The tango and habanera are two strange products of the 19^th century. Both are dances from overseas, and in spite of their associations whit territories lost to Spain in 1898, both served as signs of identity in Hispanic music of the nationalist period and are still considered today as being Spanish in character. The origins of the rhythms on which the dances are based have been the subject of several hypotheses, not all of them plausible, ranging from contredanses brought by French emigrants to Louisiana to rhythms from African sources and Andalusian rhythms transformed in the Antilles, such as the Cádiz “tanguillo”.

The truth of the matter is that we are dealing with a case of cultural interchange between Afro-Caribbean, Creole and Hispanic sources. There is a close relationship between the rhythms of the habanera and the tango, the strumming of the Argentine milonga, the conga and the Mexican huapango. As Celsa Alonso has pointed out in her exhaustive study on light operatic song, the habanera could have taken from in the theatres and salons of the Caribbean as a development of the Cuban contredanse, one of the most popular society dances in the Antilles.

The contredanses heard in the salons of the bourgeoisie were sometimes in song from – showing influences from French romances, opera and zarzuela arias – or else were composed as piano pieces, one of the earliest examples of which dates from 1803. As from that time, composers including Manuel Saumell, the founding father of Cuban nationalism, began to experiment with the bass rhythms of the accompaniment, bringing in syncopations which brought more variety to the originally rather similar binary rhythms of habanera and tango.

Yet the habanera and the tango were to develop in yet another direction. Before the 1850s they had arrived in the Iberian Peninsula, and it was here that they were to take on their definitive form. The warm, sensual, exotic character of the music brought new life to salon music not only in Spain but in the rest of Europe also. Between 1850 and 1880 many tangos and habaneras were composed for the piano, together with a large number of songs with piano or guitar accompaniment. The success of the pieces Iradier brought back his journey to Cuba in 1857 soon had an echo in the world of the zarzuela: habanera rhythms can be heard in works by Barbieri (El Relámpago, 1857, Entre mi Mujer y el Negro, 1859), by Oudrid – who included a tango in El Ultimo Mono, 1859 – and by the Catalan composer Joan Sariols, who called the dance  <americana> in his emblematic L’Esquella de la Torratxa of 1864. There were also habaneras in Arrieta’s Marina and Breton’s La Verbena de la Paloma, composed during the last years of the century. In the hands of Spanish composers, the rhythm, which had been imported from the Antilles, came to be modified yet again, with harmonic innovations based on Andalusian scales and Phrygian tetrachords, or percussive rhythms in imitation of Flamenco in the case of habaneras written for guitar.

In this way the habanera and the tango, despite their transatlantic origins, came to represent an exotic and idealised evocation of Spain in the salons and concert halls of the European bourgeoisie. In France, Iradier’s habanera La Negrita was a source of inspiration for Lalo in his Symphony Espagnole, while the sensuality of Bizet’s opera Carmen is a literal adaptation of El Arreglito, also by Iradier. By 1898, Spanish composers were producing fewer songs based on the habanera rhythm, although it was again to be used as a sign of Spanish identity in Ravel’s Rhapsody Espagnole.

 Francesc Cortès i Mir (Translation: Howard Croll)

 Castle - Carthusian monastery of Vallparadís in Terrassa