LA CUMPARSITA - TANGO - MILONGA

Steven Wagner - Stevan Vagner, Podrum COLLEGIUM MELODIUM, World music museum in Belgrade, MILENA ADAMOVIC - SLJIVIC and * FLIRT *, present The most POPULAR TANGO in The World.."La cumparsita" , 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 song was originally a Uruguayan carnival 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..Gene Kelly dances to "La cumparsita" in the film Anchors Aweigh (1945). The song was included in a ballroom scene of the film Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which Gloria Swanson and William Holden danced the tango. In the 2006 dance movie Take the Lead, Jenna Dewan, Dante Basco and Elijah Kelley danced to a remixed version.

In the 1959 film Some Like It Hot, La cumparsita is played by a blindfolded Cuban band during a scene in which Jack Lemmon dressed in drag dances with overstated flair in the arms of Joe E. Brown who thinks Lemmon is a woman. During the filming in 1958, actor George Raft taught the other two men to dance the tango for this scene. In the Olympic Games of Sydney 2000, the Argentine team marched with the Uruguayan music "La cumparsita". This originated protests and official claims from the Uruguayan government.The work was also an opening part of an infamous radio drama: The War of the Worlds an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles.