Las últimas composiciones (Spanish for The Last Compositions), also released and reissued under the fuller title Las últimas composiciones de Violeta Parra, is the twelfth and final studio album by Chilean folk singer-songwriter Violeta Parra. It was released in November 1966 by RCA Victor (catalog number CML-2456), recorded away from EMI Odeón, the label that had issued her earlier work. The album gathered fourteen songs Parra had written in the preceding months, several of which—including "Gracias a la vida," "Volver a los 17," and "Run Run se fue pa'l Norte"—went on to become among the best-known works of Chilean and Latin American popular music.
Parra recorded the album shortly after returning to Chile from an extended stay in Europe, while she was struggling to sustain a folk-art center she had opened in a tent in the La Reinadistrict of Santiago, and while her long relationship with Swiss musician Gilbert Favre was ending. Three months after the album's release, on February 5, 1967, Parra died by suicide at the La Reina tent, making Las últimas composiciones the last album she would see released in her lifetime and retroactively giving its title a second, more literal meaning.
In April 2008, the Chilean edition of Rolling Stone magazine, polling fifty Chilean musicians and critics, ranked Las últimas composiciones as the greatest Chilean album ever recorded. In a 2024 ranking of the 600 greatest Latin American albums compiled by a panel of music critics, it placed second. Ownership of the album's master tapes was the subject of a long-running legal dispute among Chilean rights holders and Parra's estate that was not resolved until 2023, complicating reissues of the record for decades; the original 1966 mix was made widely available again only with a 2025 vinyl reissue by the Spanish label Vampisoul.
Background By the mid-1960s Violeta Parra had spent several years living and performing in Europe, exhibiting her tapestries and paintings at the Louvre and touring with Bolivian musician Gilbert Favre, whom she had met in 1961 and with whom she had fallen in love. She returned to Chile in 1965 and, with support from her children Ángel and Isabel Parra, set up a large canvas tent—the carpa de La Reina—on the corner of Avenida La Cañada and Mateo de Toro y Zambrano in the La Reina commune, intending it as a permanent center for folk music and popular art. The project struggled: audiences were thin, the venue was on the edge of the city, and Chilean cultural institutions gave it little support.
Around this time Favre left for Bolivia, ending the relationship that had shaped much of Parra's previous decade, and Parra fell into a depression from which, by her family's later accounts, she had already attempted suicide more than once before 1967. Despite these difficulties, she decided to record an album of her most recent compositions. Although she remained under contract to EMI Odeón, which had released her previous records, she chose to record instead for RCA Victor, through its Chilean distributor, the Corporación de Radio de Chile; EMI's local manager, Rubén Nouzeilles, had heard Parra perform "Gracias a la vida" at a private audition the previous year and reportedly refrained from taking legal action against her over the change of label out of personal regard for the singer.
Recording Las últimas composiciones was recorded in monaural sound between August and October 1966. For the sessions, Parra was joined by the Uruguayan artisan and musician Alberto Giménez—known by the stage name "Alberto Zapicán," after his birthplace in Lavalleja, Uruguay—who had arrived at the La Reina tent earlier that year after fleeing political persecution in Uruguay and had become Parra's companion during the final months of her life. Zapicán, a self-taught carpenter and former member of the leftist Tupamaros movement who had previously helped rebuild the Chilean city of Valdivia after its 1960 earthquake, played bombo on most of the album's tracks and sang duets with Parra on four songs: "Pupila de águila," "Maldigo del alto cielo," "La cueca de los poetas," and "Una copla me ha cantado." Parra dedicated one song, "El 'Albertío'," to him, its lyrics reproaching him for not returning the affection she had given him. After Parra's death, Zapicán went on to play in the Santiago folk group Curacas, whose name he is credited with coining.
Parra's son Ángel Parra played guitar on four tracks and drummed on the body of his guitar on a fifth, while her daughter Isabel Parra also drummed on guitar and played bells. Parra herself sang lead throughout and played guitar, charango, and the cuatro venezolano—a four-stringed instrument she had begun learning in 1963 and had brought back to Chile, where she called it the guitarrilla. Luis Torrejón served as recording engineer for the sessions.
Music and lyrics All fourteen songs are credited to Parra, with the exception of "La cueca de los poetas," co-written with her brother, the poet Nicanor Parra. "Gracias a la vida," which opens the album, had been composed the previous year in La Paz, Bolivia; built on an unusual twelve-syllable verse line rarely used in Spanish-language song, it addresses gratitude for life even as its lyrics have often been read, in light of Parra's death, as an ambivalent farewell. Several other songs on the record—among them "Run Run se fue pa'l Norte," "Maldigo del alto cielo," and "Rin del angelito"—have similarly been interpreted by critics as reflecting the disappointments of Parra's final months, including the end of her relationship with Favre and the indifference she encountered from Chilean cultural institutions. "Mazúrquica modérnica" was written with deliberately invented, improvised language, while "Cantores que reflexionan" and "Volver a los Diecisiete" (composed in 1962 but held back for this release) reflect Parra's ongoing engagement with the social themes of the emerging Nueva Canción Chilena movement.
Release Las últimas composiciones was released in November 1966 on RCA Victor under catalog number CML-2456. The cover featured a black-and-white photograph of Parra taken by Javier Pérez, and the original pressing included a four-page insert with the song lyrics.
Reissues and legal disputes In 1974, the label IRT reissued the album with new string arrangements by Chilean composer Nino García and a redrawn, full-color version of the original cover photograph; this version became the edition most widely heard in Chile through the 1970s and 1980s.
Ownership of the album subsequently became contested. In 1996, Chilean businessman Pedro Valdebenito acquired the master tapes RCA Victor had used for its editions of the album. He licensed the recordings for CD reissue in the United States and, through the Chilean division of Warner Music Group, made the album one of the few original Violeta Parra records to remain available in stores, most other reissues at the time being compilations of earlier material. Beginning in 1991, Isabel Parra sought unsuccessfully to have the master tapes turned over to the Parra family; in 2006 the Fundación Violeta Parra brought a lawsuit that eventually recovered the tapes and the album's distribution rights, under a ruling that recognized Valdebenito's ownership of the physical masters while barring him from reissuing the album without Isabel Parra's authorization. The case was declared abandoned in August 2022, and in April 2023 a Chilean civil court lifted the injunctions that had prohibited reproduction of the album; that November, Valdebenito reissued both the original 1966 recording and the 1974 García version, together with the Chilean label Al Abordaje Muchachos, on CD, cassette, vinyl, and streaming services.
In July 2017, to mark the centenary of Parra's birth, her grandchildren Ángel Parra Orrego and Javiera Parra released a tribute reinterpretation of the album, joined by Chilean musicians Manuel García, Alex Anwandter, and Álvaro López, as well as by Ángel Parra, Violeta's son and the grandchildren's father, who had played on the 1966 original. It was the last recording Ángel Parra took part in before his death in March 2017.
In February 2025, the Spanish reissue label Vampisoul released the album on 180-gram vinyl using its original 1966 mix and artwork, remastered from the recovered master tapes; it was the first release of that original version on vinyl in the United States.
Reception and legacy Las últimas composiciones is widely regarded as Parra's masterpiece and as one of the foundational recordings of Chilean and Latin American popular music. In addition to its top ranking in Rolling Stone Chile's 2008 poll of the fifty greatest Chilean albums and its second-place finish in the 2024 Los 600 de Latinoamérica ranking, the album's 2025 Vampisoul reissue drew renewed critical attention. Songlines gave the reissue a five-star review, describing the record's blend of Parra's voice and finger-picked stringed instruments as haunting and definitive. PopMatters called it a brilliant final statement rooted in the political convictions of the Nueva Canción movement, while The Vinyl District and World Music Central both highlighted the significance of finally hearing the album in its unadorned 1966 form after decades in which the more orchestrated 1974 version had been better known.
Track listing All songs written by Violeta Parra, except where noted.
Personnel Credits adapted from the 1966 RCA Victor edition. Violeta Parra – lead vocals, guitar, charango, cuatro venezolano ("guitarrilla") Alberto Zapicán (Alberto Giménez) – bombo, duet vocals (tracks 4, 6, 7, 11) Ángel Parra – guitar (tracks 1, 3, 10, 13), guitar-body percussion (track 7) Isabel Parra – guitar-body percussion (track 7), bells (track 13) Javier Pérez – cover photography Luis Torrejón – recording engineer
See also Music of Chile
References