Originally, Piazzolla’s compositions were met with resistance in Buenos Aires, despite the fact that overseas he received rave reviews. In an interview with Natalio Gorin in 1990, Piazzolla himself provides some insight into why his musical was well accepted abroad:
Tuve dos grandes maestros: Nadia Boulanger y Alberto Ginastera. El… tercer maestro se llama Buenos Aires: me enseñó los secretos del tango… Mi música se puede gustar o no, pero nadie va a negar su elaboración: está bien orquestada, es novedosa, de este siglo, y tiene olor a tango, por eso es tan atractiva en todo el mundo (Gorin 1998, 15). [Translation: I had two great teachers: Nadia Boulanger and Alberto Ginastera. The third is named Buenos Aires: it taught me the secrets of the tango… You can like my music or not, but no one can deny its elaboration: it’s well orchestrated, its novel, of this century, and it smells of tango, that’s why it’s so attractive around the whole world.]
At home in Buenos Aires and more broadly, Argentina, however, his compositions were not well liked. A common saying there (“En la Argentina se puede cambiar todo, menos el tango” – In Argentina, everything can change besides the tango) expresses the common sentiment among Argentineans. For all the reasons described in the characteristic of the composition Le Grand Tango, among others, Piazzolla’s music was not well liked because these changes represented a departure from tradition. Because the people of Argentina had longed so dearly for a tradition and a form of self-identification, changing anything about what amounted to a sacred relic (Taylor 1976, 287) was, understandably, regarded as heresy. Kuri quotes Gobello, the president of the Academia Porteña del Lunfardo as saying: “La sustancia del tango es la aptitud para expresar los sentimientos del porteño y, por extensión, del argentino” (1997, 54) [The tango’s substance is in its ability to express the sentiments of the porteño and, by extension, of the Argentinean.]. Thus we see that a link is established between the identity of the Argentinean nation and its tango.
To change the tango, then, is to challenge the very identity of Argentina. For a people that worked so hard to define themselves after waves of immigration in the early twentieth century, change to this identity is not easy to accept. Particularly, because the majority of immigrants were European and thus the population of Buenos Aires became particularly white-skinned. The mestizo and black populations in Argentina eventually all but disappeared because “as with the mestizo, miscegenation gradually absorbed the Negro within the lower class” (Scobie 1971, 31). Important to note here is that these minority groups were assimilated with the lower classes. Because the tango also arose out of the lower classes in the arrabales, race was certainly a factor in its identity and in its status as a symbol for social mobility. Once the upper classes finally were comfortable with the (traditional) tango, then, they did not want it further changed. To change it any more was synonymous with continuing to allow the population to fluctuate and change. After working so hard to attain the particular identity that they had in Buenos Aires, the idea of allowing it to change any more was not acceptable.