Tango and Lunfardo

Tango took shape in the Río de la Plata region toward the close of the nineteenth century, principally in the cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where it developed as both a musical genre and a partner dance.^[1] From its beginnings the form was understood as a cultural composite; the writer Ernesto Sabato underscored its hybrid condition, while other commentators traced its lineage to Afro-Rioplatense, gauchesco, Spanish, and Italian currents amid the ethnic diversity of the great wave of European immigration.^[2] Within this layered tradition the lyric occupies a distinct linguistic position, because a large share of tango song texts are written not in formal Spanish but in lunfardo, the local Rioplatense argot.^[3]

The relationship between tango and lunfardo is principally one of voice and subject matter. Lyrics composed in the argot tend to express the emotions and sorrows of ordinary men and women, with a marked concentration on the affairs of love.^[4] The English-language record of the genre describes its lyrics in parallel terms, characterizing them as suffused with nostalgia, sadness, and mourning for love now lost.^[5] The argot therefore ties the language of the verse to the everyday speech of the city's common people, the very figures whose sentiments the songs give voice.^[6]

That popular world was itself a product of mixture, and the sources situate the music within a confluence of older forms. Investigators identify six principal styles that left their imprint on tango: the Andalusian tango, the Cuban habanera, candombe, the milonga, the mazurka, and the European polka.^[7] These antecedents place the genre within a broader Río de la Plata musical culture rather than tracing it to a single national source.^[8]

The poets who worked in this idiom gave tango some of its most quoted formulations. Enrique Santos Discépolo, counted among the genre's foremost lyricists, defined tango as "un pensamiento triste que se baila" — a sad thought that is danced.^[9] Discépolo also collaborated as a lyricist with the composer Mariano Mores on widely circulated tangos, among them "Uno" and "Cafetín de Buenos Aires," works that carried the genre's emotional vocabulary to broad audiences.^[10] The singer and songwriter Carlos Gardel stands among the form's leading figures, a measure of how closely the sung lyric is bound to tango's identity.^[11]

Tango's standing as a recognized patrimony reflects the durability of this lyric tradition. Argentina declared the genre part of its cultural heritage in 1996, and in 2009 UNESCO inscribed it as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity at the joint request of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.^[12] Musically the tradition remains organized around the bandoneon, whose timbre lends the characteristic orchestra its distinctive air, while the verse it accompanies preserves the lunfardo register that first carried tango's sentiments.^[13]