La Cumparsita

The bandoneon announces itself like a sigh that has decided to become architecture — and in "La Cumparsita" Carlos Gardel finds in that instrument's distinctive wheeze the perfect vehicle for tango's fundamental emotional content: a beauty inseparable from sadness. This is perhaps the most famous tango melody ever written, and Gardel's recording fixes it at its canonical form: the orchestral arrangement swooping and pulling, the rhythm marking its deliberate, slightly dragging time signature that distinguishes tango from everything else. Gardel's voice sits above the ensemble with absolute authority, the phrasing shaped by porteño street culture, Buenos Aires working-class neighborhoods whose dances and songs constituted an entirely new art form at the century's turn. The lyric traces loss with the elegance the form demands — tango was always a music of people who had nothing left to lose except their dignity. Culturally this is the music of Argentine national identity in its most concentrated form, the sound the country makes when it's alone with itself at midnight. Hear it in any other context and something is missing; in Buenos Aires, even now, it sounds like truth.