Manuel Ponce

Sometimes a song can become so popular and be so frequently sung (and sung in such diverse musical environments) that eventually people start to take the song for folk music, and its author disappears into the shadow his or her work has created. The great Mexican composer Manuel Ponce's wonderful Estrellita was so much a part of Latin American popular culture during the first few decades of the twentieth century that even just a few years after its first appearance in print (1914) it had come to seem part of the folk tradition. But this delightful "Little Star" is entirely Ponce's own.

Estrellita, originally for voice and piano, but later arranged by various people for voice and orchestra as well as any number of solo instruments, is the second song of Ponce's Dos Canciones Mexicanas, first published in 1914 and composed in the few years immediately preceding. The female singer tells Estrellita, the little star, of the anguish of her burning love. Ponce sets the two stanzas of the song's text in a parallel fashion: the last three lines of both stanzas form a tender refrain in which the singer asks the little star to come down to earth to tell her whether or not her love might be requited, and Ponce sets them more or less identically, using a modified version of the melodic strain that begins the whole affair. The lush, rising opening tune spans a full octave and a half in a matter of just seven notes, with the largest leap occurring at just the moment when the text speaks of the "distant sky." Its even more impassioned restatement rises a whole tone higher, and it is this melodic material that burns so long and so bright in the memory of all who hear the song. The opening gesture of the second stanza differs somewhat in tone from the first, as the singer mulls her impending death from heartache in some broad triplets. Even here, however, the music is full of tenderness and, in sublime contradiction of the text, a kind of warm contentedness.

 Interestingly enough, Estrellita has had a rich association with the violin, having been made into a sparkling gem of an encore by Jascha Heifetz. The arrangement, like most of Heifetz's, goes far beyond just adapting the voice part for violin, and might justly be called an improvement over the original on several counts. In 1943, Ponce himself adapted the song for use in the central movement of the Violin Concerto he composed for Henryk Szeryng.

-- Blair Johnston