At age 85, Señor Alberto Podestá still performs (shown here with Lisandro Adrover of Forever Tango fame).

L ast August, the 2009 Chicago International Tango Festival was privileged by the visit of a titan of song, Señor Alberto Podestá. He shared the stage of the Merle Ruskin Theatre with the show Tango Argentino on Stage and the orquesta tipica directed by Carlos Marzan. Señor Podestá's renditions of the songs he made famous brought standing ovations from the general public that filled the 900 seats house. He received honors from the Mayor of the city and from the Argentine consul in Chicago.

In 1939 he was a fifteen-year-old from the province of San Juan, who had come to the big city of Buenos Aires caressing a dream. He wanted to be a tango singer. And since 1939 he has never stopped living that dream.

I met him in July 2006 as I was interviewing people for a book in progress. During my four weeks in and out of his life, I learned not just about his spectacular career, but about who he is as a human being. As to his career, he inaugurated his many decades of recording under the baton of Miguel Caló, with the tangos "Dos fracasos" and "Yo soy el tango," and the vals "Bajo un cielo de estrellas." A few years thereafter, he found a signature song in the tango "Alma de bohemio" ("Bohemian soul," Juan Andres Caruso, 1929). In Podestá's own words: "One day I started extending the 'a' in the word cantar, so that it sounded cantaaaaar. Gradually I stayed a little bit longer with the 'a': cantaaaaaaaaar. I became known for it."

(Listen to Keith's rendering of this passage from the 1943 recording).

"Alma de bohemio" offers us a perspective on the cosmology that runs through the veins of tango poetry. The protagonist of the lyric is an irredeemably idealistic man, someone totally liberated from the material trappings of life. He lives from the heart and he will die from the heart. His way of being is guided by his subjectivity-his emotions, his fantasy, his dreams. What an impassioned wonderer! What a free spirit! He is in love with love. Here are two excerpts from the poetry:

Podestá socialized with the group of talented poets of the '40s and '50s; he told me many anecdotes about them. Back in 2006, after we met for cafecito, I wrote: "This man was a living history book of the golden age of tango, from 1939 up to the present. It was like he stepped out of the fog from that time, and walked into this café  to sit with me. He told me about Discépolo, one of my favorite tango poets. I asked what type of person Discépolo was, since he wrote the most acid tango lyrics of all time: was he a cynical or angry man? 'Discépolo was a rather introverted person,' he answered, 'quite friendly, who had many loyal friends.' The singer continued: 'When I was a young singer, Discépolo used to tell me, "Pibe [kid], each one of your arms is bigger than two of my legs put together." ' " Discépolo, known as "the Schopenhauer of tango," expressed in two verses of his tango "Uno" what happens when bohemian souls crash against reality:

The rare idealism of "Alma de bohemio" gradually faded in the subsequent poetic literature. From the '20s on, abandonment and nostalgia saturated the poetry and became its dominant themes; these emotions lie at the heart of the Golden Age tangos we dance to today. Señor Podestá recorded the greatest and most nostalgic of these icons. His rendition of Cátulo Castillo's tango "Tinta roja" was unbearably poignant when I watched his performance in Buenos Aires, in 2006. Podestá gave us seven songs with the Adrover orchestra; his voice was virile and tender, rich in textural expression, and rounded even when he sang rage. "Tinta roja" made me shiver as he, the protagonist, returned to visit his place of birth and saw it changed. With his right hand placed on his aching heart, he sang with sadness and dolor:

Not only do we dance to the music, but also to the passionate cosmology embedded in music and song. We dance to a way of being that endorses human values over material pursuits, subjective freedom over conformity, intense attachments over aesthetic distance-an internal orientation to life, rather than an external one. The people who created and nourished our music, dance and song infused these values in the tango. Podestá is a living monument to this way of being. In 2006, after returning to the States, I wrote: "I have missed this man's protective quality, his sensitivity, his ageless sensuality, his 'kissability,' his tango way of life always making time for another cafecito. He stands for what tango poetry means to me: passion, conversation, intimacy, openness, candor. He also stands for what Buenos Aires means to me, the warmth, the touching, the readiness to make time for meeting new friends or strangers, the salt and pepper of a bit of mischief." As dancers, for three minutes, in the warmth and comfort of the embrace, we feel reassured that we can live fully from the heart. And when we are lucky, we do all this to the sound of...

Cantaaaaaaaaar...

"Copyright (c) 2009 Beatriz Dujovne. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce in any form without written permission from the author." I may be contacted at bedujovne"AT"aol.com.