The award Fabien Sevitzky obtained to Piazzolla a scholarship of the French government for one year. Also his wife, Dedé received an award, consistent in studying with André Lhote, light of the cubist movement. As most of the Argentinians, both were filled with enthusiasm by the perspective to know Europe. His friends understood his frame of mind. Ginastera gave to Astor a recommendation to contact with someone. Alfredo Perrotti, as remembered his son, gave them a few francs that he had kept of a recent trip. Piazzolla packed his forgotten bandoneón... therefore it could happen. They left the boys (Diana already was eleven years old, Daniel nine) with the Nonchildren.

The Piazzolla departed for Europe in a load ship, the Cuirassier, who was going some passengers. The passage lasted 45 days, with numerous demurrages in some other ports, and except a thunderstorm that flogged them close to the Canaries, it was calm. In Liverpool they stopped the sufficient thing as to take a train to London and to walk there for some days. Then the ship crossed the English Channel, leaving behind "the steep targets of Dover", and berthed in Dunkirk, which was still showing signs of the devastation suffered during the war. Astor and some of the crew members of the Cuirassier risked up to a Belgian base of submarines that existed in the precincts. It was warned that other Argentinians had happened not long ago over there: one had written with chalk: "Living D'Arienzo!" in a wall; someone had added nearby: "Living Piazzolla!" . On September 24, 1954 they disembarked in Amsterdam. They covered the city for some days and took the train to Paris. They stayed at the Hotel Fiat, placed in the number 36 of the street Douai; the room had been transferred to them by Héctor Grané, a resident Argentine pianist in Paris that in this moment was of tour. It was not luxurious at all; at night the rats did not allow them to sleep. The winter was raw, his budget was pressed, and they found facing Paris. The Nonchildren sent to them money, and also it was a help to get the privileges for the arrangements of The courtyard of the morocha, but they should have lived modestly. Nevertheless, that was not worrying them too much: in spite of being in Paris it was enough to them. "You they cannot imagine how many pretty things are here", wrote Astor to the boys in November.

The Astor teacher in Paris would be a Nadia Boulanger, composers' legendary mentor - between them Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Jean Frangaix and Lennox Berkeley - and intimate Stravinsky friend. For then it had nearly seventy years. His influence on the young generation was already not the same as earlier-Pierre Boulez and his contemporaries were not supporting it - but his international reputation kept on being considerable and was not stopping accumulating honors. His department in the fourth apartment of the number 36 of the street Ballu (where most of his life had happened) was staying a few blocks of the Hotel Fiat. Before Astor was taking with her the first class, one of the North American pupils of the Boulanger warned him that it never had to mention the name of Rachmaninoff in his presence. Piazzolla continued the advice exactly.

Astor remained extremely impressed by the old department of the Boulanger, with his grand piano and his organ, and his photos of Stravinsky, André Gide, Paul Valéry and André Malraux. Every evening, the servant, called Margherita, was bringing the tea, which was served by the proper Boulanger. "It was like studying with my mom", would say later Astor. (In the later years, sometimes it was referring to her like his "second mother ”). it was intrigued by the cat Tascha, to which it was allowed to scratch armchairs and curtains. Boulanger was refusing that the fingernails should cut. There was in this period a particular incident that remained printed forever on the Piazzolla mind. One day he gathered in the door "a big roll wrapped carefully" that the mailman had delivered to him and one took it to Nadia." It is Stravinsky", she mentioned to him with weariness expression, "that orders me his last work. It does the same whenever it finishes a composition: and I have no time to see all of them!" It was skeptical with regard to the value of the works of Stravinsky of last years. "He is like an old man playing with his jewels", he was saying sometimes.

After the first classes, in which they were understood in English (language that the Boulanger was speaking fluidamente), she began feeling that something was missing in the scores that Astor was showing him. It is probable that also he has listened to the recording that he gave to him of Buenos Aires, the prize-winning work. "This music is well written", it pointed out to him, "but he lacks feeling." It was dictating the same verdict to most of his pupils. In a time Astor remained disheartened; he threw himself to walk along the streets of Paris and overturned his grief in the friends; but soon she extracted it of his discomfort asking him what music it was touching in the Argentina. Astor admitted reluctantly that it was touching tango.: "I love this music!", it exclaimed Nadia. "But you do not touch the piano... to interpret the tangos", he added.: "What instrument does it touch?" Once again, with difficulty there dared Astor to entrust to him that it was touching the bandoneón. She calmed it: he had listened to the music of Kurt Weil in bandoneón, and he said that the proper Stravinsky was appreciating his virtues.

Finally, it persuaded it so that he was executing one of his tangos in the piano. He chose "Triumphal". In the eighth compass she interrupted it, took it of the hands and said to him with steadfastness: "I never left this. This is his music, here is Piazzolla". Whenever in his later life he remembered this moment, it was always describing it as an Epiphany: "It helped me to find me", he said to his daughter Diana.

The individual classes and in group with Boulanger they extended almost four months. "Lamentation that should be so short my stay...", wrote Astor to José Gobello at the beginning of the new year, "since he would need at least two years to go so far as to know everything what I need." But what in this space it could know was transcendental. "It seemed to me to never have studied", he mentioned in 1987, and once they asked him what owed the Boulanger to him, answered: "Absolutely quite". She was a demanding teacher, and sometimes it was giving him forty or fifty exercises of one extract, but he liked this discipline. Also he was taking note of his opinions, principally recounted to the contemporary music, on which she was skeptical. "This goes to finish, they are going to turn Mozart some day", he said to him once. In another opportunity, referring to a premiere of Boulez at which he had been present, he commented:" What luck that in the second part Monteverdi touched". It showed interest in certain circumstances of the personal life of Astor, advising him not to smoke nor to drink in excess, and to go to bed early. They were together to listen to some concerts.

On February 14, 1955, when the Astor demurrage in Paris was approaching his end, the Boulanger dedicated a photo in which both were with the following manuscript legend:" That bientótje vous revoie to the mémeplace, cher Astor Piazzolla" (That soon sees it again in the same place, darling Astor Piazzolla). In the future, they were only in contact in limited occasions; occasionally they exchanged letters or postcards, and had only two new meetings: one in New York in April, 1958, and other in American Conservatoire of Fontainebleau in the summer of 1977, two years before she was dying 92 years after age. But as Astor wrote to him in a postcard of March, 1955, "Iwill never forget my dear Nadia Boulanger" (I will never forget my darling Nadia Boulanger). And he did not forget it. He always felt immensely proud to be able to have shared a time with her. His children repaired in that he was always speaking about the Boulanger with "an admiration... without limit". "Left-handed" Enrique Roizner, which worked with Piazzolla in the middle of the decade of seventy, observed that "he was speaking much of her. . it was marveling at how it was touching the piano, of how it was teaching". Astor never lavished so many praises to his other teachers, including Ginastera.

Text extracted from the book “Astor Piazzolla, his life and his work ”.
Authors: Maria Susana Azzi and Simon Collier.
Publishing house The Cultural club