Carlos Gardel

Carlos Gardel was born in Toulouse, France, in 1890 and died in a plane collision in Medellín, Colombia, in 1935. With his mother, he emigrated to Argentina at age two. The date and place of his birth, however, continues to be contested, with an alternative version of history claiming Uruguay as his birthplace. He grew up in Buenos Aires, in the midst of a migratory avalanche that encouraged ethnic integration and bolstered a strong sense of community. He completed his primary schooling and took sporadic jobs, preferably in the theater, which drew him closer to his vocation as a singer. At age seventeen, Carlos Gardel already was considered a semiprofessional performer. His models were the urban and rural Argentinian payadores (folk bards who improvised their poetry in duels of poetic wit known as payadas to the accompaniment of guitar), who drew mainly from mainstays of the criollo or traditional folk musico-poetic repertoire, such as estilos, cifras, and milongas. Gardel’s renditions of these folk genres can be heard in early recordings from 1912. Armed with exceptional vocal qualities, he was a solid baritone with an ample range of over two octaves that easily extended over the upper register, with an impeccable sense of pitch, timbric warmth, and an uncanny expressive intuition. With few exceptions, he did not receive any systematic vocal training. In 1913 he formed a duo with the singer José Razzano, one of his contemporaries who was performing as a soloist. In 1917 Gardel recorded his first tango, the anthological “Mi noche triste,” which was to define the principal characteristics of vocal/instrumental tango from that point onward and into the present. After ending his partnership with Razzano in 1925, Gardel continued his career as a soloist and developed a strongly personal style. During the last years of his short life he engaged in an active international career that took him to Barcelona, Paris, and New York, especially through his films. He also excelled as a composer of tangos that he sung in his movies. His tragic death in a plane crash when he was only forty-four has not loosened its grip on the larger-than-life figure that joined the domestic constellation of Río de la Plata mythology as the paradigmatic archetype of the tango vocalist and one of the genre’s outstanding performers. The influence of his histrionic style of vocal delivery, which was also transferred to instrumental tango, retains its currency after a century. Gardel’s life story, vocal qualities, international exploits, films, anecdotes, and recordings have been the subject of thousands of publications. His film productions, of uneven quality, are embedded in the history of filmmaking in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America. Most of all, his aesthetics still cast a shadow over the legacy of tango vocalists, composers, and performers. As a mythical figure in the pantheon of popular culture, Gardel retains a lasting place in the traditional canon of tango through the resilience of his recordings, which have been repeatedly re-released in their totality. This article was translated by Malena Kuss.