Juan de Dios Filiberto

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