Astor PIAZZOLLA

Creator of the "nuevo tango", Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) transformed Argentina's most typical popular music, the tango, into a cosmopolitan musical language loved all around the world.

Born in Mar del Plata to Italian immigrant parents, Astor picked up his first bandoneon in New York, where he lived for 10 years as a child. On his return to Argentina at the age of 13, he was spotted by the tango superstar, singer Carlos Gardel, who asked the young virtuoso bandoneonist to accompany him on his next concert tour. Astor's father refused; Gardel and his musicians all died in a plane crash during that same tour. If he had followed Gardel, Piazzolla joked many years later, he would have "played the harp (with the angels) instead of the bandoneon".

Back in Buenos Aires, Piazzolla worked by night as a tango musician and studied by day with the classical composer Alberto Ginastera, who introduced him to the luminaries of Western musical modernity: Stravinsky, Bartók, Ravel, Debussy... He then left for Paris to study with the famous Nadia Boulanger. In the mid-fifties, Piazzolla gave birth to the "nuevo tango", mixing elements of jazz and western classical music, notably counterpoint, with the rhythms and forms of tango.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, he lived in Europe and toured the world non-stop with his various groups, performing and recording some of his most famous compositions: Adiós Noniño, Libertango, Milonga del Angel, Invierno Porteño... In 1990 in Paris, a cerebral haemorrhage plunged him into a coma from which he never woke up. He died two years later in Buenos Aires.