Paula Nenette Pepin

Antonietta Paule Pepin Fitzpatrick (9 April 1908 – 14 November 1990), also known as Nenette, was a French composer, pianist and lyricist, wife of the Argentine singer Atahualpa Yupanqui.

Biography

Nenette was born on the island of Saint Pierre et Miquelon, French overseas territory located in the Atlantic coast of Canada. Since the island is a French colony, Nenette had French citizenship her whole life.^[1] Her father Emmanuel Victor Pepin was French, and her mother Henriette Fitzpatrick was Canadian of Irish origin. Her family called her Nenette affectively since she was a child, diminutive of Antonietta. In her infancy, during the First World War, she moved to France with her parents and her older sister Jeanne Henriette. In 1926 Jeanne finished elementary education and embarked to Buenos Aires with a dance company, where she met her first husband and stayed to live in Argentina. Two years afterwards Nenette finished elementary school and Jeanne invited her and her father to move to Argentina. Both traveled in 1928 and moved in to Villa Ballester in Buenos Aires. Nenette continued her piano advanced studies in the Music National Conservatory, where she studied with Juan José Castro, Pascual de Rogatis and Isabel Aretz. She traveled frequently to important cities in Argentina to perform in piano concerts of classical music. In 1942 she arrived to Tucumán, where after a concert she was taken by the organizers to listen to folk music from North Argentina and met Argentine singer Atahualpa Yupanqui. They started a friendship, and four years later, in 1946, they started living together.^[1][2]

They had their only child the same year, Roberto "Koya" Chavero. Nenette abandoned her career as a pianist and started working alongside her husband. During Yupanqui's persecution, Nenette took her of their son Roberto and composed songs with her husband.^[1] She was author of some of the most recognized works of Yupanqui, that due to the machismo of the era they had to be published under the pseudonym Pablo del Cerro.^[3] She chose her pseudonym because of her name, Paule, and one of her favorite places, Cerro Colorado, in the Córdoba province. She also composed piano melodies such as Luna tucumana, El alazán, Indiecito dormido, Chacarera de las piedras, Vidalita tucumana, Zamba del otoño. In 1961, when she was 53 years old, she returned to France after a vacation with her son Robert, who was 15 years old at the time. She died in Buenos Aires on 14 November 1990 from a cardiac arrest. She requested her ashes to be scattered in the sea of her home island in the North Atlantic. Despite being one of the most important composers of Argentine, she never renounced her French nationality.^[1]

References