The Tango was born in Brazil too - but soon after it was erased
Brazil 1800s.
By Katia Novella Miller / Beatriz Merell
October 2024.
It is astonishing to realize how little we know about the origins of nowadays' tango.
One of the incidents virtually completely unknown is that 'creole tango', the tango that led to the tango from Río de la Plata we all know today, was born also in Brazil in the second half of the 1800s. And that some of its major composers had to change the name of this musical genre, therefore stop using the name 'Brazilian tango', due to the pressure exerted by the recording industry eager to create the perception, in other words, the idea of an exclusive Brazilian musical genre, with roots found only in Brazil - leaving the name 'tango’ as an exclusivity of the music of Argentina and Uruguay.
For many the remark I am going to do will be like a cold shower, but for those passionate about history. These, if free of preconceptions, will certainly agree that this fact can be perfectly understood within the logic of the ideology of nationalism, that, according to the book Imagined Communities (1) by the Chinese-Irish-British scholar Benedict Anderson, was born (or was manufactured for?) in Hispanic America, in other words in (colonial) Spanish America, at the beginning of the 1800s. A nascent ideology deeply in need of symbols – social, cultural, artistic – uniquely local, 'national' – even if in order to create these symbols it was necessary to manipulate or, straightforwardly, erase the truth, the real facts, the true history.
The tango appeared in Brazil (2) at the same time it appeared in the Río de la Plata area. Brazilian researcher Ney Homero da Silva Rocha tells us that the influences that gave rise to the tango in the areas colonized by the Portuguese and the Spaniards were the same: principally the mazurka, the polka, the waltz, the candombé, the habanera and the milonga of the payadores (a verse improviser accompanied by a guitar; a performer found also in other areas of Hispanic America and whose name and compositions changed with Hispanic American latitudes).
“Between 1850 and 1895, the genesis of tango happened under these influences in the Río de la Plata and Brazil, and in 1870 there were already tango compositions in Brazil performed basically with the same instruments of the tangos of Buenos Aires and Uruguay, that is the guitar, the transverse flute, the tambourine, the violin and the piano. In this period, the instruments of percussion of African origin, the atabaque (drum) of the first original tangos, were not played any more and few years after also the tambourines were withdrawn”
Afterwards, the Brazilian tango evolved towards the maxixe (3) and the choro (4).
The major tango composers in Brazil were Ernesto Nazaré and Chiquinha Gonzaga.
“Nazaré decided to change some of his known 93 tango scores into the "chorinho" rhythm serving the interests of the phonographic companies that wanted to transmute the Brazilian tango into the “chorinho” and the samba. Meanwhile, “the tango from Río de la Plata, with the passage of time, lost its similarities with the “chorinho”, principally since the introduction of the bandoneon” asserts Ney Homero da Silva Rocha.
While Nazareth, who stated his musical career playing tangos and composed his first one, Cruz perigo, in 1879, decided to transcribe and convert his tango scores to "chorinho" under the pressure of phonographic companies, Chiquinha Gonzaga (5) kept composing tangos, tangos-choros, waltzers, mazurkas, gavotas, polkas and habaneras. Undoubtedly Chiquinha Gonzaga deserves few written lines, mainly because of her feminine trajectory, which undoubtedly could horrify many.
Chiquinha's was born in 1847 from a mulatto mother and a Portuguese father. In 1863, pressed by her father, she married a man working for the Real Portuguese Navy, who didn't allow her to dedicate herself to music. After some years, Chiquinha left him and divorced despite she had to leave as well her two youngest kids. She was allowed to take with herself only her oldest son. It is said that her father declared Chiquinha dead and forbade to pronounce her name.
In 1870 Chiquinha Gonzaga left Rio de Janeiro and moved to Minas Gerais where she lived with an engineer from whom she had a daughter. But as she couldn’t cope with his loving betrayals, therefore left him and returned to Rio de Janeiro. Even this time she had to accept she couldn't take with her her little daughter.
In 1876, at 29, Chiquinha Gonzaga was working in Rio as an independent musician and started to become famous as a pianist and composer.
After some decades dedicated to her music, in 1899, she met João Batista Fernandes Lage, a young Portuguese musician, and fell in love with him. She was 52, he 16. Chiquinha adopted him as a son in order to be able to live that love, avoid scandals, to harm her biological sons and ruin her career.
To distance herself from the evil tongues, the couple moved to Lisboa, the Portuguese capital, for some years. It is said that at first her sons didn't accept that relationship, but when they understood that both of them were happy and that that idyl was fecund for their mother, they changed their minds.
When the couple returned to Brazil, Chiquinha never publicly admitted to being living with João Batista as wife and husband. Their relationship was discovered after her death, in 1935, through her letters and the photographs of the couple.
Returning to the main topic of this article… If it is very likely that the name 'tango' disappeared from the musical production of Brazil due to the eagerness of the political and economic elites to create exclusive national symbols - a phenomenon, as we have already seen, that according to Benedict Anderson (1) spread from Hispanic America to Brazil and the rest of the world - we have to admit that it would be very interesting to understand - and undoubtedly revealing – who owned those phonographic industries in order to comprehend whether there were only local interests involved or if there were geographically far away interests engaged in these maneuvers as well – as happened with the tango from Rio de la Plata as we will see soon in my next publication
I leave you here the links to two tangos of Chiquinha Gonzaga.
Gaucho:
Corta Jaca:
Notes:
1. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is considered one of the most read scholar books in the English-language academy.
2. Previously there were tangos also in other areas of Hispanic America.
3. It seems that the maxixe, known as well as Brazilian tango, and often performed as a choro subgenre, originated in Rio de Janeiro. According to some scholars, later on, the maxixe contributed to the birth of the samba and lambada.
4. In the 19th century, the word 'choro' was used to express a style consisting in playing different musical genres (like polkas, waltzers, mazurkas, habaneras...). Maxixes were performed by choro musical bands.
5. Chiquinha Gozanga founded in 1917 the Brazilian Society of Theatre Authors to protect the copy rights; it is worth highlighting that she was also a activist for the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage.
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