The spanish king of argentine tango: Quinito Valverde, paradigm of composer of the music industry at the beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

Joaquín [Quinito] Valverde (Madrid, 1875-Mexico City,
1918) arrived in Paris in 1907, a time in which distinction between “music for the elite” and “music for the masses” was being conceptually developed. Valverde was in this city at the same time as Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados, the pianist Ricardo Viñes, Joaquín Turina or a young Manuel de Falla, but he worked in musical circles far removed from the musical institutions where his compatriots studied and triumphed: Valverde did not go to the Schola Cantorum or the Conservatoire, but he achieved public and critical success in popular urban genres and in operetta theatres, salons and music halls as important as Olympia or Moulin-Rouge. Valverde, as a popular composer, is at the forefront of stage genres and technical means that allowed him to achieve international success in the first decades of the 20th century. This article’s main goal is to document that Quinito Valverde was a first-rate international star in popular music, although today he is practically forgotten and neglected by the international and national musical canon. I aim to highlight Valverde’s impact as a successful composer of songs and dances in France, Germany, the former Russian Empire and North America. To this end, I have made a review of European and American archives and incorporated a quantitative study of the phonographic recordings of his work without going into their analysis, that deserves a further work.