Susana Rinaldi

Susana Rinaldi ranks among the foremost interpreters of the sung form of Argentine tango, the song-and-dance idiom of the Río de la Plata most closely identified with Buenos Aires and Montevideo and woven through with the region's layered immigrant inheritance — a music the writer Ernesto Sabato called a "hybrid," fusing Afro-Rioplatense candombe, the Cuban habanera, the milonga, and European mazurka and polka into the sensual, close-embrace dance of the Rioplatense night.^[1] That tradition had crystallized in and around the Argentine capital toward the close of the nineteenth century.^[2] Born in Buenos Aires on 25 December 1935 to a wealthy father and a poor mother, she became known as "La Tana," an affectionate nod to her Italian descent, and passed a childhood shuttling among Argentina's provinces.^[3]

From conservatory to tango

Rinaldi entered the genre by way of formal conservatory training and the stage rather than the milonga circuit alone. From the age of fourteen she studied chamber singing at the National Conservatory of Music; she enrolled in the School of Dramatic Art in 1955, made her television debut two years later, and reached a major theatrical production by 1959.^[4] When producers invited her in 1966 to record a poetry recital, she countered with a tango album instead; her debut record appeared late that year with arrangements by the bandoneón virtuoso Roberto Pansera, after which she gradually set aside her acting career and toured the city's tango bars and milongas to make her name.^[5]

Claiming the male repertoire

Rinaldi's breakthrough in the late 1960s rested on a deliberate breach of gendered convention: she claimed tangos that had until then been sung only by men, among them standards tied to José María Contursi and Enrique Santos Discépolo, along with the lyricists Homero Manzi and Cátulo Castillo.^[6] The move drew an unexpected following of young university audiences, and she broadened her songbook with newer writers — Eladia Blázquez and Osvaldo Avena among them, alongside Héctor Negro and Chico Novarro.^[7] The choice carried weight because tango's lyric tradition, often composed in the Rioplatense street argot of lunfardo, had long given voice to the sorrows of ordinary men and women — a quality Discépolo distilled in his definition of the genre as "un pensamiento triste que se baila," a sad thought that is danced.^[8] By reinterpreting that male-coded inheritance in a woman's voice, she set herself squarely within tango's enduring tension between guarding the canon and remaking it.^[9]

Exile in Paris

In 1971 Rinaldi and her husband, the bandoneonist Osvaldo Piro, opened Magoya, a café-concert in the Atlantic resort city of Mar del Plata.^[10] The military coup of March 1976 cut the venture short, forcing her out of Argentina to settle for years in Paris.^[11] Her exile retraced a route the music itself had often traveled: tango's spread as an international art had repeatedly passed through the French capital, and the form had been entangled from its beginnings with migration, politics, and displacement.^[12]

Return and renewal

Rinaldi returned to Argentina in 1989 with an unorthodox staging of the tango-show; purists balked once more, but she emerged as a leading figure of the era's tango-renewal movement and, in time, a familiar ambassador for the genre abroad.^[13] Her path mirrored a broader current in which later interpreters honored the classical repertoire even as they reanimated it through fresh arrangement and theatrical presentation.^[14] Away from the stage she made her political conscience explicit: named an Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires in 1990, she served as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador from 1992 and gathered distinctions including the SADAIC Grand Prize and repeated Konex awards across several decades.^[15]