (1927). Letra de Roman Machado and music by Arturo César Senez.
- The slippery taitaby José Padilla
- Tomo y obligo (1931).
- Silence (1933).
- Melody of arrabal (1933).
- ♪ (1933).
- Student loves (1934).
- Golondrinas (1934).
- Cuesta down (1934).
- My dear Buenos Aires (1934).
- Soledad (1934).
- Back (1935).
- Guitar guitar mine (1935).
- For a head (1935).
- His eyes closed (1935).
- Far away from me (1935).
- He came back one night. (1935).
- Absent
- For a head
- The day you love me (1935).
- Déjà ("Ya"); Folie ("Locura"); Je te dirai ("I will tell you"); Madame c'est vous (Lady, it's you) Parlez moi d'amour ("Tell me of love") (all in French).
- Drop that Mujica (1929). Music and lyrics by Juan Sarcione
Filmography
- Peach Flower (mode film).
- Sello: Patria Films
- Director: Francisco Defilipis Novoa
- Filmed in Dolores (Córdoba) and Buenos Aires. (1917).
- Band of songs (this is ten short films).
- First sound film made in South America in 1930, using the Movietone system (image and sound recorded at the same time on the tape). For the kind of film (ten filmed songs), Gardel became a pioneer of the today called video clips.
- The lights of Buenos Aires
- Seal: Paramount
- Director: Adelqui Millar
- Guion: Manuel Romero and Luis Bayón Herrera
- Music: Gerardo Matos Rodríguez, with the participation of the orchestra of Julio De Caro
- Filmed in Joinville (France, 1931).
- Gardel interprets: “Tomo and obligo” and “El rosal”.
- Wait for me. (in credit) Wait for me.; at the time it was replaced as Wait for me: strokes of a Creole in Spain).
- Seal: Paramount
- Director: Luis Gasnier
- Guion: Alfredo Le Pera
- Music: Carlos Gardel, Marcel Lattés and Don Aspiazú. With the participation of the Cuban Orchestra of Aspiazú and the guitarist Horacio Pettorossi.
- Filmed in Joinville (France, 1932).
- Gardel interprets: “By your black eyes”, “I am sorry to confess it”, “Criollita de mi ensueños” and “Estudiante”.
- The house is serious.
- Seal: Paramount
- Director: Lucien Jacquelux
- Guion: Alfredo Le Pera
- Music: Carlos Gardel and Marcel Lattés
- Filmed in Joinville (France, 1932).
- Lost short film, whose soundtrack is preserved.
- Gardel interprets: «Record malevo» and «Remember me», which was not taken to the album.
- Melody of arrabal
- Seal: Paramount
- Director: Luis Gasnier
- Guion: Alfredo Le Pera
- Music: Carlos Gardel, José Sentis, Horacio Pettorossi, Marcel Lattés and Raúl Moretti, with the participation of the orchestra of Juan Cruz Mateo and Horacio Pettorossi.
- Filmed in Joinville (France, 1932).
- Gardel interprets: "Melody of arrabal", "When you are not", "Silence" and "Mañanitas de sol", to duo with the Argentine Empire.
- Cuesta down
- Seal: Paramount
- Director: Luis Gasnier
- Guion: Alfredo Le Pera
- Music: Alberto Castellanos
- Filmed in Long Island (New York, 1934).
- Gardel interprets: “Amores of a student”, “By your red mouth”, “Criollita said yes”, “Cuesta bajo” and “Mi Buenos Aires Dear”.
- Tango on Broadway
- Seal: Paramount
- Director: Luis Gasnier
- Guion: Alfredo Le Pera
- Music: Alberto Castellanos
- Filmed in Long Island (New York, 1934).
- Gardel interprets: “Rubias de New York”, “Golondrinas”, “Soledad” and “Sunny Walk”.
- Star Hunters
- English title: The Big Broadcast of 1936.
- Seal: Paramount
- Director: Norman Taurog (and Theodore Reed, at the scenes of Gardel).
- Filmed in Hollywood (United States, in 1935), except Gardel, made in Long Island (New York, December 15, 1934).
- Musical film with several world artists from the moment, including Bing Crosby, Ethel Merman, George Burns and Ray Noble and his orchestra, with Glenn Miller as a member. Carlos Gardel participates in two paintings, interpreting "Apure front ox" and "Amargura".
- The day you love me
- Seal: Paramount
- Director: John Reinhardt
- Guion: Alfredo Le Pera
- Music: Terig Tucci
- Filmed in Long Island (New York, 1935).
- Gardel interprets: “Black luck”, in trio with Lusiardo and Peluffo; “The tropical sun”, “The day you want me”, with end to duo with Rosita Moreno; “His eyes were closed”, “Guitarra, guitar mine” and “Volver”.
- Tango Bar
- Seal: Paramount
- Director: John Reinhardt
- Guion: Alfredo Le Pera
- Music: Terig Tucci
- Filmed in Long Island (New York, 1935).
- Gardel interprets: “For a head”, “The eyes of my moza”, “Leave land of mine” and “Arrabal bitter”.
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Annex: Goya Award for Best Film