Carlos di Sarli

Carlos Di Sarli (January 7, 1903 – January 12, 1960) was an Argentine tango musician, orchestra leader, composer and pianist.

Early years

Carlos di Sarli was born at 511 Buenos Aires street (now Yrigoyen) in the city of Bahía Blanca, located in Southern Argentina. He was the eighth child of the Italian immigrant Miguel Di Sarli, the owner of a gunsmith store, and Serafina Russomano, daughter of the tenor singer Tito Russomano. Baptized as Cayetano di Sarli in accordance with the solid Catholic tradition of his parents, he later changed his name to Carlos. Music played an important role in the family: Carlos' older brother Domingo was a teacher at the Williams music conservatory in Bahía Blanca, Nicolas, another older child, became a famous baritone, and Carlos' younger brother, Roque, turned into a pianist. Carlos received training in classical music in the conservatory where his brother was teaching.

In 1916, working in his father's store, he suffered an accident that cost him an eye and which forced him to wear glasses for the rest of his life. Once recovered from the accident, 13-year-old Carlos joined a company of traveling musicians, touring various provinces and playing popular music including tangos. Then he moved to Santa Rosa in the La Pampa province where a friend of his father, another Italian immigrant by the name of Mario Manara, owned a cinema and a club. He played piano there for two years, accompanying silent movies and performing early tango songs at the club. In 1919, he returned to Bahía Blanca and set up his first orchestra, playing at the Cafe Express on the corner of Zelarrayan and Buenos Aires streets, and in Cafe Moka, on O'Higgins street. The orchestra also did tours in the provinces La Pampa, Córdoba, Mendoza, San Juan and Salta. In 1923, Carlos and his younger brother Roque moved to Buenos Aires.

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..."

History

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: