La Cumparsita

"La cumparsita" is a tango written in 1916 by the Uruguayan musician Gerardo Matos Rodríguez, with lyrics by Pascual Contursi and Enrique Pedro Maroni. It is among the most famous and recognizable tangos of all time.Roberto Firpo, director and pianist of the orchestra that premiered the song, added parts of his tangos "La Gaucha Manuela" and "Curda Completa" to Matos' carnival march ("La Cumparsita"), resulting in "La cumparsita" as it is currently known.

The title translates as "the little parade", and the first version was a tune with no lyrics. Later, Pascual Contursi wrote words to make the most popular version of the song. The lyrics begin: "The little parade of endless miseries..."

The song was originally a march, whose melody was composed in early 1916 by an architecture student in Montevideo, an 18-year-old man named Gerardo Hernán "Becho" Matos Rodríguez, the son of Montevideo's Moulin Rouge nightclub proprietor Emilio Matos. On 8 February 1916, Matos Rodríguez had his friend Manuel Barca show orchestra leader Roberto Firpo the music in the cafe called La Giralda. Firpo looked at the music and quickly determined that he could make it into a tango. As presented to him it had two sections; Firpo added a third part taken from his own little-known tangos "La gaucha Manuela" and "Curda completa", and also used a portion of the song "Miserere" by Giuseppe Verdi from the opera Il trovatore. Years later, Firpo reported the historic moment as follows:

In 1916 I was playing in the café La Giralda in Montevideo, when one day a man was accompanied by about fifteen boys — all students — to say he brought a carnival march song and they wanted me to review it because they thought it could be a tango. They wanted me to revise and tweak the score that night because it was needed by a boy named Matos Rodríguez. In the 2/4 [march time signature] score there appeared a little [useful melody] in the first half and in the second half there was nothing. I got a piano and I remembered my two tangos composed in 1906 that had not had any success: "La gaucha Manuela" and "Curda completa". And I put in a little of each. At night I played the song with "Bachicha" Deambroggio and "Tito" Roccatagliatta. It was an apotheosis. Matos Rodríguez walked around like a champion... But the tango was forgotten, its later success began when the words of Enrique Maroni and Pascual Contursi were associated with it.

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