Description

Adiós Nonino

Astor Piazzolla

Arranged for Clarinet Quartet by Alex Russo

In 1959, Piazzolla was on a tour of Central America when, during a presentation in Puerto Rico with Juan Carlos Copes and Maria Nieves Rego, he received news of the death of his father, Vicente Piazzolla, nicknamed Nonino, due to a bicycle accident in his hometown of Mar del Plata. This news, coupled with the tour’s failure, economic problems and homesickness, led Piazzolla to depression. After returning to his family’s temporary residence in New York on October 1959 he composed this wonderful work in tribute to his father, based on “Nonino”, another tango Astor had composed five years earlier in Paris, also dedicated to Vicente Piazzolla.

Dad asked us to leave him alone for a few hours. We went into the kitchen. First there was absolute silence. After a while, we heard dad playing the bandoneon. It was a very sad, terribly sad melody. He was composing “Adiós Nonino”.

— Daniel Piazzolla, his son. Astor, Diana Piazzolla, 1986.

Because of its deeply sad melody and the fact that Piazzolla wrote it so far from his native country while suffering from severe depression, Adiós Nonino evokes a strong sense of nostalgia and has become a symbol of the Argentine diaspora.