From Habanera to Tango, Part 4

( Deutsche Version )

When Argentine tango came to be recognized as a distinct, indigenous music style in the region of the River Plate, around the turn of the 20th century, “theories” of its history were formulated as well. These were rarely conclusions of objective investigations but rather comments in journalistic essays or opinions that, cited repeatedly, became accepted as common knowledge.

Milonga and tango showed both an indisputable influence of the habanera, as both featured the habanera rhythm as an accompaniment figure. The habanera, it was therefore claimed, was introduced through Cuban sailors to Buenos Aires where it was taken up by local musicians and danced in seedy harbor taverns. It then blended with the milonga and eventually evolved into tango. This speculative assumption was repeated so many times that it has currency even today. Yet, it is not based on historical evidence but rather on the popular image of Argentine tango from which its ancestry was inferred.

From its beginnings, Argentine tango was considered to be the music of the lower class population and thus ancestors of corresponding social status were assigned to it. The milonga was a music style from the Argentinian countryside were it was performed by the payadores (itinerant singers accompanying themselves on the guitar). The habanera, being introduced by “common” sailors from Cuba into the lower class neighborhoods of the harbor district, also acquired the reputation of being a country dance due to its relationship to the milonga.

Illustration to a short story, “Los bailes de mi pago”, representing the dance of a habanera.

Published in Caras y Caretas, 1899

Even though the presence of the habanera rhythm in milonga and tango may suggest a descendance as outlined above, it is difficult to maintain in the face of demonstrable historic evidence. For one, it is highly unlikely that a significant number of Cuban sailors visited Buenos Aires (let alone sailors musically so accomplished to make a lasting impression on local musicians) since Cuba did not possess a merchant fleet. Furthermore, this narrative completely ignores the musical life as it unfolded in Buenos Aires during the given time period.

1. Dance Music in Buenos Aires 1861-1898

Reliable data on what music people actually played, danced, and listened to in the 19th century is difficult to come by—even more so in Argentina due to the sparsity of significant research. An inventory of compositions by Argentinian composers that were mentioned as newly published in newspapers between 1861-1898 provides at least some information, incomplete as it may be. Most of the newly composed pieces were dance music. If one can judge from the number of publications, the five most popular dances were waltzes (168), polkas (137), mazurkas (113), habaneras (64), and schottische (32). These dances were also—it should come as no surprise—the ones most often composed (and danced) in Europe.

Dance assignations of musical compositions are often dubious. The dance indicated in a title may just refer to the style of the composition (a piano piece “in the style”of a waltz) rather than actually being intended for social dancing. It is almost compelling to ask this question with many of the habanera-like pieces. They simply seem too short to make it worthwhile stepping on the dance floor. There is evidence, however, that the habanera was indeed a popular social dance, and it comes from Buenos Aires.

The highpoint of the dancing season, in Argentina as well as in Europe, were the dances organized during carnival. In 1877, the Buenos Aires Opera, the most prestigious theater of the city, hosted its first public carnival dances at the opera house. The announcement published in local newspaper reads as follows:

Opera
THE RENOWNED DANCES OF THE OPERA SOCIETY
Upon request by countless members of the elegant youth
Grand Ballroom, Fantasy, and Individual Dances
will be given during the nights of Saturday, January 20 and Sunday, January 21.
GREAT NOVELTY
The theater is converted into a grand hall, the proscenium having been enlarged to more than 200 square cubits and given the most adequate ventilation. All the decorations and embellishments of the grand hall are newly painted for the purpose. There will be a large, luxuriously decorated grandstand at the center of the theater that will hold a large orchestra of the best music professors. They will play the most modern dances of renowned French, German, Italian, and Spanish composers—Strauss, Gungel, Labitzky, Riege, Offenbach, Lecoq, Hervé, Littolff, Capitani, Levi, Iradier, etc.
The dances will last 10 minutes, each with a 5 minute intermission. They will be played in the following order: 1st polka, 2nd habanera, 3rd quadrille (French), 4th waltz, 5th mazurka, 6th schottische, 7th quadrille (French).
Ladies will enter GRATIS with an invitation ticket of the dance commission.

Publicity announcement of the carnival dances at the opera in Buenos Aires, 1877

The program of dances were listed in advance. They include the standard repertory of ball dances that one would have encountered in Europe as well. Typically for the 19th century, the quadrilles were the high points of the evening since they required the cooperation of the entire dancing audience.

The composers of the music listed were all Europeans and well-known for their dance music. Sebastián Iradier, the most representative composer of the habanera is included in the list. We noted in the first article of this series that his habaneras were predominantly vocal compositions, and many of them were also quite short. As the program indicates, however, each dance was scheduled to last 10 minutes. The orchestra, hence, must have played an arrangement of a number of habaneras. (Waltzes written for dancing typically contain 4 or more parts—each one a “complete” dance in itself—to be played through and repeated, and thus easily reach a performance time of 10 or more minutes.)

The announcement shows two things very clearly: habanera music originating from Spain was appreciated in Buenos Aires. The fact that Iradier is mentioned by name on the program advertisement suggests also that his music was considered among the best available. Furthermore, the habanera was indeed a social dance and had its devotees in the best circles of society.

Tango, however, does not appear on the program. It was to take another 25 years before tango as a dance became a standard fixture during the carnival festivities. Tango also appears only minimally in the inventory of pieces published by Argentinian composers discussed above. Within the years from 1862 to 1891, only ten entries refer to tangos. For most of these, the music appears to have been lost. Four refer to songs performed by “black” carnival societies (sociedad de negros), which were organizations of white people who organized floats and performed songs in which the presented themselves as negros. Two tangos in the inventory are piano editions of pieces from Spanish zarzuelas. One of them deserves special attention, as we will show in the following section.

2. El Tango de la Menegilda

In 1889, the Argentine composer Francisco Hargreaves published a piano edition of El Tango de la Menegilda from the revue La Gran Vía by the Spanish composers Federico Chueca and Joaquín Valverde. The revue had premiered in Madrid in 1886 and was first shown in Buenos Aires three years later. That Hargreaves promptly sat down and worked out a piano edition of Chueca's and Valverde's work is noteworthy by itself, inasmuch as he was himself a noted composer of operas. The profits expected from a piano edition of the revue's most popular song must have been exceptional. And indeed, La Gran Vía was no ordinary work. It was a huge international success that was presented in Paris, London, New York, and many other metropolitan cities. Its spectacular success in Buenos Aires was remembered even 20 years after its first showing. 

El Tango de la Menegilda (“The Tango of the Maidservant”) is actually sung twice in the revue: first by the maidservant and later by the landlady, doña Virtudes (“Lady Virtuous”). The maidservant tells her story: when she came to Madrid, she learned to scrub, sweep, cook, iron, and sew when told, but seeing that this would not get her anywhere she decided to learn to pilfer and shortchange her employers. She became very skilled in it and eventually became the maid of a senile old man and now she is the landlady of the house. Doña Virtudes sings, in contrast, about the problems she faced dealing with steeling, lazy, and insolent maidservants.

Musically, El Tango de la Menegilda strongly resembles the tangos written for stage performances discussed in the previous article of this series. It has all the marks of a habanera-like composition: the habanera rhythm as an accompaniment figure, cross-rhythms in the melody, and a two-part division with contrasting parallel keys, e minor and E major in this case.

What makes El Tango de la Menegilda important for the development of Argentine tango is the cast of characters of the song and revue, as well as the influence La Gran Vía had on the theater in Buenos Aires. Habaneras and tangos, as we have seen, represented something exotic that involved the black population of Cuba. On the theater stage, these blacks belonged to the realm of servants, that is, to roles that traditionally provided relief (often comic) to the main characters of a play. The novelty of La Gran Vía was to give “lower-class” characters—common people one could meet every day on the street, on Madrid's Gran Vía—the main roles of the play and to present them in a sympathetic light. El Tango de la Menegilda showcases a maidservant, a person of questionable character with no means to get ahead other than by stealing from those who have, her better-off employers. Doña Virtudes, the maid's employer, provides the “upper-class” contrast, a finicky landlady, but she only arouses sympathy for the pilfering maids in her employ. Thus, the traditionally “lower-class” roles (which includes maids, petty thieves, soldiers, bonvivants, etc.) have become the main characters in La Gran Vía. And this cast of characters was to become the one that figures prominently in the texts of Argentine tango.

La Gran Vía was a huge international success, one which was immediately imitated. Within a year after its premiere in Buenos Aires an Argentine copy, De Paseo por Buenos Aires appeared on the stage. It was an adaption that contained many of the characters of the model but took place, as the title indicates, in Buenos Aires. Other revues of the kind were to follow. Showcasing lower-class characters was also adopted by playwrights of the Argentine theater emerging in the 1890s . (Before this decade, the theater of Buenos Aires was dominated by foreign theater companies.) Sainetes, short plays with plots playing in Buenos Aires or the Argentinian countryside, were soon to compete with serious theatrical works. A favored location of urban plots was the conventillo, the tenement housing of the lower classes and immigrants, and tango was stylized as the music and dance of its inhabitants.

Cover of a piano score of La Gran Vía. The music in the revue is based on popular dances. They include a waltz, polka, schottische, and mazurka, thus, dances that were also played at the carnival dances at the Buenos Aires Opera.

(Recordings of El Tango de la Menegilda are available on YouTube.)

3. Justicia criolla

It did not take long for the association of the lower-class population of the conventillo and tango to become commonplace. A key work in this respect was Ezequiel Soria's zarzuela Justicia criolla which was staged with great success in 1897. Taking place in a conventillo, the plot includes a festivity at which the inhabitants dance a tango. Tango is not the only dance requested (they also ask for dances like waltz and quadrille that we know were popular from the list of carnival dances at the opera), but it is in this play referred to as an indigenous dance. Thus it has lost its association with Cuba.

First man A waltz.

Some No, no, tangos. 

Others Quadrilles! 

Benito Gentlemen, a bit of peace! They will all be danced. As good criollos, I suggest we open the session with a tango, and if the majority is in the affirmative, the guitarists may begin to strum the strings of their guitars.

All The tango, the tango! 

Benito How quickly have I arranged that! I have a good hand for majorities. (They play and dance the tango. ...)

Benito, the main character of the play, is a black porter at the House of Congress. As a side story to the plot, he is in love with Juana, whom he had met dancing a schottische. While there has always been a relationship between tango and dancing, in Justicia criolla a more precise connection to a specific way of dancing is established. Argentine tango was danced with corte y quebrada (with “cut” and “break”). Other dances, like the waltz, were danced “sin corte”. References to particular dance moves like the quebrada (“broken” or “fractured”) had appeared in the literature earlier in the century but were not specifically linked to a tango dance. Vague as these references are, they seem to describe a sort of dip by the woman that was considered scandalous since it “broke” the conventional upright body posture. The explicit association of tango, corte, and quebrada may have been made for the first time in Justicia criolla.

In a dialog with José, a Spanish immigrant and porter at the Courts, Benito describes his conquest of Juana at a carnival dance:

...

then, during a tango, hey, I went ahead

and conquered her with a pure corte.

Later in the play, Benito describes his embrace of Juana during a tango. It is danced in close position, the dancers are leaning against each other, and it includes a quebrada.

Guitarist And this Juanita, how is she? 

Benito Like this, hey! (he closes his fist) The finest!... When I am dancing a tango with her (he acts a pantomime of the dance) , 

I plant her firmly against the hip and I let myself go

to the rhythm of the music. And I sink into her

black eyes and she inclines her head against my chest,

and doing a turn comes a little quebrada... 

Oh, brother, it disappears … every ill-humor just disappears.

Guitarist I'd like to meet this Juana. 

The image of tango established in Justicia criolla differs distinctly from those in Spanish zarzuelas. Here it is only incidental (though perhaps not insignificant) that Benito is black. Tango has become the dance of the conventillo, that is, the lower classes of Argentinian society. 

In the first staging of Justicia criolla, Benito was played by a Spanish actor, Enrique Gil, one of the most celebrated stage artists in Buenos Aires. The guitarist was played by the then twenty-one-year-old Arturo de Nava, who frequently appeared on stage as a tango dancer and went on to become a well-known singer (payador) of Argentine and Uruguayan folk music.

Arturo de Nava (dark jacket) as a tango dancer

4. The Inception of Argentine Tango

The beginnings of Argentine tango coincide with the beginnings of the national Argentine theater. The first compositions that can be identified unequivocally as tangos were published around the turn of the 20th century. They stem from a small group of composers born before 1880. The senior (and perhaps most important) members of this group, Ángel Villoldo (1861-1919) and Cayetano Rosendo Mendizábal (1868-1913), composed the oldest tangosthat are still played as dance musictoday. Two other members of this group, Alfredo Eusebio Gobbi (1877-1938) and Enrique Saborido (1878-1941) (the former singing and performing on stage with his wife Flora Rodríguez, the latter also being a dance teacher), were instrumental in introducing Argentine tango as music and dance to Paris.

The work and the artistic development of these musicians (and, as a matter of fact, of all Argentinian and Uruguayan tango composers) has been very poorly documented and it is at this point impossible to establish a chronology of their compositions. It is clear, however, that when the first pieces by these composers appeared in print, they evinced characteristics that differed decisively from the older habanera-like tangos.

There are two significant differences: First, most early Argentinian tangos were conceived as instrumental music which resulted in a different musical form. Whereas the predominantly vocal habanera-like pieces were composed as two-part pieces (AB) that reflected the verse/refrain structure of the text, instrumental Argentine tangos used a three-part rondo form (ABC). Compositions with three sections of 16 measures each (subdivided into two phrases of equal length) became the standard format for instrumental tangos.

Second, cross-rhythms created through the habanera rhythms and triplets in the melody disappeared. Instead, the síncopa became the dominant and conspicuous rhythmical figure of Argentine tango. In some pieces this rhythm is so dominant that they seem to be composed “around” the síncopa. Furthermore, as a result of being performed by instruments rather than singers, the music took on a stronger rhythmical character, with shorter, sometimes strongly accentuated motives and dynamic contrasts that leave an impression of mischievous exaggeration.

To be sure, the influence of the habanera continued to be discernible for some time. The habanera rhythm was yet the prevailing rhythmic figure in the bass accompaniment. Little ornamentations in the melody echoed the upper mordents that abounded in zarzuela tangos. Contrasts in parallel major and minor keys used to set off different sections of a piece remained a common device throughout the tango literature.

In a previous series of articles, we have analyzed in detail a few early instrumental tangos from the period under consideration. We shall therefore refrain from repeating the process here and refer the reader to two compositions, Ángel Villoldo's El Porteñito and Arturo De Bassi's El Incendio that can be called exemplary in many ways.

Ángel Villoldo: El Porteñito, Quinteto Pirincho 

Arturo De Bassi: El Incendio, Roberto Firpo

Judging from the sources available and accessible today, it surprises that Argentine tango emerged suddenly within a short period of time and that it was already well-defined at its appearance, showing few signs of development. Apart from influences of the habanera and zarzuela, the basic form and characteristics of Argentine tango appear to have been understood and shared by composers from the outset.

One explanation for this circumstance is that the fundamental musical form of Argentine tango was not new at all. The three-part rondo form (ABC) is one of the most common patterns in Western music, in particular, in dance and dance-like genres. The sudden appearance of a distinct Argentine tango, whose composers resort to the same musical forms and tonal language, is an indication that this music was cultivated by a group of professional musicians who had been educated in the tradition of Western music. Thus, what was new about Argentine tango was not the musical form but the musical style. This new style manifested itself in rhythmic and melodic qualities (thesíncopa, for instance) and, as the music style developed, in the formation of specialized ensembles (the orquesta típica) and a particular performance style.

5. La Morocha

“For me, the origin of tango is the habanera. In its first era, it had the rhythm of the habanera. Now it has changed, but that was its origin. One will realize this by taking a look at La Morocha.”

Arturo De Bassi, 1937

Enrique Saborido's La Morocha (1905) is one of the best known early tangos. It has an emblematic status of early tangos due to its almost mandatory appearance in Argentine films with plots playing at the turn of the 20th century. Saborido's fame was not only limited to his compositions. Besides being a pianist, he was a renowned tango dancer and for some time maintained a dance school in Buenos Aires. In 1911, he was invited to Paris where he taught tango until the outbreak of WWI.

Saborido revealed the genesis of La Morocha in a 1928 interview. As the story goes, he was very fond of a beautiful brunette (morocha) dancer, Lola Candales. His friends challenged him one night to write a tango that she could perform successfully. After returning home in the early morning hours, Saborido sat down at the piano and composed the tango within 1-1/2 hours. Then he went to see Ángel Villoldo and asked him to write a text for the song. Within a few hours, the piece was ready to be rehearsed, and Lola Candales performed it the following night to the great applause of Saborido's friends.

La Morocha is labelled a tango criollo. Thus it is classified as an Argentine tango. It is a simple composition consisting of two sections to 16 measures, plus an introduction and a coda of 4 measures each. The first part, the introduction and coda are written in d minor, whereas the second section stands in D major.

The habanera rhythm predominates as an accompaniment figure throughout the entire piece. The melody is quite simple. In the first part, it consists of almost only one motif that is repeatedly altered depending on the harmonic context.

La Morocha, section A, antecedent phrase. Red brackets indicate the basic melodic motif.

The same holds true for the second part, which also shows one repeating motif that is altered depending on the harmonic context. Interestingly, this motif consists of triplets and creates cross-rhythms against the habanera-rhythm in the accompaniment.

La Morocha, section B, antecedent phrase. Red brackets indicate the basic melodic motif that creates cross-rhythms.

The musical structure of Saborido's tango criollo appears to contradict all the formal elements of Argentine tango listed above. Rather than a tango, La Morocha shows all the marks of a habanera: the habanera rhythm in the accompaniment, cross-rhythms in the melody, a two-part formal division, and tonal differentiation of the two parts through parallel major and minor keys.

The analyst is presented with a dilemma: the author referred to the piece as a tango, but the musical evidence suggests that it is a habanera. Has one of the emblematic Argentine tangos, La Morocha, been modeled after a Spanish habanera like Iradier's La Paloma?

Composers are neither analysts nor librarians of their music, and it is safe to assume that the successful dissemination of their works was more important to them than a correct classification. The categorization of La Morocha as a tango can perhaps be seen as an indication of the rising popularity of tango and the decline of the habanera. All the same, a more critical look at Saborido's interview reveals points in the story which suggest that the circumstances under which La Morocha was written were not quite as portayed by the composer.

Saborido's suggestion that he wrote the piece for a dancer—not a singer—must seem odd but is not unthinkable. (Even Fred Astaire tried to establish himself as a singer at the beginning of his career.) More problematic is the type of text that Villoldo wrote for La Morocha: it takes place in the countryside and the persons appearing in it are “la morocha”, and the rural population of gauchos, pamperos, and an estate owner on horseback. This is not the cast of characters for a tango, but rather for a habanera which, as we have noted at the beginning of this article, was understood as a country dance.

The subject matter of texts that Villoldo wrote for his own tangos criollos are, by contrast, quite different. They all play in an urban setting and feature characters that one would expect in a conventillo rather than the pampa. Typically, the actors of the texts are also avid tango dancers. It is, therefore, difficult to understand why Villoldo would have placed the action into the pampa, if he had been asked to write a text for tango to be sung by a dancer in a bar in Buenos Aires.

In 1906, when La Morocha was printed, as well as in 1928, when Saborido gave his interview, tango enjoyed great popularity in Buenos Aires. The habanera, by contrast, had past its apogee. It was still danced in 1905 but could no longer generate the excitement that tango did. And in 1928, the habanera was a dance of the past. Musicians have always been pragmatic: the response of the audience is the yardstick by which success is measured. Whatever the reasons for the (misleading) categorization of La Morocha may be, the song as a habanera may never have reached the success and reputation it gained as a tango criollo.

Example 9: Libertad Lamarque performing La Morocha (1938). Note that the triplets that create cross-rhythms in the original score are played here as síncopas. This clearly audible in the orchestra interlude during the dance performance.

Libertad Lamarque performing La Morocha (1938). Note that the triplets that create cross-rhythms in the original score are played here as síncopas. This clearly audible in the orchestra interlude during the dance performance.

6. Conclusion

Historical assessments of Argentine tango have traditionally placed its descendance from the habanera into an undefined, distant past and the countryside removed from Buenos Aires. Our investigation has drawn a different picture: throughout the second half of the 19th century, the habanera was known and appreciated in the Argentinian capital, just as it was in Paris and Madrid. Contrary to its popular image as a country dance, it was a social dance performed in the best circles of society.

The theater stage played a crucial role in the development of Argentine tango. The social environment of tango corresponds to the one taking a central place in the sainetes of the emerging Argentine and Uruguayan theater. The lower-class inhabitants of the conventillo are prominent characters in these plays, and tango is presented as the typical dance of the conventillo. Thus, the image of tango shifted from being a dance of black people to the emblematic dance of the lower-class population of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

The appearance of Argentine tango coincides with the growing popularity of sainetes. Argentine tango quickly showed its own stylistic traits, but there existed no conflict of genre between the new “native” tango and old “imported” habanera. Saborido's La Morocha became a very successful tango criollo in spite of its stylistic dependency on the „archaic“ habanera.

To:	Part 1	Part 2	Part 3

From Habanera to Tango, Part 3

( Deutsche Version )

In the 19th century, Paris was the music capital of the Western world. To make a career in Paris was the dream of every ambitious musician, and what happened in Paris was taken note of everywhere. Sebastián Iradier was one of many Spanish composers who established professional ties to Paris. Being named professor of singing by the empress Eugenia made him also one of the more successful musicians in Paris.

Cuba being a Spanish colony at the time, it is not surprising that Spanish composers adopted Cuban music elements they perceived as part of their national (colonial) heritage. However, the habanera gained also popularity in other countries, which had neither colonial or language connections to Cuba. The success of the habanera in Paris, therefore, is best explained by an interest in the exotic.

Throughout the 19th century, artists and their public were fascinated by different and unfamiliar cultures. In music, it made itself evident, for example, in a host of operas playing in far away places (Lakmé, The Perlfishers, Aida, etc.) and orchestra and piano works based on dances perceived as “exotic” by their producers and audience. These were described as Slavic, Hungarian, Cuban, or from yet another place.

1. Le Petit Coco d'Amérique

The French singer Louis Bousquet published in 1858 in Paris a piano score of a chanson havanaise, or tango, entitled Le Petit Coco d'Amérique. The text of the song tells the story of Coco, a black man originally from Mozambique who had come from South America to Paris as a pauper in order to make his fortune. He has succeeded and became rich by singing and dancing the tango in public. Dressed like a gentleman, Coco plans to return to South America and buy his father and his beloved out of slavery. 

Bousquet performed Le Petit Coco d'Amériqueat the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique as an entr'acte during the performance of a dramatic play “à grand spectacle”: Les Fugitifs by Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and Ferdinand Dugué. The play takes place in India and includes characters like French settlers, English soldiers and sailors, as well as native servants, rebels, and bandits. Bousquet's number had nothing to do with the play, other than the element of exoticism: Coco from Mozambique dancing tango in the streets of Paris is no less exotic than the rescue drama playing in India. 

Le Petit Coco d'Amérique, cover page

The musical structure of Le Petit Coco d'Amérique is not very interesting with respect to our discussion. It is a simple strophic song consisting of two phrases with a short introduction and a coda. The habanera rhythm provides the rhythmic foundation of the piece, but there are neither melodic cross rhythms nor síncopas. The melody always moves with the habanera rhythm, never against it.

Le Petit Coco d'Amérique, excerpts

One encounters this kind of tangos—a simple strophic song with accompanying habanera rhythm—intermittently in the Spanish zarzuela. And, in fact, this is where Bousquet's song originated. The same music appears in the zarzuela El Relámpago, composed by Francisco Asenjo Barbieri in 1857, just one year before the publication of Bousquet's song. In the zarzuela, this piece, which is called a tango, represents finale of the work with the title “¡Ay, qué guto, qué placé!” (Recordings are available on Youtube.)

On the cover page of the piano score Bousquet is credited as the creator of Le Petit Coco d'Amérique, but he is at best the author of the French lyrics. One should not dismiss Bousquet's publication as just as a case of music plagiarism, though, as it is also a record of the role that he created and performed on stage. 

Barbieri's zarzuela plays in colonial Cuba. The tango is sung and danced by the “coro de negros” who are the servants to the white main characters. Corresponding to many habanera songs, the characters of¡Ay, qué guto, qué placé!(¡Ay, qué gusto, qué placer! in standard Spanish) sing in the supposed dialect of Cuba's black people about the pleasures of dancing. Bousquet's stage character, Le Petit Coco d'Amérique, follows the model of Barbieri's tango. Coco is black, sings in incorrect French, and has made his fortune by singing and dancing tango.

We don't know why Bousquet chose to pilfer Barbieri's tango and masquerade as a singing and dancing black man. His choice allows one or two important deductions, however. First, the association oftango, dance, and black people—which, as we have seen, was prevalent in the habanera-like pieces of Spanish composer—was self-evident to Bousquet. Second, this association probably originated on European stages and was disseminated through public performances like Barbieri's zarzuela and Bousquets entr'acte.

2. Zig-zig-zig-tong

Henrique Alves de Mesquita (1830-1906) studied music at the conservatory of Rio de Janeiro and, upon graduation, was awarded a scholarship to continue his studies in Paris. His first published compositions appeared in the late 1850s (piano dance music, mostly quadrilles and polkas). After leaving Paris, he established himself as a composer, orchestra director, and professor of music in Rio de Janeiro and made a name for himself as a composer of operettas. One of his pieces that is still performed today is a tango from his operetta Ali Baba (with a text by the Portuguese librettist Eduardo Garrido, based on the story from One Thousand and One Nights). (Recordings of the piece are available on Youtube.)

Henrique Alves de Mesquita (1830-1906)

This tango, entitled Zig-zig-zig-tong, is not unlike the tango of Barbieri's El Relámpago. It is a short piece of two sections that show the typical phrase divisions of simple song and dance pieces (32 + 3 measures in the first section, 16 + 5 in the second).Both sections are tonally contrasted by means of a pattern common in habanera-like pieces, that is, by parallel keys (a minor and A major, respectively).

The habanera rhythm provides the rhythmic foundation in the bass accompaniment through the entire piece. There are no melodic cross rhythms but the síncopais a prominent rhythmic figure in the first section.

Zig-zig-zig-tong, Section 1, excerpt

By contrast, the second section introduces an energetic, polka-like rhythm into melody. This, together with the key of A major and a faster tempo, lends the section a lively dance-like character.

Zig-zig-zig-tong, Section 2, excerpt

Today, the piece is commonly known as “the tango from Ali Baba”. However, the fact that it actually has a title, Zig-zig-zig-tong, is an indication that it may have had a text and was a song-and-dance number in the operetta, just as Barbieri's "¡Ay, qué guto, qué placé!". The cover illustration of the piano score suggests as much: it shows three black men dancing and making music, thus associating tango again with black people and dance.

Zig-zig-zig-tong, cover page

The tango Zig-zig-zig-tong exhibits many of the typical elements that characterize habanera or habanera-like compositions. Alves de Mesquita went to Paris at a time when the habanera was becoming a musical genre popular with composers in Spain and France. Whether or not he became acquainted with the habanera then and took it back Rio de Janeiro seems unlikely and, in the end, is not very significant. More important is that he kept composing music, including tangos, after his return that appealed to the audience and publishers in Paris. This demonstrates that a continuous bilateral cultural exchange was maintained by professionals (composers, performers) and professional institutions (theaters, publishers) across continental boundaries.

An interesting side note to our discussion: Alves de Mesquita is also credited with being the originator of a Brazilian music style, the maxixe (also known as “Brazilian tango”), which conquered the dance floors in Europe and North America just a few years before Argentinian tango became all the rage in 1912.

3. El Negro Schicoba

A perusal of Argentinian writings on the history of tango sometimes leaves the impression that the country was something of a musical backwater even during the second half of the 19th century. The reason for this is that by trying to trace the Argentinian roots of tango, researchers focussed on that which could be claimed as “Argentinian” and rejected everything else.

If one looks at musical life in Buenos Aires as a whole, however, one notices that it was not that different from Paris or Madrid. People played and danced to the same kind of music and enjoyed performances from numerous foreign artists in theaters, concert halls, and cafes. In December 1862, the newspaper El Nacional reported on a performance of the actor Fernando Cuello:

Cuello caused a sensation in this show [of the comedy Fuego en el Cielo]. What elated the audience the most was a tangohe sang at the end. It received an ovation as only few pieces have. As a proof that it was justified, we are offering [Cuello] a newtangoso that he may have it set to music and sing it.

The name and music of the piece are unfortunately unknown, nor do we know what role the singer impersonated when he was performing his tango. The situation in which the piece was performed—a singer's or dancer's showpiece given in addition or as an entr'acte tothe scheduled program—recalls Bousquet's performance of Le Petit Coco d'Amérique in Paris.

A similar piece was performed in 1867 at the Teatro Argentino in Buenos Aires. At the end of a performance of a comedy, the first North-American actor working in Argentina, Germán (Herman?) MacKay, sang El Negro Schicoba. The actor wrote the text himself but the music, which has survived as a piano score, was composed by an Argentinian, José María Palazuelos. MacKay, who actually was an actor of serious roles, in this occasion dressed up as a black broom vendor and sang, presenting a farcical dancing routine and improvising risqué verses to the thunderous applause of the audience. 

The North-American actor Germán MacKay and his character,
"El Negro Schicova"

The piano score does not indicate what kind of piece it is, but it is obviously a habanera-type composition. Like the two tangos discussed above, the piece is a simple two-part song consisting of two phrases of 16 and 14 measures, respectively, plus and introduction and a coda. The accompaniment is based on a continuous habanera rhythm.

The melody of the first section makes use of the síncopa. Harmonically, the antecedent phrase introduces the main key, e minor, whereas the consequent phrase shifts to the relative key, G major. The second section employs the typical habanera figure with triplets. Here they are not set in a cross-rhythmic pattern against the dotted habanera rhythm, however. The accompaniment switches to triplets as well and the rhythms in both voices are synchronized. Harmonically, the antecedent phrase moves to the parallel key E major and returns to e minor in the subsequent phrase.

El Negro Schicoba, interestingly, appears to be a recapitulation of the pieces discussed earlier. As other habanera-like pieces, it has a black character who sings and dances. The setting in which the performance took place is equivalent to the presentation of Le Petit Coco d'Amérique. As a musical composition, the piece corresponds formally to ¡Ay, qué guto, qué placé! and Zig-zig-zig-tong. Harmonically, it exploits parallel and relative keys just like La Flor de Santander did.

Looking at all the pieces discussed in our study as a collection, it emerges that, on the one hand, it is impossible to attribute definitive characteristics to any of the habanera-like compositions. Whether habanera, canción americana, or tango, all categories share stylistic and formal traits, but these traits are neither limited to a particular category nor are they necessarily present. The names of the categories are designations, and as such they are imprecise to the point of being useless for analytical purposes.

Nevertheless, as a family of music forms, habanera-like pieces show consistent, reoccurring traits: the habanera rhythm as a continuous accompaniment figure, cross-rhythms, síncopas, tonal contrasts between parallel and relative keys, a connection to dance, and—if sung—a textual association with black people. Rather than taking compositions of the kind and period under consideration as distinct types, it seems more appropriate to look at them as members of one category, that is, as examples of the habanera.

The habanera emerged as a musical form in the 1850s in Spain and was quickly taken up by composers outside Spain. The pieces we have scrutinized so far can be dated roughly within the timespan of two decades. Significant is the geographical distribution in which the pieces were written and performed, reaching from Madrid, to Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires. The recurrence of common stylistic traits and similarities in performance settings suggests that there existed conventions for composing and performing a habanera that were universally understood and appreciated. It means that a habanera or tango written in 1870 in Paris would have been appreciated as a tango in Buenos Aires and vice versa. Furthermore, it would have been self-evident to the audience in either city that an actor singing and dancing a tango would dress up a as black person because of its notorious Cuban association.

Finally, one should take note that the dissemination of the habanera did not occur by chance but ran through network channels of professional musicians. Composers took their inspiration from Cuban music, but performers and music publishers carried their works to audiences wherever they could find one, be it Madrid, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, or Buenos Aires.

Cover page of a piano score of Francisco Barbieri's El Relámpago,
including the tango "¡Ay, qué guto, qué placé!",
published 1867 in Montevideo, Uruguay

© 2019 Wolfgang Freis

From Habanera to Tango, Part 2

To the German version 

As we have seen in Part 1 of our discussion, Iradier's La Paloma and El Arreglito were classified as canción americana and canción habanera, respectively. In addition, Iradier's “American” compositions include yet another category besides the danza habanera, namely, tango americano.

The origin of the term “tango” and what kind of music it referred to has not been unambiguously clarified. What is clear is that “tango” was not a new term when Spanish composers, like Iradier, began to write pieces by that name in the mid-nineteenth century. Looking at the scores one wonders, in fact, what distinguishes a tango from an habanera, for example. This is particularly striking in the work of Iradier: all of his “American” pieces, including the danzas, are vocal compositions, are built on the habanera rhythm, and show the typical melodic cross rhythms we have encountered in La Paloma and El Arreglito.

However, it is not only in Iradier's work that such ambiguity of categorization can be detected. Tangos and habaneras were written for stage works and instrumental music, with no consistent differentiation. One has to content oneself with the realization that composers handled the categorization of their pieces quite casually.

For example, La Flor de Santander (1861) a tango composed by Dámaso Zabalza (1835-1894) is a piano piece that shows correspondences to the danza habanera La Cubana by Florencio Lahoz discussed in Part 1.

Dámaso Zabalsa

1. La Flor de Santander

Dámaso Zabalza was a concert pianist and piano professor at the conservatory of Madrid. A prolific composer of music for the pianoforte, his pieces included piano etudes, arrangements of operas, and dances popular at the time—among them “American” pieces like habaneras, contradanzas, and tangos.

His tango La Flor de Santander (88 measures) is a longer piece than La Cubana, but it is still a short composition. It consists of 4 sections plus an introduction. Fundamentally, each section is built on a 16-measure phrase. Only the antecedent phrase of section A has 2 “empty” accompaniment measures pre- and appended, respectively, which makes the phrase sound somewhat unbalanced. But apart from this little anomaly, the phrase structure of La Flor de Santander is very regular.

Section	Actual Length  (in Measures)	Fundamental Length (in Measures)	Tonality
Introduction	8		c minor
A	18	10 (8+2) + 8	c minor
B + bridge	20	16 + 4	Eb major → c minor
A (repetition)	18	10 (8+2) + 8	c minor
C	8 (16 with repetition)	8	c minor
D	16		C major

The composer also uses the tonal relationships of major and minor keys to express the formal structure of the piece. In El Arreglito, Iradier differentiated sections by alternating the parallel keys d minor and D major. Here in La Flor de Santander we also find parallel keys but employed differently: the piece begins in c minor but ends in C major. Furthermore, section B seems to shift tonally to the relative major key Eb major in the antecedent phrase, only to return to c minor in consequent phrase. This little shift to the relative major is nevertheless significant: it foreshadows the ending in the parallel major key.

Interesting are also the harmonic progressions of the last section. They may be described as two extended cadences, thus, as progressions that decisively establish the tonality in C major. The consequent phrase uses the more common subdominant, dominant, tonic progression. The antecedent phrase, however, introduces some harmonic color by moving through a series of secondary dominants. These secondary dominants are all major chords, and thus the progression from A major to D major to G major before resolving to the tonic C major. The contrast to the preceding sections could not be stronger. From the beginning up to section D, the piece is in c minor, only briefly leaning toward the relative major key. Section D is not only in C major, its harmonic progressions contain nothing but major chords.

Secondary Dominants

We started our discussion of La Flor de Santander by suggesting that this tango exhibited correspondences to the danza habanera La Cubana by Lahoz. Both pieces are piano works, the phrase composition is similar (16-measure phrases, with slight irregularities), and the rhythmic structure of the melodies shows correspondences (cross rhythms, síncopa).

La Cubana has a simple musical design, namely, a two-part song form. It is not difficult to imagine the music as setting the strophe and refrain of a poem. La Flor de Santander, on the other hand, is a more complex formal structure that is based on an important concept of harmony: the relationship between parallel and relative major and minor keys. The piece starts in c minor and ends in the parallel C major key, after having “visited” the relative Eb major in between. This harmonic pattern shows that the composer was trained in harmony of Western music. More important to the point: it speaks a tonal language that would still be readily understood by the “old school” composers of Argentinian tango, like Villoldo, Firpo, Greco, or Arolas, who will be active a few decades later. (Readers of our A Short Harmony of Tango will recognize the harmonic progressions and principles of formal structuring discussed in this article.)

2. The Audience of Piano Music

Iradier dedicated many of his vocal compositions to (sometimes internationally) well-known singers. It was the custom for composers to dedicate a piece to a singer or musician in the hope of getting it performed. It was a move to help the sale of the music. When a piece had been performed publicly on stage, the publisher would list it on the title page as an advertisement. La Flor de Santander, however, is a simple piano piece, too simple to attract the interest of a well-known pianist and to be performed in a concert. Instead, it can be inferred that La Flor de Santander and similar pieces like La Cubana were intended for the greater audience of piano-playing amateurs.

The importance of easy-to-play piano pieces should not be underestimated. At a time without television, radio, or even the gramophone, one had to go the opera, a concert hall, or a café to hear music. Otherwise, one had to play it oneself. Piano music was sold as inexpensive sheet music or in modest collections. It was a powerful distribution channel through which new music reached a wide audience—not only in Europe, but also in countries of the New World.

This holds true for Argentinian tangos as well. In the early days of tango, when records were expensive and the radio not yet been invented, piano sheet music was the most important outlet for the dissemination of new compositions. Arturo de Bassi commented in an interview in the 1930s on his first great success as a composer. He wrote his tango El Incendio in 1906 when he was just 16 years old and worked as an orchestra musician at the Apolo Theater in Buenos Aires. The orchestra premiered the piece at the theater during an intermission. Since he could not find a publisher, De Bassi had El Incendio printed at his own expense and sold it on consignment in music stores. The piece became a hit and sold 50,000 copies.

The success of El Incendio was exceptional, and the sales total given by De Bassi must have been accumulative over the years. Nevertheless, the fact that an individual—an unknown composer, without the help of an established publisher—could sell a significant number of copies of a piano score bespeaks an interest and demand by the general public. 

Our investigation of the development from habanera to tango has led us from the stage and musical salon, where professional musicians performed for an audience, to the private homes of music amateurs who purchased piano scores for personal entertainment and educational purposes. The producers of this kind of music were music professionals (composer, arrangers, publishers) who provided their audience with a huge body of piano music intended private amusement. This repertory consisted of popular music in the widest sense: piano reductions from stage works, songs, dances, and “American” pieces, like habaneras, tangos, or danzas cubanas.

From Habanera to Tango, Part 1

(Zur deutschen Version)

The habanera was a type of music extremely popular in the second half of the 19^thcentury. Yet, one finds hardly any descriptions of what characterizes pieces called habanera. One thing, however, a prime indicator of its kind, is fundamental to the habanera: a particular rhythmic figure that serves as an accompaniment throughout the piece.

Habanera rhythm

Since this rhythmic figure is so prevalent in the habanera, the rhythm itself has been named after the composition it accompanies, to the point that descriptions of the habanera form go rarely beyond a reference to the rhythm. However, a rhythm is not the same as the form of a piece of music, being only part of the whole. What a habanera form really is remains to be explained. 

One more detailed description asserts that an habanera usually consists of two parts and that the two parts are distinguished through major and minor keys. Indeed, one frequently finds pieces that match such description but they apply mainly to certain habanera songs. One quickly realizes that these indicators determine the musical form: the two-part division relates to strophic texts where the first part sets the verse and the second the refrain. Furthermore, a differentiation of musical sections in major and minor keys was common practice in 19th century music. Hence, the musical form of a habanera remains to be determined more precisely.

The word “habanera”, meaning “from Havana”, obviously refers to something originating from the city in Cuba. It is said that the habanera was an adaption of the French contredanse. Thus, it is often implied to be dance music. Furthermore, being from Cuba, is it also considered to be music of people of color. The characters appearing in habanera songs are usually negros or mulatos.

Habaneras began to gain popularity in Spain in the 1850s. The first known pieces were published as piano pieces and songs identified as contradanza habanera, danza habanera, canción habanera or simply habanera. The composers were conservatory-trained musicians who were well-known instrumental soloists or professors of music. Today, the habanera is associated with one composer in particular: Sebastián Iradier (1809-1865). Among his compositions are two habaneras that even today will be recognized by just about everyone. The first one, La Paloma has the reputation of being the piece of music most often recorded. The second, El arreglito, became the model for the famous habanera in Georges Bizet's opera Carmen.

1. La Paloma

The date of composition of La Paloma is uncertain. The earliest known edition was published in Madrid in 1859. By that time, Iradier had been a professor of music in Madrid; later he alternated residences in Paris and Madrid.

Iradier dedicated La Paloma to Sarolta Bujanovics, at the time the prima donna assoluta at the royal theater in Madrid. The piece is identified as a canción americana (which in the Spanish-speaking world was understood as originating from Cuba). The text is a strophic poem written by Iradier himself.

Mlle. Sarolta Bujanovics

The musical form of La Paloma consists of three sections of slightly irregular length (listed as A, B, and C, respectively, in the table below), plus an introduction and a coda. The fundamental length of each section (including the coda) consists of 16 measures, though the actual measure count can differ due to phrase extensions of the accompaniment or section overlaps. The introduction is an extended version of the antecedent phrase of section A.

Section	Actual Length  (in Measures)	Fundamental Length (in Measures)
Introduction (a)	14	8
A	18	16
B	15	16
C	16
Coda	16

The first section sets the strophe of the poem, the second and third the refrain. Contrary to the description of the habanera form mentioned above, the sections are not tonally contrasted but are all written in the same key, C major.

The habanera rhythm, played in the lower register of the piano, is the most striking feature of the piece. It is continuous and invariable. Since the composition is a song, the continuous rhythm is also the strongest, if not only, reference to dance music in the piece.

In addition, La Paloma shows another feature typical of the habanera that curiously is never mentioned in discussions of its musical form: the structure of the melody. It is striking (and a feature especially consistent in Iradier's compositions) that the melody persistently sets triplets against the dotted habanera rhythm. This creates a particular rhythmic tension known as cross rhythm. That is, there are notes in each of the voices that do not sound together on the same subdivision of the measure, but slightly misaligned. 

Cross rhythms, indicated by red arrows

More then the simple presence of the habanera rhythm, it is the superimposition of conflicting rhythmical figures, the cross rhythms, that are characteristic of the habanera. This is true, in particular, for Iradier's “American” pieces (whether they were labeled as habaneras or not), but also for the genre as a whole. In La Paloma, the figure of the habanera rhythm with superimposed triplets is the nucleus of the melody in each of the three phrases.

La Paloma, excerpts.
Brackets indicate corresponding motives with cross rhythms.

2. El Arreglito

Iradier's habanera El Arreglito, while it has never reached the fame of La Paloma, will immediately be recognized by modern listeners. It served the model to the famous habanera in Georges Bizet's opera Carmen.

The publication date of El Arreglito is uncertain, but a Spanish edition has been dated 1864. The piece has been labeled a canción habanera with piano accompaniment by the composer and, as the title page announces, it had been sung to great applause by Mlle. Treveli at the “Imperial Italian Theater” (perhaps the Théâtre-Italien) in Paris.

Musically, El Arreglito is quite similar to La Paloma. Listeners will quickly recognize the characteristic features of the habanera, that is,the typical rhythm in the bass accompaniment and cross rhythms provided by the melody through triplets.

Unlike the strophic structure of La Paloma, however, the text El Arreglito is a narrative poem. As a consequence, the musical structure is not a three-part division with strophe and refrain, but a more extensive form of six sections (listed as A through F, respectively, in the table below), plus an introduction and a coda.

Section	Actual Length  (in Measures)	Fundamental Length (in Measures)	Tonality
Introduction	8		d minor
A	16		d minor
B	25	24 = 16+8	D major
C	16		d minor
D	17	16	D major
E	17	16	d minor
F	17	16	D major
Coda	12		D major

Essentially, all proper phrases are built on a 16-measure framework. Only section B seems to differ, but actually it does not: the subsequent phrase is repeated and thus the section is extended from 16 to 24 measures. Thus, although the text of El Arreglito is longer and its format different, the compositional procedure of the music corresponds to La Paloma.

In order to emphasize the change from one section to the next in El Arreglito, the composer had recourse to a device commonly used in habaneras: contrasting tonalities. The six sections alternate parallel major and minor keys. Hence, the first section is written in d minor, the second in D major, the third in d minor, and so on. The following example gives a rendition of the piece from the beginning to the opening measures of the fourth section.

Our comparison of Iradier's habaneras shows that the pieces, on the one hand, are quite similar. They both are built on a framework of 16-measure phrases, use the habanera rhythm as an accompaniment and cross rhythms in the melody. On the other hand, they are different kinds of musical pieces. La Paloma is a strophic song and El Arreglito a through-composed vocal piece without repetitions. 

Organizing music pieces based on 16-measure phrases is perhaps the most common form of musical composition in Western music, and the way Iradier arranged his two pieces is typical for song-like compositions. This may lead us to the conclusion (to be confirmed or refuted through further investigation) that the habanera is not so much a musical form but a style—a style in which common forms of Western music have been “decorated” with exotic elements by the composer.

3. La Cubana

Among the early pieces to be found with habanera in the subtitle is the danza habanera La Cubana by Florencio Lahoz (1815-1868). Lahoz was a Spanish organist and composer who published numerous piano compositions but also orchestral works. He also compiled piano reductions of Spanish music theater works. Most of his piano pieces draw on genres of Spanish folk music, especially the jota of his native Aragón, but there are also “American” examples. Lahoz is not known to have travelled outside of Spain and, thus, his acquaintance with the habanera must stem from the “American” compositions of his fellow Spanish composers.

La Cubana is a short piano piece whose date of composition is again uncertain. It is believed to have been composed around 1850, thus early on when the habanera gained popularity in Spain. The piece, written throughout in G major, consists of two phrases (A and B) of 16 measures length and a coda of 10 measures.

Certainly, La Cubana is an unpretentious composition. Section A presents the main musical idea of the piece and section B introduces a contrasting melody. However, it does so only in the antecedent phrase. The subsequent phrase of section B takes up again the melody of section A.

As in Iradier's vocal compositions, the habanera rhythm is maintained as a continuous accompanying figure. Section B also shows cross rhythms in the melody created through triplets. The most striking figure in the melody is, however, another type of rhythm: the síncopa (syncope).

Example of the síncopa, indicated by brackets.

The síncopa is not as characteristic of the style as the habanera rhythm and cross rhythms, but it appears nevertheless frequently in habaneras. Interestingly, this síncopa was to become later the most characteristic rhythmical figure of Argentinian tango.

La Cubana is a fascinating example of an habanera as it is stylistically very close to Argentinian tango as it emerged about 50 years later. Well into the second decade of the 20th century, Argentinian tangos were still written with the habanera rhythm as an accompaniment. They were longer pieces, usually consisting of three sections, and favored minor keys and terse, somewhat choppy melodic motives. La Cubana is, by comparison, too short and the major key with its parallel thirds and sixths sound a bit too “sweet” for an Argentinian tango. This, together with the wavering imprecision of the cross rhythms, makes up the charm of the “voluptuous” habanera, but it is too mellow for the tango criollo. Nonetheless, the affinity between La Cubana and Argentinian tango is evident and intriguing.

© 2018 Wolfgang Freis