Adiós Nonino

In 1959 Astor Piazzolla was touring Spanish-speaking America with the dancers Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves when, during a show in Puerto Rico, word reached him that his father Vicente had died after a bicycle accident in Mar del Plata. The family called Vicente Nonino, an Argentine twist on the Italian word for grandfather. The tour had gone badly, money was short and Piazzolla was homesick, and the news pushed him into depression. A few days later, in October 1959 in New York, he asked his family to leave him alone for a few hours. As they later remembered it, there was silence at first, and then they heard him playing a terribly sad melody on the bandoneon. He wrote Adiós Nonino in about thirty minutes. It was not entirely new: he kept the rhythmic part of Nonino, a tango he had written for his father in Paris five years earlier, and rebuilt the rest around it, so the farewell grew out of a piece made while the old man was still alive. It became one of Piazzolla's best-known compositions, recorded many times in many arrangements. In 2002 it was played at the wedding of Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and the Argentine-born Máxima Zorreguieta, and figure skaters including Yuna Kim and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir have built Olympic-season programmes around it. A son's private grief, worked out in half an hour, became the piece through which much of the world first hears nuevo tango.