* It is among the most famous and recognizable tango songs of all time.
* Written by Gerardo Matos Rodriguez in 1917 when he was only 17 years old at that time of in the music room of Club Nacional de Football.
* First played in the coffee house La Giralda, Montevideo, Uruguay.
* The young Gerardo passed the tango he had written anonymously to the orchestra of Roberto Firpo to play for the first time.
* He was a student at the Faculty of Architecture in Montevideo that time.
* 7 years in 1924 in Paris, Gerardo realized that his tango, which he had forgotten about, had become a major hit.
* The tango lyricists Enrique Maroni and Pascual Contursi added words to the tango and renamed it as “Si Supieras” (If you knew/realized).
* La Cumparsita spread to the rest of the world from Paris, where meanwhile there was La Cumparsita-mania already in Argentina as well.
* Gerardo had only composed the first two parts. Firpo had added the third part and a harmony to the first part.
*Gerardo Matos Rodriguez spent 20 years in and out of court trying to regain his rights as author of the most famous tango in the world.He had sold the rights of the tango for 20 pesos when he first composed it. Most likely he was a naive 17 year old kid.
* In the Olympic Games of Sydney 2000, the Argentine team marched to “La Cumparsita”. This originated protests and official claims from the Uruguayan government.
* The song was named cultural and popular anthem of Uruguay by law in 1997.
The Lyrics in Spanish and in English
La Cumparsita: The little cumparsa
Cumparsa: Lunfardo word that denotes a group of people that attends the carnival festivals dressed in a similar fashion (usually, but not exclusively, wearing masks.)
The term seems to be a corruption of the italian ‘comparsa’.
Also see: History of La Cumparsita
