With a concert and the opening milonga with live music and hip DJs, we invite you to the historic halls of the Chemnitz Industrial Museum. Visitors can be enchanted by the special charm of the exhibition and the ambience of the museum. The opportunity to dance in the corridors between the exhibits of historical textile, automotive and typewriters and calculating machines (and much more) that have made Chemnitz and Saxony what it was and is, will not be available again in the near future. Ultimately, the concertina was invented in Chemnitz and exported from Saxony to Buenos Aires in its thousands as the bandoneon. Now it is coming back to Chemnitz with tangueras and tangueros in honour of Carl Friedrich Uhlig and Alfred Arnold!
The Tango Argentino Chemnitz 2025 festival honours the inventor of the concertina, Carl Friedrich Uhlig, who first presented this instrument with five heads on each side on the left and right in Chemnitz in 1834 and whose origins can be found in the workshop/manufactory at the time, around 40 metres from today's Karl Marx Monument. Carl Friedrich Uhlig and his apprentices - including Carl Friedrich Zimmermann - continued to develop the concertina. A wider range of tones with multiple rows of buttons and registers enabled a more extensive musical repertoire. The aim of providing an inexpensive instrument that could be played by anyone remained the same. Saxony, especially Carlsfeld, became a centre of instrument manufacture and since Heinrich Band in Krefeld gave the concertina its name, the instrument spread as the bandonion. The bandoneón made by Alfred Arnold as the ‘AA’ from Carlsfeld is world-famous and associated with the Argentine tango, and its sound continues to fascinate and inspire to this day. The Uhlig core zone of the button/sound arrangement has remained unchanged to this day. The festival therefore invites you to Chemnitz - the cradle of the bandoneon - as part of the Capital of Culture project ‘Moving Sounds - Concertina & Bandoneon’.
