MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Poet, writer Horacio Ferrer dies in Buenos Aires at age 81

Horacio Ferrer (right) and Astor Piazzola on the cover of the En Persona recording, released in 1970.

Author of Ballad for a Madman (Balada para un loco), the Uruguayan born artist was a close collaborator of Astor Piazzolla's and other tango musicians.

 Poet, writer and tango legend Horacio Ferrer died Sunday in Buenos Aires of a heart disease at the age of 81, announced sources for the clinic wehre he had been admitted 20 days before. His wake was held at the City Hall. Ferrer was also president of the National Academy of Tango, which he co-founded in 1990.

Born Horacio Arturo Ferrer Ezcurra in Montevideo, Uruguay, on June 2, 1933, he wrote over 200 songs and several books of poetry and history of tango. His most famous works are: Balada para un loco (Ballad for a madman), all of them co-authored with Astor Piazzola, which is said to be among the 100 most important musical pieces ever produced in Latin America, Chiquilín de Bachín and María de Buenos Aires.

In the 1950s , with just over twenty years, he was one of the directors radio show of the program Selección de Tangos in a Montevideo station, where he stood for the news trends represented by musicians like Aníbal Troilo, Horacio Salgán and especially Astor Piazzolla, at the time the leader of the Octeto Buenos Aires group. Ferrer was then put in charge of tango programming at the official Uruguayan Sodre network. He also worked as a reporter for Montevideo's El Dia newspaper.

He moved to Buenos Aires in 1967 and the next year he was already working alongside Astor Piazzolla, with whom he co-wrote the small opera Maria de Buenos Aires. Ferrer himself played the narrator as the work was taken to the stage. Balada para un loco and Chiquilín de Bachin came in 1969. The Piazzolla-Ferrer collaborative duo wrote over 40 songs, many of which were realsed in one album called En Persona in 1970.

Ferrer took up Argentine citizenship in 1983, one year after meeting painter Lulu Michelli, “the woman of whom I am her man”, as he liked to say.

“I shall die in Buenos Aires, it shall be at dawn, which is the time when those who know how to die do...,” he had written.