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Juan “Pacho”
Maglio, 1880-1934
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(German Version)
The photographs included here appeared in a weekly magazine published in 1915 in Buenos Aires. The
article relates little about Maglio and his career but by the time the article appeared,
“Pacho” had become a household name. Maglio was the first recording
celebrity of the bandoneon and the música criolla. The
article is one of the first to portray a tango musician not as
denizen of the impoverished suburbs of Buenos Aires, but as a highly
successful professional.
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| Pacho Maglio and his wife Teresa |
In 1915, the
bandoneon was still not a very common instrument. Julio De Caro
reported in his autobiography that the arrival of a new bandoneon in
his father's music store was a bit of a sensation. A good portion of
Buenos Aires tango musicians would stop by to examine the instrument.
One
reason for the relative rarity of the instrument was its high price.
It cost five times as much as a guitar, for example.
It was
a high price for Pacho Maglio's family as well. His father played the
bandoneon and accordion. Pacho desperately wanted to learn the instrument
but his family could not afford to purchase one suitable for a child,
let alone engage a teacher. Eventually he started to learn the
instrument as a teenager.
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| Pacho Maglio at age 4 |
Like
other tango musicians who did not grow up in families of musicians,
Maglio embarked on his musical career at age 18, when he reached
adulthood. Before he had worked at a machine shop in order to
contribute to the family income. In 1898, he began taking bandoneon
lessons from Domingo Santa Cruz, the composer of Unión
Cívica, and one year
later he made his debut as a professional musician.
Pacho
Maglio was the first bandoneon player to be recorded as a soloist. His first engagement in a suburban café of Buenos
Aires brought him some 3 pesos per day. By 1914 he performed in the
center of town and earned a handsome salary of 550 pesos monthly.
His
first composition, El Zurdo, was published in 1912 and sold
2,000 copies. Within the next two years followed Un copetín,
Armenonville, Cuasi nada, Adelita, Chile,
and Anda pato, all of which went through various editions.
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| Advertisement of records of "Professor" Juan Maglio, 1914 |
His
career as a recording musician began in 1912 with the North-American
company Columbia. “Pacho” a household name and a synonym for
tango records. Maglio indicated that his income from recordings in
1914 (the year in which the above advertisement was published)
amounted to 12,000 pesos.
© 2018 Wolfgang Freis
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