CHAVELA VARGAS:CHAVELA VARGAS, whose tender yet fierce interpretations of Mexico's classic ranchera songs made her a star in Latin America and Spain, died earlier this month in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She was 93.
The cause was heart and respiratory problems, said her biographer and friend Maria Cortina. Vargas fell ill last month in Madrid, where she had gone to perform songs from her latest album, La Luna Grande, which consists of poems by the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca set to music.
Vargas's collaboration with Mexico's great ranchera composers, particularly Jose Alfredo Jimenez, gave rise to definitive recordings of some of Mexico's best-known songs. Her versions, with simple guitar accompaniment, reached for the emotional essence of the music by stripping the songs of their sentimentality, flourishes and trumpets.
"She gave us a new freedom to reinvent yourself in that genre," the Mexican singer Lila Downs, who recorded with Vargas, said. "Her interpretation was of the poetry in each song, and of all that she had lived, and her relationship with these composers."
Among those who rediscovered her work late in her career was the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who featured her songs in several of his films and who called her his muse. "Chavela Vargas made of abandonment and desolation a cathedral in which we all found a place," Almodóvar wrote on the Facebook page of his production company, El Deseo.
Isabel Vargas Lizano was born in San Joaquin de Flores, Costa Rica, on April 17th, 1919, and emigrated to Mexico City in her teens. Her early career was forged in the vibrant artistic scene of 1940s and 1950s Mexico City, but she did not record her first album, Noches de Bohemia, until 1961. Rebellious and outspoken, she performed wearing trousers and a poncho, smoking a cigar and carrying a gun.
But her heavy drinking and raucous life took their toll, and she vanished from public life in the 1970s. Submerged in an alcoholic haze, she said, she was taken in by an Indian family who nursed her back to health without knowing who she was. In 2003, she told the New York Times that she had not had a drink in 25 years.
In the early 1990s, she began singing again at El Habito, the bohemian Mexico City nightclub. From there, her career took off once more.
At 81, she announced that she was a lesbian. "Nobody taught me to be like this," she told the Spanish newspaper El Pais in 2000. "I was born this way. Since I opened my eyes to the world, I have never slept with a man. Never. Just imagine what purity. I have nothing to be ashamed of."
On the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut in 2003, she looked back on how her singing had changed over her career. "The years take you to a different feeling than when you were 30. "I feel differently, I interpret differently, more toward the mystical."
Instead of holding a traditional Mexican wake, friends, fans and musicians gathered for a musical tribute at Plaza Garibaldi in Mexico City, where Vargas had spent many a night drinking with Jimenez. No immediate family members survive.
Chavela Vargas: born April 7th, 1919; died August 5th, 2012