Where does Bandoneon come from?
The bandoneon comes from Germany. Heinrich Band, a music dealer in Krefeld, developed it in the mid-1800s from the German concertina first made in Chemnitz, and emigrants and sailors later carried it to the Río de la Plata, where it became the voice of tango.
From Chemnitz to Krefeld
Around 1834 the Chemnitz instrument maker Carl Friedrich Uhlig began making button-played concertinas. They had few notes, and Heinrich Band, a musician, teacher and composer who had taken over his father's music shop in Krefeld, found them too limited. He expanded the keyboard, first to 64 and then 88 notes, and later to 100. He called his instruments the Bandonion, probably modelling the name on the accordion, which was selling well.
Built in the east, sold in Krefeld
Band never built instruments himself. The musicologist Janine Krüger traced his makers to the workshops of Christian Reichel in Waldheim, in eastern Germany, and found that Band's design used six rows of buttons where the eastern concertina makers kept three. Band sold the instruments only in his Krefeld shop. About 40 years later the family business ended, and the Arnold brothers, also from the east, led the trade, keeping Band's design. By 1910 Germany was making bandoneons for Argentina and Uruguay, and in 1930 alone 25,000 were shipped to Argentina.
Why people think of Argentina
No document shows exactly how the bandoneon reached the Río de la Plata. It is believed that emigrants and sailors brought it around 1870, and one account tells of an emigrant who played it on the voyage in 1862. Tango took it up, and players such as Aníbal Troilo and Astor Piazzolla made it famous. Yet for most of the 20th century bandoneons were made in Germany, not Argentina. When the old German instruments grew rare and costly, Argentine makers began building their own, among them a team at the National University of Lanús in 2014.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · de.wikipedia.org ↗ · welt.de ↗ · bbc.com ↗
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