05 Enrique Santos Discepolo

Philosophy in small coins

Some years before, in his essay Les Assassins de la Mémoire —an
acute study on the neo-nazi revisionism in contemporary Europe—,
the French writer Pierre Vidal-Naquet transcribed lyrics of
“Cambalache”, the seminal tango by Enrique Santos Discépolo. A
far-fetched quotation? Maybe a feature of exotism by an
intellectual in search of oxygen out of the European culture
environment? According to the author´s confession, he was
acquainted with Discépolo´s work by way of some Latin American
friends. And he decided to include him in a book not at all
connected with tango. The image of a cambalache (second-hand shop)
as scenery for insolent random, of a confusion of values and
desacralization seemed to him most adequate to seal his denouncing
text.

That was not the first time which Discépolo´s work aroused interest
in the field of thought. The Spaniard Camilo José Cela included him
among his preferred popular poets and Ernesto Sábato had no doubt
in identifying himself with the pessimistic philosophy of the one
who wrote “Qué vachaché”: «True love got drowned in the soup».
Several years before these recognitions, the lunfardo (slang) poets
Dante Linyera and Carlos de la Púa defined Discépolo as an author
with philosophy. Another writer from Buenos Aires, Julián Centeya,
when reviewing one of his films, talked of «philosophy in small
coins», and at the same time was risking an analogy —undoubtedly
exaggerated— between Discépolo and... Charlie Chaplin.

Unlike other popular creators who displayed their talent in an
instinctive and somewhat naïve way to be later recognized as future
exegetes, Discépolo was always conscious of his contribution. It
could also be stated that all his artistic renderings were
articulated by common sense, a certain Discepolian air or spirit
which people immediately recognizes with affection and admiration
as if his work —more than once defined as prophetic— should express
the common sense of the Argentines. Discépolo´s singularity keeps
on disquieting either in the tango universe or outside it. While
most of his contemporaries are today strange to new generations,
the man who wrote and composed “Cambalache” persists, is in force.
Or to say it with one of his most loved images: he keeps on
biting.

Enrique grew up seeing theater guided by his brother Armando, the
great playwright of the River Plate grotesque, and soon later he
was attracted by popular arts. He arrived at tango after having
tried with uneven success, play writing and acting. In 1917, he
made his début as an actor, in the company of Roberto Casaux, a
comic star of that time, and a year later he wrote together with a
friend the play Los Duendes, mistreated by critics. He later
improved his level with El Señor Cura (adaptation of a Maupassant´s
story), Día Feriado, El Hombre Solo, Páselo Cabo and, especially,
El Organito, fierce social painting sketched with his brother in
the mid-20s. As an actor, Discépolo evolved from chorus member to a
cast name, and his work in Mustafá, would be remembered, among many
other renditions.

Although the worlds of tango and theater were not divorced in the
Argentina of Yrigoyen and Gardel, Discépolo´s decision to be an
author of popular songs was resisted by his elder brother —Armando
had been responsible for Enrique´s education after the early death
of their parents—, and it cannot be said that things had been easy
for the feeble and shy Discepolín. A mild familiar influence
(Santo, his father, was a noted Neapolitan musician settled in
Buenos Aires) may have been the first evidence towards the combined
art of sound organization and lyrics, but the revelation was not
immediate. On the contrary, either the anodyne “Bizcochito”, his
first composition commissioned by the playwright Saldías, or the
remarkable and revulsive “Qué vachaché”, published by Julio Korn in
1926 and premiered at a theater in Montevideo where it was noisily
whistled, were a bad start or, at least, that was what people in
Buenos Aires, used to appraise Manuel Romero's, Celedonio Flores'
and Pascual Contursi's tangos, thought.

The luck of the stubborn author changed in 1928 when, in a revue,
the singer Azucena Maizani sang “Esta noche me emborracho”, a tango
with Horatian touches (because of Horacio, author of Odes) and with
an entirely River Plate subject: an old cabaret woman who was
mercilessly treated by time. Days after its début, the lyrics of
that tango were heard throughout the country. Argentine musicians
on tour of Europe included it in their repertories, and in Alfonso
XIII´s Spain, the composition achieved an enormous popularity. That
was Discépolo birth in tango. That very year, the actress and
singer Tita Merello returned to the previously critized “Qué
vachaché” and drove it to the same stature of “Esta noche me
emborracho”. Finally, 1928 would be the year of love for an
intellectual full of uncertainties. Tania, a Spanish singer of
cuplés settled in Buenos Aires, who would turn out to be an
adequate interpreter of his tangos, was to accompany Discépolo
until the end of his life.

At a time when lyric writing and musical composition were clearly
differentiated within the frame of cultural industries, Discépolo
wrote lyrics and music, even though the latter was conceived with
just two fingers on the piano keyboard, to be later committed to
staff sheet by some friend musicians (generally Lalo Scalise). This
twofold capacity allowed Discépolo to develop each tango as a
perfect unit of lyrics and music. With an extremely sharp sense of
rhythm and dramatic progression, with an impeccable melodic sense
(Carlos de la Púa defined him as a Philharmonic Tom Thumb),
Discépolo managed to make of his short and, most times, violent
stories, an authentic River Plate human comedy. He set aside a big
portion of the modernist influence which viciated other lyricists
(Rubén Darío was the literary hero for hundred of Argentine poets,
for many years) and translated to the minor format of song, certain
predominant ideas of the age: theatrical grotesque, Croce´s
idealism, Pirandellian estrangement...

The profusion of ideas in each lyric found in the witty humor and
in the lyricism of music, a certain balance, a sensory
compensation, a way to tell things in and through tango. No other
author would go so far.

Of course, the fact that Carlos Gardel had recorded almost all his
early tangos greatly helped to divulge and legitimate Discépolo as
author and composer in a genre plenty of authors and composers. In
this sense, Gardel´s rendition of “Yira yira” in October 1930
stands amongst the great numbers of Argentine music. The intensity
of the recording, where there were not special theatrical resources
and the singer avoided all unnecessary emphasis, is given by the
immediacy of Gardel´s expression. There are no instrumental
preambles to make the listener familiar with the material beyond a
brief introduction by the guitarists who present the bridge with
tremolos and phrasings in the low strings so typical of the period.
The melodic line, with deceptive simplicity suddenly breaks in,
with a force which excludes complaint.

“Yira yira” was listened to and interpreted as a claim loaded with
skepticism. The ridiculed militant in “Qué vachaché” comes back to
assault, but this time he is backed by a profound material crisis.
Now the conceited one, who resisted to believe that «true love got
drowned in the soup», is taking the place of a cynical voice. The
principles have been changed by reality. This is the triumph of
disbelief but now without the cynicism —and even less the
grotesque— of some years before. The character of “Yira yira”
trusted the world but the world failed him. Such as in other
Discépolo´s tangos, the lyrics tell us of a fall, a cruel sunrise:
there is no more space for deceipt and fraud. (From this
perspective, those who saw in Discépolo a moralist disappointed by
modernity are not completely mistaken, but perhaps he is much more
than that).

The trend that begins with “Qué vachaché” and ripens in “Yira yira”
is continued in the tangos “Qué sapa señor” and, in 1935,
“Cambalache”. But this is not the only style of the compositional
art of Discépolo. He was romantic in the waltz “Sueño de juventud”,
mocking in comic tangos such as “Justo el 31” and “Chorra”,
expressionist in “Soy un arlequín” and “Quién más quién menos”,
passionate in “Confesión” and “Canción desesperada” and somewhat
nostalgic and elegiac in “Uno” and “Cafetín de Buenos Aires”, both
written together with Mariano Mores. He was not as prolific as
Enrique Cadícamo, and a portion of his work lacks in interest.
Undoubtedly, Discépolo's musical variety had to do with his
interest in theater and cinema. His staging of Wunder Bar and his
most known movies —Cuatro Corazones,En la Luz de una Estrella— made
known several songs —some almost forgotten— which the director and
actor wrote with his programmatic sense.

Enrique Santos Discépolo was born in the neighborhood of Once,
Buenos Aires, and died at his downtown apartment which he shared
with Tania. His commitment with Peronism, made public through his
brief and shocking participation in a controverted radio program,
caused a troublesome distance between him and his old friends. Two
years after his death, when the political trenches no longer needed
him but several of his tangos kept on striking on the collective
consciousness, Discépolo was remembered by the writer Nicolás
Olivari on a remarkable article. There Olivari asserted that “Yira
yira”'s author had been the bolt of Buenos Aires humorism, smeared
with grease for anguish. In a way, that was a Discepolian
definition.

Sergio A. Pujol is historian and music critic. Among other books,
he published Discépolo. Una Biografía Argentina (An Argentine
biography) (Emecé, 1997).