Antonio María Romeu

Antonio María Romeu Marrero was the pianist, composer and bandleader who gave the Cuban danzón its defining ensemble voice, leading for more than three decades the flute-fronted charanga whose music couples moved to in ballrooms and social clubs across the island.^[1] Contemporaries judged his band Cuba's foremost charanga — an orchestra of violins, flute, piano, double bass and timbales whose repertoire was built around the danzón rather than around song — and that primacy held for more than thirty years.^[2] His command of the keyboard within the dance band earned him the lifelong sobriquet 'El Mago de las Teclas', the Keyboard Magician.^[3]

From Jibacoa to the Havana charanga

Romeu's musical formation belonged to the Cuban countryside before it belonged to the capital. He began formal study in 1884 under Joaquín Mariano Martínez and practised the piano at a church in Jibacoa, and by the age of twelve he had already played his first dance and written his first composition.^[4]

In 1899 he moved to Havana, working the city's cafés before joining the Orquesta Cervantes — one of the earliest charangas to form at the turn of the 1900s and, by reputation, the first to seat a piano within the format.^[5] The charanga itself marked a tonal departure from the older, brass-led orquesta típica: the new groups pushed the flute to the front and took up the pailas criollas — the percussion later known as the timbales — for a brighter, lighter sound than the brass típicas, and it was inside the Cervantes orchestra that Romeu absorbed the idiom he would make his own.^[5]

A band of his own

Romeu founded his own orchestra in 1910, setting his piano alongside Feliciano Facenda on violin, Alfredo Valdés on flute, Rafael Calazán on double bass, Remigio Valdés on timbales and Juan de la Merced on güiro.^[6] Over the following decades the group grew and adapted to changing fashion: by the 1920s its ranks had widened to include the leader's son, Antonio María Romeu Jr., on violin, and during the 1930s it briefly reorganised as a jazz-style big band before contracting again as wartime tourism fell away.^[7]

The sung danzón and Barbarito Díez

The orchestra's most far-reaching change was the entry of the voice. The sung danzón took hold around 1927, and Romeu's ensemble carried first Fernando Collazo and then, from 1935, the tenor Barbarito Díez.^[8] Throughout, Romeu kept his bands racially integrated, continuing a Cuban performing tradition that reached back into the nineteenth century.^[9]

Díez did much to anchor the orchestra's later renown. He had begun in the son group of Graciano Gómez and Isaac Oviedo before joining Romeu, and across roughly twenty years as the band's lead voice — a naturally gifted tenor prized for his rhythmic sureness, exact diction and romantic phrasing — he established himself among the foremost interpreters of the sung danzón.^[10]

When Romeu died in 1955 the orchestra passed first to his son and then to Díez, continuing as the Orquesta de Barbarito Díez; Díez sustained the traditional danzón in performance and on record, touring and recording in Venezuela and Puerto Rico and carrying on with his own charanga and other groups for some thirty years more — well beyond the founder's lifetime.^[11]

More than five hundred danzones

As a composer Romeu was extraordinarily prolific, leaving a catalogue of more than five hundred danzones, many of which were later refashioned for other genres.^[12] His best-remembered piece, 'Tres lindas cubanas', was adapted from a son cubano credited to the guitarist Guillermo Castillo and reached a wide public through the Septeto Habanero; other titles such as 'La danza de los millones' and 'Cinta azul' held their place in the repertoire, and he arranged music by contemporaries including Sindo Garay and Manuel Corona as well as adaptations of Mozart and Rossini.^[13]