Maruja Pacheco Huergo
El adiós, which translates to English as “the farewell”, is one of the oldest songs on my album. It was composed in 1937 by Maruja Pacheco Huergo, with lyrics by Virgilio San Clemente. Maruja Pacheco Huergo was a trained pianist but also an actress and a singer. As a singer she often performed on the radio and was nominated as “Miss Radio” in 1938 But she wasn’t involved in tango for long, and in the 1950s she released two albums of songs for children, written and composed by her. Even more interestingly, she composed 12 songs based on the old testament. As an actress, she appeared on several films in Argentina, but in minor roles. Her husband Manuel Ferradás Campos was a writer who wrote the lyrics to another beautiful tango called Será una noche. Back to Maruja Pacheco Huergo, the first person to record her tango El Adiós was Ignacio Corsini in 1938. Apparently she got the idea of having her sing it before there were even lyrics to the song. And Corsini loved it, so lyrics were commissioned for it. So that’s the story of Maruja Pacheco Huergo, one of the relatively few women composers in the early days of tango, and more specifically the composer of the beautiful tango “El adiós”, which I decided to include on my album as well.