Word: cumparsita
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...tango tunes put together by the Tin Pan Alleys along the Plata, the one locally regarded as No. 1 is La Cumparsita. Gerardo Hernán Mattos Rodríguez, a Uruguayan, wrote it in 1916. An architecture student at the University of Uruguay, he had seen a group of boisterous fellow students, evicted from their rooming house, pick up the tables and chairs and march out in a noisy procession (cumparsa). That gave him a title. He quickly knocked out a doleful melody and a set of lyrics that were soon replaced by those of a rival lyricist...
...Racetrack. Young Mattos Rodríguez sold La Cumparsita to a Buenos Aires publisher for 20 gold pesos, lost them at the races next day, later had to pay the money back when his contract with the publisher was voided because he was a minor. That was luck in disguise. In the years that followed, he made enough from La Cumparsita-and other tangos-to stake him to a comfortable life in Paris and free-spending afternoons at many a racetrack...
When Mattos Rodríguez died last week in Montevideo, at 51, Buenos Aires newspapers barely mentioned it, and the deadpanned dancers in the big, middle-class dance halls, in the low dives and tony boîtes did not even know that La Cumparsita's composer was dead. But their feet still followed his rhythms and their silent lips mouthed the lines...
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