As the new style of tango romanza emerged in the 1920s, tango melodies took on a more emotive role and the genre’s heavy dance rhythms subsided, allowing the tango to emulate, for brief moments it had not risen to before, the soaring notes of the opera. One of its first lasting hits in this style was Griseta, featured last week—a song whose lyrics are a collage of opera posters. The songs that followed in its footsteps naturally shifted from portraying characters to a heartbroken lyricism in which the characters speak for themselves. Such is the case with José María Contursi’s many pure lyrics of yearning, and none more so than the “Más allá.”
Contursi’s wording creates a sense of thwarted longing by exploiting a syllable shared by two phrases—jamás (never or no more) and más allá (beyond, i.e., the hereafter). Out of this pun arises the song’s ironic desire for transcendence. The music by Joaquín Mora, one of the tango’s few black songwriters, and one of the finer exponents of the tango romanza type of song in the 1930s, truly gives wings to the voice here, and lets the singer sail over the rhythm in a way that few other tangos were to achieve.
There Beyond
(Tr. Jake Spatz)
YouTube: Ernesto Famá (orq. Francisco Canaro)
It has now been three years gone by…
I don’t know what became of you,
It seems to me I can hear,
So close by my side,
Your voice all bathed in sorrow;
It’s horrendous to live this way,
Buried down where the darknesses pour,
Where my eyes have no light,
Where they have you to see
No more.
There beyond, where the wind might have once
Hidden love far away,
Has my heart found a place that it can
Pour out its pain.
There beyond, after death, after God,
Here me out, there beyond…
Maybe there, ever after from you
Shall I move on.
How many times in my solitude
Did unhappiness coo and call,
And, preferring to forget,
I turned to alcohol
To drown away my losses,
But it broke down my soul after all,
To think back on you, back before,
And now it kills me to know,
I’ll see you again
No more.
Más allá (1939)
Music: Joaquín Mora
Lyrics: José María Contursi
Han pasado tres años ya
y no se que será de ti,
me parece escuchar
tan cerca de mi
tu voz bañada en llanto;
es horrible vivir así,
sepultado en la oscuridad
de mis ojos sin luz,
que no te han de ver
jamás.
Más allá donde el viento tal vez
un amor escondió,
ha podido sus penas contar
mi corazón.
Más allá de la muerte y de Dios,
óyeme, más allá…
Puede ser que me aleje de ti
la eternidad.
Cuantas veces la soledad
mis tristezas acarició
y, queriendo olvidar,
busqué en el alcohol
consumir mis quebrantos,
pero el alma se doblegó
recordándote más y más
y, hoy me mata saber,
que no te veré
jamás.