Piazzolla's Five Pieces for Guitar were written around 1980 and were published by Edizioni Musicali Bèrben in Italy in 1981. They are the composer's only works for guitar solo. Even without much of a track record in the field (he did write several other works for ensembles that included a guitar), Piazzolla confidently proclaimed that these pieces would make his name well known among guitarists. He was right; the Pieces are staples of the Latin American guitar recital, and they have been recorded several times.

Though not virtuoso works, the pieces are nicely idiomatic to the guitar, containing overtone effects and passages in which the fingers strike or are trilled on the instrument's surface. They are mostly slow and quite harmonically involved; the only one with more than a hint of Piazzolla's usual tango rhythms is the third piece, and that one is a tango that is both minimal and edgy. Especially evocative is the first piece, in triple meter and cast in a ternary form. In the middle section, after a gradual and complicated shift to duple meter, a halting melody emerges, very vocal in nature, like the verse of a tortured ballad intoned by one of the classic Latin female vocalists, imprisoned in the cage of a repressive society. For that moment alone these pieces are worthy of wider familiarity, and there are several others equally as beautiful.

Periodic suggestions that versions other than the printed one exist are both unsubstantiated and pointless, for these works, even if somewhat more compositionally specified than the general run of Piazzolla's works, certainly permit variation in performance. The unique essence of Piazzolla's method is the grafting of popular ensemble performance techniques onto written compositions of a fairly rigorous sort. Piazzolla wrote out most of his own music but then treated it freely in performances with his quintet, and even though these pieces began their public existence as a publication in musical notation, there is no reason to think that their composer would not have approved of similar freedoms in this particular case.

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