Balada Para un Loco

Astor Piazzolla's tango nuevo was always a provocation — to traditionalists who felt he'd destroyed the form, to classical audiences who weren't sure what to make of his bandoneón. "Balada Para un Loco" exists somewhere in the space his opponents feared most: a tango that is also a poem, an urban surrealist vision with Horacio Ferrer's lyrics conjuring a madman dancing on Buenos Aires rooftops, dragging a reluctant woman toward some mad vision of transcendence. Roberto Goyeneche's voice — graveled, world-worn, with a cabaret singer's instinct for dramatic timing — is the perfect vehicle for this text: he sounds like someone who might actually follow a lunatic onto a rooftop, not because he believes but because he's seen enough to find disbelief exhausting. The musical architecture is baroque in its complexity — Piazzolla's bandoneón lines crashing against violin and piano in patterns that feel improvised even when they're rigorously composed. The Buenos Aires of this song is a fever-dream city, the Río de la Plata winking silver in the mad imagining. The song became a standard of the genre in 1969 and has never shed its quality of radical strangeness, even after decades of familiarity. It is music for the grandiose interior gesture — for feeling, briefly, that beauty is a legitimate form of insanity.