Enrique Santos Discépolo

Enrique Santos Discépolo (Buenos Aires, March 27, 1901 - Buenos Aires, December 23, 1951) was an Argentine composer, musician, playwright and filmmaker. He was also known as Discepolín . His brother, Armando Discépolo, was a theater director and playwright. Discépolo is especially remembered for composing several of the so-called "fundamental tangos", or "golden tangos", among which stand out Yira, yira (1929), Cambalache (1934), Uno (1943), and Cafetín de Buenos Aires (1948), in which the writer's lyrical vein crystallized, and which ended up giving him a great prestige. Norberto Galasso, one of Discépolo's most renowned biographers, expressed that his life "was a permanent tearing apart in an unjust society [...] only understandable within the framework of the suffering Argentina of the 20th century."

Biography

He was born in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Balvanera and died in the same neighborhood of a heart attack, 50 years later.

After his parents died, his brother Armando Discépolo, 13 years older, became his teacher and discovered his vocation for theater. With him he took his first steps as an actor in 1917. In 1918 he wrote his first plays: The Priest , The Lonely Man and Holiday Day . In 1923 he acted in the play Mateo , written by his brother. He continued writing for the theater genre and at the same time, in 1925, he composed the music for the tango Bizcochito and the lyrics and music for Que vachaché .

He had a 24-year romance with the Spanish singer Tania. On a trip to Mexico, in 1945, he had a brief relationship with a former actress and journalist Raquel Díaz de León, with whom he had a son named Enrique Luis Santos Discépolo Díaz de León (April 21, 1947 - May 28, 2017), whom she could not meet since she returned to her country when Raquel was only six months pregnant..

Career

In 1928 he composed the tango Today I get drunk, popularized by Azucena Maizani. Later, between 1928 and 1929, she wrote Chorra , Malevaje , Soy un harlequín and Yira, yira , among others. Meanwhile, he continued to perform successfully in the theaters of Montevideo and Buenos Aires.

Between 1931 and 1934 he wrote several musical works, including Wunderbar and Three Hopes. In 1935 he traveled to Europe and upon his return he joined the world of cinema as an actor, screenwriter and director. Simultaneously he wrote and composed his most notable tangos Cambalache (1934), Desencanto (1937), Alma de bandoneón (1935), Uno (with music by Mariano Mores, 1943) and Desperate Song (1944).

Starting in 1943 within the framework of a campaign initiated by the military government that forced the suppression of lunfardo language, as well as any reference to drunkenness, prostitution and pimping or expressions that were arbitrarily considered immoral or negative for the language or for the country, he included the tango Uno among those censored for radio broadcast.

The restrictions continued upon assuming the constitutional government of General Perón and in 1949 Sadaic directors asked the administrator of Postal and Telecommunications in an interview to annul them, but to no avail. They then obtained an audience with Perón, which took place on March 25, 1949, and the president – who stated that he was unaware of the existence of these directives – left them without effect and Uno, like many others, tangos, was able to return to the radio.

In 1947, after a tour of Mexico and Cuba, he composed Cafetín de Buenos Aires (1948). During the following years he continued producing films, plays and tangos, some of which were released after his death.

Finally, on April 13, 1951, he premiered and starred in his last film as an actor, directed by Manuel Romero, called El fan. In which his famous phrase is immortalized in which he describes what a football fan is.

Of Peronist ideology, Enrique Pichon-Rivière says that the doubts that Discépolo had about Peronism increased between 1950 and 1951 and that “he suffered a strong conflict of ambivalence towards Peronism, which he felt in its popular aspect but rejected in some of their actions.” From the radio studios, he identified with the nickname “Mordisquito” those he considered "rams" of the oligarchy or sepoys, actively fighting them. Tania says that Discépolo admitted prior censorship and usually gave the Secretary of Press and Broadcasting Raúl Apold a copy of the script that he was going to read the next day so that he could approve it. His participation in that program and the defense of Peronism brought him the hatred of many, to the point of buying all the tickets for his shows so that when he came on stage he would see the theater empty. These events involving people she considered friends filled him with deep sadness, which, added to the cancer he suffered, precipitated his death in 1951.

Actor

In 1917, he debuted as an actor, alongside Roberto Casaux, a capocomic of the time, and a year later he signed with a friend the piece Los duendes, mistreated by critics. Then he raised his aim with The Priest (adaptation of a story by Guy de Maupassant), Holiday, The Lonely Man, Páselo cabo and, above all, El organito, a fierce social painting sketched with his brother, in the mid-1920s. As an actor, Discépolo evolved from troupe to cast name, and His work in Mustafá, among many other premieres, was remembered with enthusiasm.

Tangos

Filmography

Actor;

• The swelling (1951)
• I didn't choose my life. (1949)
• And tomorrow will be men (1939)
• Four hearts (1939)
• Melodies porteñas (1937)
• Matthew (1937)
• Yira, yira (1930)

Director;

• Candida, the woman of the year (1943)
• Academias de idiomas en Buenos Aires (1942)
• In the light of a star (1941)
• Caprichosa and millionaire (1940)
• A mucamo lord (1940)
• Four hearts (1939)

Screenwriter;

• Blum (1970) (argument)
• The swelling (1951)
• I didn't choose my life. (1949)
• Candida, the woman of the year (1943)
• Academias de idiomas en Buenos Aires (1942)
• In the light of a star (1941)
• Confession (1940)
• Caprichosa and millionaire (1940)
• A mucamo lord (1940)
• Four hearts (1939)
• Melodies porteñas (1937)