Special Exhibition: Dear Tango!

Astor Piazzolla and the bandoneon

Concertina, bandoneon and their legacy—a special exhibition by the German Harmonica Museum marking the 25th anniversary of the death of Astor Piazzolla.

The legendary Argentine bandoneon virtuoso and composer Astor Piazzolla (1903–1992) had died 25 years before the exhibition. His reputation as the great innovator of tango is common knowledge, including in Germany.

He raised tango, already popular in the Americas and Europe in the early 20th century, to a new artistic level. At the same time, he established the bandoneon in the public imagination as the defining instrument of this musical tradition.

A German instrument in Argentina

What is known almost only to music lovers—and tango enthusiasts in Argentina in particular—is that the bandoneon is a characteristically German product. It was developed by the Krefeld musical-instrument dealer Heinrich Band and named after him. Under the name “Bandonion”, it was manufactured in hundreds of thousands by numerous factories, most of them in Saxony. Exports to South America began towards the end of the 19th century. In Argentina, the “bandoneón” developed into a kind of national instrument.

The German Harmonica Museum used the 25th anniversary of Astor Piazzolla’s death as an opportunity to examine the tango phenomenon in greater depth, paying particular attention to the bandoneon and its relative, the German concertina.

Concertina, tango and rediscovery

The exhibition offered an informative and attractive overview ranging from the beginnings in Chemnitz, which can be dated to 1834, through Carlsfeld in the Ore Mountains—the centre of bandoneon manufacture and home of the famous Arnold bandoneons—to the decades of crisis after 1945 and the revival of bandoneon production since the 1990s. It is a distinctive history filled with remarkable stories: that of Walter Pörschmann (1903–1959), once Germany’s undisputed bandoneon star, or that of Carlos Gardel, the Argentine king of tango song.

Independent of the emerging “tango wave”, the concertina and bandoneon experienced an extraordinary boom in Germany during the early 20th century. Many hundreds of concertina and “Bandonion” orchestras existed in the industrial centres of Saxony and the Rhineland.

Visitors to “Dear Tango!” discovered why this golden age ended in the 1930s and why organised musical life had almost disappeared by 1960, while the bandoneon, together with tango, went on to enjoy a lasting renaissance.

The exhibition at the new German Harmonica Museum in Trossingen also presented magnificent bandoneons and concertinas. Many were loans from the Steinhart Collection at the Tango and Bandoneon Museum in Staufen im Breisgau or donations from the René Wehrle Collection. A rich accompanying programme completed the exhibition.