Sobre las Olas

The waltz "Sobre las Olas" (or "Over the Waves") is the best known work of Mexican composer Juventino Rosas (1868–1894). It "remains one of the most famous Latin American pieces worldwide," according to the "Latin America" article in The Oxford Companion to Music.

It was first published by Rosas in 1888^[1]. It remains popular as a classic waltz, and has also found its way into New Orleans Jazz and Tejano music.

The song remains popular with country and old-time fiddlers in the United States.

Film

A Mexican film titled "Sobre las Olas" was released in 1933.

The Mexican film biography of Juventino Rosas, released in 1950 and starring Pedro Infante, is entitled Sobre Las Olas.

In popular culture

• In the United States, Sobre las Olas has a cultural association with funfairs, and trapeze artists, as it was one of the tunes available for Wurlitzer's popular line of fairground organs.
• The music for Over the Waves was used for the song The Loveliest Night of the Year, which was sung by Ann Blyth in MGM's film The Great Caruso.
• The composition is featured in the film, Stage Fright (1950); and is played when Jonathan gets out of the car and goes into Charlotte's house.
• The song appears as a medley, along with Entry of the Gladiators, in the Circus tribe stages in Lemmings 2: The Tribes.
• This waltz is performed in the James Bond movie, Octopussy, in the scene in the Circus in Germany.
• On Sesame Street, Ernie often sang a song to this melody, called George Washington Bridge. The lyrics went: "George Washington Bridge, George Washington Washington Bridge..." ^[2]
• The tune is featured in the RKO Radio Pictures feature When's Your Birthday? (1937) starring Joe E. Brown.
• In the 1946 Warner Brothers cartoon, Daffy Doodles, Daffy sings Sobre las Olas to the tune of "She was an acrobat's daughter..."
• Sobre las Olas can be heard in the score of Disney's 1944 film The Three Caballeros during The Cold-Blooded Penguin segment.

References

1. ^ Helmut Brenner, Juventino Rosas: His Life, His Work, His Time (=Detroit Monographs in Musicology/Studies in Music 32, ed. by J. Bunker Clark). Foreword by Robert Stevenson. Warren, Michigan: Harmonie Park Press, 2000. Please see also the discussion site to this article
2. ^ "Let's Sing a Song That Everybody Knows - Muppet Wiki". http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Let%27s_Sing_a_Song_That_Everybody_Knows. 

External Links

• Sheet music for "Sobre Las Olas", F. Trifet & Co., 1895.