Juan de Dios Filiberto

Juan de Dios Filiberto (March 8, 1885 – November 11, 1964) was an Argentine violinist, conductor, poet and composer who became prominent in the Argentine tango genre.

He was born Oscar Juan de Dios Filiberti in 1885 to Josefa Roballo, a mestizo descendant of one of the founding fathers of Argentina, Martín Rodríguez, and Juan Filiberti, a Genoese immigrant. An uncle in the pampas town of Lobos introduced him to tango at the age of six, though he was forced to leave school at age nine, entering the labor force as a newsie and, later, bricklayer. He later worked as a stevedore and, eventually, shift supervisor for the local Mihánovich shipyards.

The advent of organized labor in Argentina and poor working conditions helped lead Filiberto and most of his colleagues to join the stevedores' union affiliated with the Argentine Workers' Federation, where he supported an anarchist line and actively participated in a series of strikes in 1907.

Given his first music lessons by Héctor Polzinetti, a carpenter at the dockyards, Filiberto and a number of friends created a musical ensemble known as "Orfeón Los del Futuro" ("The Orpheum of the Future"), for whom he played a pipe organ in theatres. A gift of a ticket to a Teatro Coliseo performance of Amilcare Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda resulted in an argument the following day, when Filiberto's negative opinion of the tenor's voice met with his friend's dismissive reply. Dejected, Filiberto made it a goal to become a trained musician, and, in his words, "at that moment I made up my mind about my future."

He secured a post as a machine assistant at Buenos Aires famed Colón Theater, where a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony inspired him to join the local Pezzini-Stianessi music conservatory, in 1909. There, he studied the violin, music theory and solfège and eventually, he was granted a scholarship to attend maestro Alberto Williams' prestigious National Conservatory, where he was given lessons on counterpoint, piano and guitar.

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