Le Tango parisien

The arrival of the tango in Paris is difficult to date precisely, but Rafael Mandressi asserts that the ‘key date’ was 1907, when the Argentinian department store Gath & Chaves sent Uruguayan violinist Alfredo Gobbi, Chilean singer Flora Rodriguez, and Argentinean composer and performer Ángel Villoldo to Paris to record tangos and other South American dances.Footnote ⁴ Between 1907 and 1911, French ensembles and recording companies also started offering tangos, including Gobbi’s El mamao, Villoldo’s El choclo, Joaquina by the pianist Juan Bergamino, and tangos composed in Europe expressly for the European market.Footnote ⁵ By 1911, the tango was an established feature of Parisian dancing cultures and references to the tango argéntin appeared regularly in advertisements for dance venues, sheet music publications, and recordings. Dance halls such as those at Magic-City, Bal Tabarin, Bal Bullier, and Ba-ta-clan began to rely heavily on the tango to attract audiences by featuring tango competitions and declaring in advertisements that ‘from now on, the Argentine tango is in fashion here, and we will dance it every night’.Footnote ⁶ By the end of summer 1911, the tango was being referred to as ‘that new dance that is all the rage right now’, and it seems that most fashionable Parisians would have at least been aware of its basic outlines.Footnote ⁷ Two years later, the tango had exploded into a veritable craze, impossible to avoid. It became a central attraction in many venues for social dance across the city, appeared on theatrical stages, was ubiquitous in recordings and sheet music publications, and was covered endlessly in the press. In December 1913, journalist Clément Vautel described it as a ‘genuine epilepsy that shakes everyone’, and ridiculed the ‘two hundred thousand Parisians’ for whom ‘nothing is so interesting as the tango’.Footnote ⁸ This ‘tangomania’ was taken up by many other commentators in 1913,Footnote ⁹ and, referring to the heat generated by two bodies rubbing together, the dance was repeatedly referred to as Paris’s ‘central heating’ of the year.Footnote ¹⁰ In the ensuing months, vibrant tango cultures also emerged in cities from Chicago to Tokyo, where the Parisian interest in the dance form confirmed its status as the height of fashion.Footnote ¹¹

The tango was part of a larger trend of foreign dances gaining popularity in Paris, a shift that Sophie Jacotot has referred to as an ‘inversion’ of cultural relations between Europe and the Americas. This shift aligned modern life with the vibrancy of the ‘New World’, and reflected a sense that the ‘modern’ twentieth-century body would be an American one.Footnote ¹² Indeed, almost all the social dances that were fashionable in Paris between about 1900 and 1914 came from the Americas, from the cakewalk, which draws on Black US origins, to the maxixe, which came from Brazil, to the Rioplatense tango (Figure 1). The American origins of social dances during this period also mirrors an interest in intersections of exoticism and dance more broadly: the tango craze overlapped almost perfectly with the explosive first years of the Ballets Russes, a dance troupe that originated, like the tango, outside France and, also like the tango, wowed Parisians with its exoticist displays of virtuosity and vibrant sexual excess.

Figure 1.

Edouard Touraine, ‘Quelques danses bien parisiennes!’, La Vie Parisienne, 21 June 1913, 442–3.

Like many dance cultures, engagement in the tango was particularly considered a pastime for women. At the height of the craze, the magazine La Vie Parisienne assured its readers that ‘except for a few dissidents … there is not a single elegant woman who does not dance it all day long’.Footnote ¹³ Upper- and middle-class women who danced the tango were often seen as the epitome of fashion and modernity, and fashion was an integral aspect of the tango craze. Indeed, Béatrice Humbert has credited the tango craze with pushing forward dress reform, as clothing designed for tango dancing often featured flexible corsets and slit skirts to facilitate the motions required in the dance.Footnote ¹⁴

Recent scholarship on the 1913 Parisian tango ‘craze’ has examined at length the substantial backlash to the tango among Catholic leaders, conservative-leaning journalists, and others invested in protecting the virtue of young Parisian women.Footnote ¹⁵ As Mandressi has argued, the eroticism of the tango and its exoticism went hand in hand in many critiques. Some commentators saw the dance as cause for concern because it required an exceptionally intimate partner hold that could encourage couples to devolve into lewd behaviour. But alarmist accounts of the tango also often spoke against it because the dance had originated elsewhere. Some critics saw imported dances such as the tango, one-step, and maxixe as a threat to French cultural hegemony. One self-proclaimed antitanguiste (a term for the opponents of the tango) expressed their horror at the incursion of ragtime dances in France: ‘How awful! … Will France, the homeland of grace, adopt a mimicry of American slums? We’ve had the cake walk, that chahut of the nègres, and the grizzly bear. It’s pitiful!’Footnote ¹⁶ As this quotation attests, intensifying concerns about the tango and foreigners was the fact that the dance was highly racialized. Italian immigrants were integral to the development of the tango in Buenos Aires; accordingly, tropes about Mediterranean swarthiness and untrustworthiness abounded in French writings about it. But racialization also took more indeterminate outlines. Men in particular who danced the tango were often described as of Afro-South American, North African, Southern Italian, or of other non-white racial origin. Fernand Nozière, who served as theatre critic for Gil Blas, describes how in tango dances, ‘we see above all young people with brown skin and black, glued down hair. They do not belong to a specific nationality. They have the physique of a traitor, shown to us by melodramas. They obviously descend from Pranzini. We wonder how they make their living.’Footnote ¹⁷ Here, Nozière invokes the ‘Pranzini affair’ of 1887, in which Enrico Pranzini, an Egyptian of Italian descent, was guillotined for triple murder.Footnote ¹⁸

While commentators from all walks of life spoke out against the tango, a series of interdictions against the tango made by leaders of the Catholic church starting in late 1913 were particularly influential among many Frenchmen and women.Footnote ¹⁹ In January 1914, Léon-Adolphe Amette, Archbishop of Paris, weighed in with his own ban, declaring that ‘we condemn the foreign dance known as the tango, which is inherently lascivious and offensive to morality’.Footnote ²⁰ Some commentators observed that while these sanctions did seem to quickly tamp down interest in the tango in the provinces, they did not have an immediate impact on the dance scene in Paris. For some, this indicated a division of values between the working classes and the wealthy, and between regional centres and more international cities such as Biarritz or Paris. As one commentator put it:

Despite such claims of Parisian secularism and indifference to morality, backlash against the tango from all sides became too great, even in the capital city. By spring 1914 there was a precipitous drop in newspaper coverage of the dance, and by summer, it was hardly mentioned in the press at all.

In the face of such imperilled virtue and multifaceted opposition, why did so many Parisian women engage so enthusiastically in tango dancing? Humbert and others have pointed to the ways in which the tango allowed women to express and explore their sexuality in an otherwise repressive cultural environment, a motivating factor that was indelibly intertwined with the racial and exoticist connotations of the dance.Footnote ²² What interests me here, however, is how women could use engagement in the tango craze with more tactical motivations in mind. Parisian women not only enjoyed the tango but also deployed it to indicate their political affiliations, status within the Parisian social hierarchy, and awareness of the changing geopolitical forces of modernity. In other words, the tango could play a vital role in a Parisian woman’s assertion of her position in the world.

Opportunities for tango dancing were plentiful and existed at many price points. To learn the notoriously complicated and extensive collection of steps in the Parisian version of the dance, many women took lessons. For the wealthy, these lessons could take place at home, and it became a social event to invite friends over to take a small group lesson together.Footnote ²³ Prominent teachers could demand astronomical rates for private lessons: one celebrity dancer, Luis Bayo, claimed to charge up to two hundred francs per hour for lessons at his studio on Rue Cimarosa.Footnote ²⁴ Public group lessons were another option, and were held anywhere from theatre stages, cafés-concerts, and dance halls to hotel lobbies or even vacant apartments. Lessons such as these varied in price depending on the neighbourhood, from two or three francs near the Champs-Élysées down to one franc or even less in working-class areas such as Ménilmontant and Charonne.Footnote ²⁵ Once the complex choreography of the tango was apprehended, it could be unleashed at both public and private dances. Bals publics, where admission prices ranged from fifty centimes to over five francs, existed across the city, each with particular specialties and catering to different communities.Footnote ²⁶

The venue perhaps most closely associated with the tango was the dance hall at Magic-City (Figure 2). Founded to capitalize on the nearby Exposition Universelle of 1900, the amusement park Magic-City was established by Ernest Cognacq and Marie-Louise Jaÿ, owners of the department store Samaritaine. Modelled after Coney Island in New York, the amusement park gave off an air of américanisme and was complete with panoramic rail rides, water chutes, concerts, ‘ethnographic exhibits’, and other attractions. Around 1911, Magic-City started advertising its newly renovated dance hall. Focusing on dances from the Americas such as ragtime and the tango, the dance hall at Magic-City was an early iteration of what would in the interwar period be referred to as a dancing, or public dance hall loosely associated with American dance cultures.Footnote ²⁷ At Magic-City and venues like it, the coexistence of dances from all across North and South America indicated a slippage between nationally or regionally distinct forms of exoticism and also suggested a Pan-American formation of modernity. Starting in spring-summer 1913, the venue went all in on the tango. Magic-City offered the tango at several types of events: dance lessons, thés dansants (tea dances) which ran three days per week from four to seven p.m., dancing several evenings per week with galas on Fridays, and balls for holidays such as Mardi Gras, Mi-Carême, Bastille Day, or US Independence Day. Nestled on the edge of the wealthy Faubourg Saint-Germain, Magic-City billed itself as the most elite and exclusive dance hall in the city, and admission was comparatively expensive.Footnote ²⁸ Observers asserted that the audience comprised the rich and powerful, including financiers, parliamentarians, nobility, music hall performers, and foreign tourists.Footnote ²⁹ The décor was modern, colourful, and brilliantly lit,Footnote ³⁰ and the hall’s spaciousness and airflow were advertised as hygienic assets.Footnote ³¹ For the tango, Magic-City served as a site of transformation, bringing what was considered quite a controversial and sexually charged dance into dialogue with upper- and middle-class French cultural expectations. Accounts of the rich and famous dancing the tango on a brightly lit, modern, and hygienic dance floor, located in one of the wealthiest parts of the city, suggested a safety and domestication that aided in the spread of the genre.

Figure 2.

The salle de bal at Magic-City, c. 1913. Personal collection of the author.

Cosmopolitan modernity and la Parisienne

Mica Nava has theorized exoticist bodily practices such as dancing the tango or participating in Ballets Russes-inspired fashions as ‘cosmopolitan modernity’, a function that allowed some Western women to articulate their worldliness and their progressive political affiliations.Footnote ³² Focusing her study on the role of the tango and Ballets Russes at Selfridges, a department store that catered to middle- and upper-class women in London, Nava contends that some women participated in these exoticist discourses as a way of negotiating the social power structures that regulated their lives. Nava’s cosmopolitan modernity therefore offers nuance to theorizations of exoticism that follow Edward Said’s foundational work on the topic.Footnote ³³ For Nava, Saidian exoticism and orientalism are ‘too monochromatic and monolithic to be able to take into account’ the contradictory and fine-grained experiences of many, particularly women.Footnote ³⁴ Unlike Saidian orientalism, which focuses on the function of desire – particularly sexual desire – for the Other, the women in the context Nava describes ‘appropriate the narratives of difference for themselves’, using markers of cosmopolitanism for ‘identification with the socially excluded’ and to express ‘a desire to escape from family, home and country’.Footnote ³⁵ For women invested in progressivist causes, adopting a cosmopolitan outlook could be a way to articulate discomfort with their status in society. An apt encapsulation of this stance can be found in the words of Virginia Woolf two decades later: ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’Footnote ³⁶ Like Nava’s Londoners, Parisian women enacted cosmopolitan feeling by engaging with ‘tangomania’ in several formats: reading faits divers threaded through with tango themes during the day, wearing tango-inspired fashions and beauty products such as perfume, going out to dance in venues that specialized in the tango in the afternoons and evenings, and purchasing sheet music, dance manuals, and recordings for home consumption. In so doing, these women were responding to several perceptions of life in the French capital.

The first trope these women negotiated when engaging in tango culture was the internationally legible symbolic figure of la Parisienne, an idealized woman who informed and haunted the real-life behaviours of real-life Parisian women.Footnote ³⁷ A construction of commercial enterprises, popular fiction, and artwork of the nineteenth century, la Parisienne was renowned for her chic attire, elegance, and cosmopolitanism. Ruth E. Iskin notes how la Parisienne ‘supported both the consumer economy and a French identity of cultural superiority’ in the late nineteenth century by being employed as a frequent subject of advertisements, and therefore was held up as a model for women consumers.Footnote ³⁸ For decades, la Parisienne served as a paragon of femininity: in the words of Emmeline Raymond in 1867, ‘the Parisiennes are women, but they are more so than all other women’.Footnote ³⁹

Magic-City often drew on an alignment of the tango with la Parisienne in its advertisements. The women who spent time dancing in its salle de bal were often described as perfect modern Parisiennes: recall the ‘refined chic’ of the turban-sporting young ‘flower of Paris’ in the quotation at the opening of this article, or see Figure 3, where a fashionable woman is shown enjoying the many entertainments to be had at the amusement park, including, centrally, dancing the tango. In one advertisement for Magic-City, Parisian women were praised as uniquely accomplished tango dancers, that ‘to dance the tango with grace, to make it a distinguished, correct, seductive dance, as we did at Magic-City, you must have all the natural distinction of the French, all the elegance, the grace, the charm, and the restraint of French women’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The source then continues by aligning the dance with the beauty and slim physique of the ideal Parisienne by exclaiming that the tango is ‘not a dance for people who are too large or too fat!’ Celebrity sightings were a particular highlight of an evening out at Magic-City, as one description of the scene from Chassaigne de Néronde attests:

Figure 3.

Vald’es, ‘A Magic-City, le paradis des parisiens’, La Vie Parisienne, 26 July 1913, 542.

Such celebrity women were often upheld in the popular press as exemplars of the Parisienne model through their beauty, mastery of current fashions, and seeming ability to effortlessly execute foreign dances such as the tango. Their clothing and appearance are a central feature here, as is their genuine ‘enthusiasm’ for the tango, which de Néronde assures us they dance not for profit or publicity, but for their own gratification. The tango became a container for everything the modern Parisienne was expected to be: urbane, cosmopolitan, fashionable, and beautiful.

In the early twentieth century, la Parisienne also served as a counterbalance to fears about la nouvelle femme (‘the New Woman’), a symbol of progressivism who was often stigmatized as unfeminine in her behaviours and political assertiveness.Footnote ⁴² As the nouvelle femme archetype had been imported from England and the United States, she was also considered by some as antithetical to traditional French feminine values of love and motherhood. Women who danced the tango had to carefully navigate between the Parisienne and nouvelle femme tropes. Depending on context, the dance could be understood as being the epitome of Parisienne chic because it was fashionable. On the other hand, though, it also provided women with a framework in which to express their bodily liberty. Often, the new fashions designed for tango dancing resisted traditionally feminine modes of dress in their embrace of looser and more athletic silhouettes, and resonated with other women’s rights causes such as suffrage. Some newspaper accounts aligned tango dancing with typical pursuits of la nouvelle femme, and tango cultures were often seen as taking women out of the home and away from the traditional duties of motherhood. For example, Clément Vautel often voiced concerns in his regular column in Le Matin that tango-dancing women would be uninterested in marriage or becoming mothers. Tango dancing was, in his eyes, a useless skill – particularly for married women, who should instead focus on refining their cooking.Footnote ⁴³ In order to be palatable to a wider audience, supporters of the tango had to highlight its compatibility with the safe, politically indeterminate femininity of la Parisienne, for example, by emphasizing the grace required to execute it or noting its place in respectable, elite venues such as the salle de bal at Magic-City.

In the process of creating their own tango culture, these women changed the dance itself, in ways that are often described as in line with the Parisienne trope. Marta Savigliano describes how the Parisian tango was ‘stylized into glamorous, almost balletic, postures (extended arms, stretched torsos and necks, dizzying sways), with marching walks in between’;Footnote ⁴⁴ similarly, Florencia Garramuño and Nardo Zalko have both noted how the dance was imbued with a French elegance.Footnote ⁴⁵ By June, a popular magazine was able to brag that while the tango had originally not been considered appropriate for polite company in Buenos Aires, ‘the tango, softened, arranged, adorned with new graces in the Parisian salons, has returned triumphantly to its country of origin, and they are beginning to dance it in the “smartest” salons of Buenos Aires: only, to mask its dark origin over there, they call it “le tango parisien”’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This observation is also borne out in Argentinian sources. For example, the Buenos Aires newspaper P.B.T. asserted that ‘the tango which we have exported and which in France is called “le tango” has nothing traditional in it’.Footnote ⁴⁷ This ‘lack of tradition’ was a benefit for many South Americans who sought respectability, as the dance could now safely be performed in salons due to both its popularity in Paris and the choreographic changes it underwent in the European capital.

Global Paris

The vision of the tango propagated by Magic-City and embodied by tango-dancing Parisiennes was emblematic of a particularly Parisian formation of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism, a term whose Greek origins evoke both universalism (‘cosmo-’) and citizenship (‘-polis’), was central to Parisian identity in the early twentieth century. Paradoxically, under the logic of Parisian cosmopolitanism, foreign cultural practices such as the tango could be understood as Parisian precisely due to their foreignness. Parisians were encouraged to think of their city as the place where cultures from around the globe converged and mingled, whether through the feverish activity of French colonial expansion, international trade, or cultural events such as the Expositions Universelles that punctuated the late nineteenth century. Parisian cultural mobility has a long history, which can be traced intellectually through the ‘travelling culture’ brought into relief by the Baudelairean figure of the flâneur, or materially through the persistent presence of international businesspeople, guests, and tourists in the French capital.Footnote ⁴⁸ This emphasis on cosmopolitanism disambiguated Parisian identity from French identity, and many conservative commentators saw cosmopolitanism as adverse to French cultural superiority, family values, and religious piety. Some critics expressed concerns that globalization was leading to the massification of culture such as Paul Landormy, who feared the development of an international monoculture: ‘The art of the people is being lost everywhere. … Soon there will be on earth only one operetta, the Viennese, one ballet, the Russian, one comedy, the French, one song, the Montmartroise, and one dance, the tango.’Footnote ⁴⁹ However, for many who lived in the city, to be Parisian – if not French – was to embrace the world. Dance halls that foregrounded the tango such as Magic-City tapped into this sentiment, aligning Parisian cosmopolitanism with capitalist consumption and dance cultures from across the Americas.

Because cosmopolitanism was so tied to Parisian identity, it also rubbed off on early twentieth-century formations of la Parisienne. For example, Octave Uzanne wrote in 1912 that the ‘modern Parisienne’ had been formed by ‘contact, by means of travel, with women of foreign countries’, and possessed ‘a sense of vigor, a cosmopolitan veneer, a sort of boyish bravado, a kind of pseudo-English smartness … She has become in some sort a collector, a searcher after curiosities, a lover of art and beautiful things.’Footnote ⁵⁰ These attributes affected la Parisienne’s wardrobe, which included fabrics and fashions from around the world, ‘in charming satin or Japanese crêpe tea-gowns, or Indian silk or Oriental velvet on which are embroidered processions of birds or fantastic dragons’.Footnote ⁵¹ Dancing foreign dances such as the tango was a gestural analogue to this eclectic and exoticist wardrobe, and a mastery of its steps could allow a woman to demonstrate her worldliness.

Nava characterizes cosmopolitan modernity as a ‘revolt against the conservatism and narrow national identifications’ of English mainstream culture.Footnote ⁵² For many of these women, the alignment of the tango with modernity became a way to articulate anti-parochial and anti-paternalistic political positions in the face of a culture that largely discouraged women’s political engagement. As in London, the tango in Paris was associated with dress reform, women’s suffrage, and other progressivist causes. For some, though, cosmopolitan behaviours could also serve as a way for women to demonstrate their roles as Parisiennes, a status less firmly entrenched in progressivist politics. Because cosmopolitanism was so central to Parisian identity, cosmopolitanism across the Channel could be used to articulate a distinction between civic and national pride. By embracing foreign dances and exoticist fashions, women could perform the worldly identity of their city in a way that was still understood as feminine, a feature so central to the identity of la Parisienne.

As Uzanne’s description of la Parisienne’s wardrobe indicates, commercialism was fundamental to both early twentieth-century cosmopolitanism and femininity. Rita Felski has noted how early twentieth-century modernity was often enacted by Western women through their status as consumers, which gave them ‘an intimate familiarity with the rapidly changing fashions and lifestyles that constituted an important part of the felt experience of being modern’.Footnote ⁵³ Indeed, the tango often came to Parisian women through the commercial domains of fashion houses and department stores, as did many of the exoticist practices that European women engaged in. Magic-City echoed the atmosphere of leisure, capitalist consumption, and cosmopolitanism that the owners’ department store, Samaritaine, also propagated. This circumstance runs parallel to the department store that anchors Nava’s argument, Selfridges in London, which used the tango as part of a larger matrix of cosmopolitan signifiers to advertise its wares to upper-class London women. ‘In their capacity as shoppers, readers, theatre- and cinema-goers’, Nava observes, these women ‘became instigators and mediators of narratives about the allure of difference and elsewhere. “Other” fashions and cultural products bought by them increasingly transformed the female body, penetrated the intimacy of the home, seeped into the imagination’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Just like la Parisienne herself, le tango parisien was both a subject and an object of consumption. The Parisian tango was understood as an exotic importation, a refinement of a (neo)colonial commodity not unlike the wares sold by the very department stores that used illustrations of Parisiennes in their advertisements. The caricaturist Georges Goursat, who worked under the pseudonym Sem, described the tango as like the imports from many corners of the Earth; it was

For Sem, there is exactly one character to whom the metaphorical sable stole or thin cigarette of the tango belongs: la Parisienne. This rendering of the tango as a commodity is a manifestation of larger currents. Savigliano observes how the long-standing commodification of tango culture is emblematic of the commodification of exotic culture in general. Appreciation for the exotic in Western European cities is a symptom of ‘a trackable trafficking in emotions and actions’ from the peripheral to the core countries of the capitalist world system, in which passion is ‘accumulated, recoded, and consumed in the form of Exotic Culture’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Sem’s assessment enacts the process that Savigliano describes by rendering the tango a tangible good, no different from the cigars and sable furs that were popular luxuries in France at the time.

In light of the exoticism of Parisian tangos and foreign origins of the style, it is fair to inquire: to what extent did Parisian women feel the tango ‘belonged’ to them? Some described it as a form of tourism, a way to travel the world without leaving the city’s borders. In an article for Le Figaro, Marie de Régnier penned one of very few journalistic assessments of the tango by a woman. She asserted that even the genre’s name evokes travel:

Here, de Régnier relies on wordplay: the French verb for ‘to tango’, tanguer, also means the swaying of a ship at sea. She then goes on to suggest a kind of transformative power the dance possessed that changes one’s environment, positing that French women like to dance the tango so much because it ‘is as if the gentle and noble landscapes of Valois had suddenly been transformed into plantations of South America’. In de Régnier’s assessment, the tango was fashionable because of its ability to allow Europeans to travel to lands they otherwise would never visit. Dance scholars have long acknowledged dance’s ability to ‘move’ between cultures. Useful here is Nadine George-Graves’s formulation of the early twentieth-century animal dances – which became popular around the same time as the tango and were sometimes conflated with it – as appealing to white (US) Americans by allowing them to be ‘tourists in a less formal culture’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Along similar lines, Parisian women used the tango in order to inhabit new and imaginary forms of sexual freedom that they associated with the Rioplatense lower classes and to imagine their environment becoming something new and exotic. Tango dancing thus perpetuated the sense that Paris contained the world, that the city collapsed vast distances into easily traversable journeys.

Rather than viewing tango dancing as an act of metaphorical tourism, though, others proposed that it was becoming fully assimilated into mainstream Parisian society. For example, Henry Postel du Mas argued that the tango and other popular dances of foreign origin are ‘very French dances when they are performed by French people’.Footnote ⁵⁹ To dance a foreign dance in a Parisian context, then, became a way to perform the cosmopolitanism of that city, not to travel to another. The writer Jean Richepin expressed a similar sentiment in a widely publicized speech on the tango to the annual gathering of the Académies françaises in October 1913. Richepin argues that the acceptance of foreign cultures was an essential feature of ‘this hospitable Paris of ours’, where among the dances that have ‘flourished side by side’ are ‘the English contredanse, the German waltz, the Polish mazurka, the Hungarian polka, the Lithuanian schottish, the Tzch redowa, and the American boston’.Footnote ⁶⁰ While we can read Richepin’s support as stemming from an embrace of the foreign, he also saw his love of the tango as a continuation of his investment in culture of the working classes. Richepin believed in the tango’s place in Paris not because it was foreign, but because it stemmed from culture populaire, from the ‘filthy hovels of South America’. Richepin notes that even the most celebrated French dances such as the gavotte and the minuet came from ‘popular origins’ as well, and many stemmed from regions of France far away from the capital city:

For Richepin, the tango was no less objectionable than the centuries-old dances that were icons of French culture such as the gavotte and minuet, and therefore deserved to be fully assimilated into Parisian society.

Much like the tango itself, popular perceptions of la Parisienne also suggested she could originate from anywhere, according to Iskin a ‘paradoxical claim’ that aided in the commercialized Parisienne’s reach to women beyond the French capital.Footnote ⁶² Just as the tango hailed from foreign lands but was easily assimilated into Parisian culture, Uzanne asserted that ‘a woman may be Parisian by taste and instinct anywhere on French soil, and indeed in any town or country in the world. There are many cosmopolitan Parisiennes.’Footnote ⁶³ Parisiennes were made, not born: the symbolic attachment of la Parisienne to the city was not due to her birth, but because the city acted as something of a finishing school for her. Uzanne continues, ‘Paris may be said to complete rather than to create the Parisienne; the air of the capital … refines, polishes, beautifies, and spiritualizes everything that undergoes the influence of its charm.’ Finishing or polishing were also common elements of discourse about the tango, which, for example, was described by one US newspaper as ‘a sort of Spanish dance “finished” in France’.Footnote ⁶⁴

In summary, the tango was both of and not of Paris. Its foreign origins made it a perfect metaphor for the global lines of exchange that characterized modernity, while its popularity among fashionable French women made it as Parisian as a fur stole purchased at Samaritaine. Women pursuing the Parisienne ideal could use the tango to play into notions of Paris as a cosmopolitan environment and to articulate their civic identity. These women also changed the dance to fit the aesthetics of la Parisienne. The project of the salle de bal at Magic-City was to reshape the tango for this new market, to reconfigure the dance as modern and exotic on the one hand, yet safe and refined on the other. How the organizers of this dance hall did so in sound is where we shall next turn.

Sounding cosmopolitan modernity

While there has been no shortage of attention to the choreographic transformations the tango underwent in Paris, fewer scholars have engaged with the sonic traces of this tango ‘craze’. Just as the choreographies of Parisian tangos represented bodily enactments of Nava’s concept of cosmopolitan modernity, Parisian music for tango dancing was composed to appeal to women consumers. Parisian tangos were sold in solo piano editions marketed at women to perform in the home or among friends. In their orchestrated editions, these works motivated the movements of the dancers across the floor, inviting them to inhabit the modern Parisian versions of the tango.

While an evening at the venue was not accessible to all Parisians, sheet music and recordings with connections to Magic-City were more widely available, allowing people at many levels of society to bring a bit of the ‘Magic-City magic’ home. Music director René André, a Belgian cornet virtuoso, composer, and conductor, was responsible for the famously high standard of the ensembles that performed at the venue. André published all sorts of fashionable dances under both his own imprint and with Fermo Dante Marchetti, a composer and music publisher specializing in dance music. These publications advertise the centrality of his venue to the tango craze and position exotic and local symbols of the dance in dialogue. For example, the cover to the piano version of Magic-Tango depicts a barefoot gaucho leaning over the elegant entryway arch to Magic-City in shades of bright red and moody blue (Figure 4).Footnote ⁶⁵ Within, one could find basic instructions on the steps of the tango by an instructor associated with the dance hall. The music relies on many of the generic markers of the tango in the period, such as a persistent habanera bass line, descending chromatic motion in the right hand, and a ternary form that is emphasized by a change in mode (Example 1). The melody draws on the syncopated rhythmic logic of both ragtime and the maxixe, two other genres popular in Paris during the period and common on the dance floor at Magic-City, thus reflecting the musical hybridity of the venue. Magic-Tango was relatively successful and broke into other media as well: in 1913 André recorded it alongside other tangos for Pathé, and a piano roll version was also produced by Pianola.Footnote ⁶⁶

Figure 4.

Cover of René André, Magic-Tango (Paris: Marchetti, 1913).

Example 1.

René André, Magic-Tango (Paris: Marchetti, 1913), p. 1.

In addition to sheet music for domestic use, Parisian music publishers also released orchestrated arrangements for performance in the city’s many salles de danse. While not all of these orchestrations were used specifically at Magic-City, they allow us to recapture something of the sound of the tango in Parisian dance halls. Some of the orchestrational choices of these Parisian tangos rely on frequent and long-standing markers of exoticism in Western Europe. The use of castanets is widespread, for example, in Emile Köhler’s El Gauchito (1914), as is tambourine, such as in Icilio Sadun’s Soy Tuya (1912). The tango El Numero 13 by Manuel Sarrablo takes a maximalist approach to percussion, calling for tambourine, jingle bells, triangle, sandpaper (or slapstick), timpani, and bass drum. Some get more creative: a handful of tangos, such as Soy Tuya or Fernand Heintz’s Tanguinette (1912), call for cannon fire or gunshots, while others incorporated tapping or col legno effects in the strings, such as Henri Herpin’s El Mas Antes….!! (1912) and G. Smet’s Llorona (1913). Vocal interjections are not unheard of: in the tango Ché!… (Rogelio Huguet-Tagell, 1911), the string and some percussion players are asked to yell ‘Ché!’, a sonic symbol of urban Argentinian identity, repeatedly through certain sections.

In using such markers, these arrangements remind us of the generic fluidity the tango experienced. While many do reference Argentinian culture in titles, lyrics, or sound, arrangements also freely reference Spanish identity, for example combining the porteño tango with the flamenco genre also known as tango. Some composers of tango music, such as Manuel Sarrablo, Joaquin Cassadó, Rogelio Huguet-Tagell, and José Sentis, were themselves Spanish or of Spanish descent, and were accustomed to incorporating markers of Spanish identity in order to cater to the French market. Many arrangements rely heavily on French perceptions of Spanish music. The use of percussion instruments such as castanets or tambourines, or the use of the Phrygian mode, posit a cultural continuity between Hispanophone cultures. References to Bizet’s opera Carmen are extremely common: there is a Le Tango del Carmen (Rodolphe Berger, 1914), and melodies across the repertoire often meander downward in a way that evoke the famous habanera aria from the opera, ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’.Footnote ⁶⁷ As the form of exoticism most geographically proximate and most ubiquitous in French popular culture around 1900, ‘Spanish’ sounds came to stand for the larger Hispanophone world.

Another figure associated with Magic-City who published music was Camille de Rhynal, who was in charge of dance instruction at the venue. De Rhynal was dizzyingly busy in the 1910s and 1920s: in addition to writing music and running the dance programme at Magic-City, he also hosted dance competitions across France, appeared in revues, directed plays, and ran his own dancing academy at 29 Avenue Mac-Mahon.Footnote ⁶⁸ There, he would demonstrate the tango with the assistance of the performer Hélène Andrée and accompanied by two orchestras, one ‘purely Argentinian’ and another French.Footnote ⁶⁹ De Rhynal published a handful of dance pieces, including several versions of a tango, El Chichirico, in the years just prior to his employment at Magic-City. The first version (1911) appeared in a supplement to the periodical Musica. One year later, Marchetti (who also published André’s Magic-Tango) published a new version that was substantially different, both for dance orchestra and in piano reduction for domestic consumption.Footnote ⁷⁰

The 1911 and 1912 versions of El Chichirico differ from each other in ways that are instructive. The Musica edition, which was published first, employs more markers of Spanish exoticism, for example, the Phrygian scalar figuration found in its short introduction (Example 2, bb. 1–10). The habanera bass line – perhaps the most immediately identifiable feature of early twentieth-century tangos – does not emerge until the second strain (b. 27), and in the context of what has come before, could read as Spanish as well. By contrast, the Marchetti versions of El Chichirico present the habanera rhythm right at the outset, in the first bar (Example 3). The Marchetti versions are also more ‘modern’ in their rhythmic contour. Gone are the Phrygian figurations that introduced the Musica version, and in their stead is a syncopated figure in the right hand that will persist throughout this version of the work. Much like André’s Magic-Tango, the melody here relies on syncopation, which could have evoked for French dancers both ragtime from the United States and the maxixe from Brazil, two genres that were common on the Magic-City dance floor alongside the tango.

Example 2.

Camille de Rhynal, El Chichirico (Supplement Musica version, 1911), bb. 1–34.

Example 3.

Camille de Rhynal, El Chichirico (Marchetti version, 1912), bb. 1–27.

Across these versions, we can see de Rhynal working through audience expectations and assumptions about tango music as it was rising in popularity in 1911 and 1912. The Musica version takes the shape of a generic upbeat dance number with gestures towards a Spanish exoticism. By contrast, the Marchetti publications cater to an audience with more coherently formed expectations of the tango as a South American dance. The habanera bassline, which would signal to dancers most clearly that this was a tango, is impossible to miss. And the dominance of syncopated rhythms in the Marchetti versions of El Chichirico spoke to a culture in which the Argentinian tango coexisted on the dance floor with other new dance genres. Dances that departed significantly from a nineteenth-century European norm, including the ragtime dances and the tango, were often grouped together in sheet music collections and dance lesson advertisements, and were set apart from their Euro-derived counterparts by the descriptors danses modernes, danses nouvelles, danses eccentriques, or some other marker of distinction. As exemplified by Magic-Tango and El Chichirico, the adoption of ragtime syncopations into Parisian tangos of this period assumes a continuity across various dance genres from the Americas, whether they came to France from the United States, Brazil, or Argentina.

Syncopated rhythms such as those found in both Magic-Tango and El Chichirico were most obviously associated with ragtime, which had its origins in Black communities in the United States and had been popular in Paris since the explosive arrival of the cakewalk in late 1902.Footnote ⁷¹ As Jody Blake has noted, the cakewalk and ragtime were tied to essentialized notions of Black identity and sexual excesses, and ‘seemed to invite Europeans to partake of the imagined sexual openness of the racially defined “other”’.Footnote ⁷² The inclusion of ragtime as a stylistic touchstone in these tangos therefore played on the sensuality already associated with the tango. This merging of ragtime and the tango also speaks to Lyneise E. Williams’s work on the formation of Latin Blackness in Parisian visual culture. Williams argues that depictions of Latin Americans often ‘articulated Latin Americans as marked by supposedly European, Indigenous, and African characteristics’, a ‘Latinizing framework’ that distinguished Latin Americans from Europeans, highlighted features associated with Black identity, and supported a perception that Latin Americans were racially inferior to the French, and therefore subject to colonial subjugation.Footnote ⁷³ In a similar way, by musically evoking an African (US) American genre, these tangos bring Rioplatense identity in closer proximity to a generalized Blackness.

By using syncopation and other markers of ragtime, Parisian tango music underscored the trans-American modernity cultivated in the salle de bal at Magic-City and venues like it. But by incorporating markers of Spanish exoticism familiar to Parisian audiences from continued exposure to Spanish genres such as flamenco, the tango also took on a more indeterminate, globalized exoticism. Like the venue that André and de Rhynal worked within, the music of these composers allowed for a taste of the exoticism and sensuality promised by the tango while offering it in a frame that was relatively stable and familiar.

Intriguing questions remain about the relationship between this music and the women for whom it was so meaningful. Taken together, these arrangements are in turn humorous, eccentric, and lively – at first flush, all features at odds with period descriptions of the Parisian tango as smooth and elegant. Perhaps the syncopated, energized style of tangos composed by André, de Rhynal, and scores of other French and Spanish composers cast the suave motions of the dancers into relief by contrast. Perhaps these tangos appealed to French women because of the novelty of the sound. Compared with European dance genres popular in previous generations, such as the waltz, the bouncy spirit of Parisian tangos would have read as indelibly fresh and modern, their ‘newness’ a musical correspondent to the trendy fashions the ideal Parisienne was expected to wear. Women could use this music in several ways in their enaction of cosmopolitan modernity. By purchasing tangos for solo piano, they performed and displayed this music at home, articulating their awareness of current trends to an intimate circle of family and visitors. In the public space of a salle de bal, the percussion-heavy instrumentation, overlapping markers of racial alterity and exoticism of the orchestrated tangos encouraged Parisian women to think of their performance on the dance floor in a global context.