Adiós Nonino (1959)

Adiós Nonino is a tango by the Argentine bandoneonist and composer Astor Piazzolla, written in 1959 as a homage to his father, Vicente Piazzolla.^[1] Piazzolla composed it after learning of his father's death, and the result reads as an elegy cast in the idiom of tango — a piece that, within his catalogue, proved unusually durable, returning across decades of recordings under a single recurring title.^[2]

The work's history turns on a distinction between when it was written and when it first reached disc. Piazzolla composed Adiós Nonino in 1959, but the tango was not recorded until 1961, when it appeared on the album Piazzolla interpreta a Piazzolla, issued by RCA.^[2] That gap of roughly two years is a reminder that the date a tango is composed and the date it is first captured in the studio rarely coincide.

The title gained a second life at the end of the decade. In 1969 Piazzolla and his Quinteto recorded and released in Argentina a studio album that took its name from the 1959 tango, so that a single elegiac composition came to designate an entire program.^[3] By then the piece had already existed on disc for most of the decade, and the new record did not introduce it so much as raise its title to the status of a banner. The album carried weight for another reason as well: it held the first recorded appearance of Otoño porteño, one of the four works Piazzolla would later group as the Estaciones porteñas.^[2]

The 1969 release also marks a documented change in how Piazzolla named his ensemble. Until this album the group had been billed as the Quinteto Nuevo Tango; from this point on the composer dropped the longer phrase and called the formation simply the Quinteto.^[2] Small as the change of name is, it fixes the record as a hinge in the chronology of Piazzolla's working groups.

In the long reception of his catalogue, Adiós Nonino settled into a position of unusual prominence. Together with Libertango, it is among the titles that recur most often across the many compilations and live albums assembled from his work — a frequency that sets it apart from the rest of his repertoire.^[2] That an elegy born of private grief in 1959 should anchor so many later anthologies measures how far the piece travelled from the occasion that produced it.^[1]