La Cumparsita

When it appeared, the Argentine tango scandalized all respectable people, and they were not slow in saying so. In those early years of the 20th Century, the German Kaiser, the King of Italy, the Queen of England and the Pope were all in agreement: they detested the tango.

Thundered the Archbishop of Lyon: "This abominable dance kills virtue, and gives rein to every appetite." At an Atlanta, Ga. Bible conference, Dr. Campbell Morgan declared that the tango was a reversion to the ape. A New York doctor announced a new disease, the tango foot. In Paris, the Argentine ambassador added his censure. "The tango," said he, "is a dance peculiar to the houses of ill fame in Buenos Aires and is never cultivated at respectable gatherings."

On the Waterfront. Along the rough and bawdy Buenos Aires waterfront, in lamplit saloons and "dancing academies," the tango had long been danced by prostitutes and lawless toughies. It got into society by accident.To clean out the toughs, vigilante groups of rich young Argentines invaded the waterfront, stayed to learn the tango, later carried it to the ballrooms of France. Transplanted, the tango retained its sad, metallic tempo--one, two, three, pause--and continued to be danced by automatons whose torsos remained in expressionless rapture while their legs swept nimbly through the corte (cross step) and corrida (promenade). Actor Rudolph Valentino showed moviegoers how to do it when he tangoed his way to fame in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Of all the tango tunes put together by the Tin Pan Alleys along the Plata, the one locally regarded as No. 1 is La Cumparsita. Gerardo Hernan Mattos Rodriguez, 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:

I've still that affection which I had for you;

Who knows if you would know I've never forgotten you?

At the Racetrack. Young Mattos Rodriguez 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 Rodriguez 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 boites 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:

Friends no longer come, no longer visit me,

No one consoles me in my sad affliction.

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