Consuelo Velazquez, 88; Mexican Composer Wrote Pop Ballad ‘Besame Mucho’

Consuelo Velazquez, a pianist and composer whose yearning romantic ballad “Besame Mucho” became a pop standard and a personal anthem for innumerable couples separated during World War II, died Saturday in Mexico City. Although some sources reported her age as 84, her son, Sergio Rivera, said she was 88.

The cause of death was a respiratory ailment resulting from a fall at her home last October. She had been in intensive care since November.

A classically trained pianist, Velazquez was best-known as the composer of swooning boleros, or love songs, including “Amar y Vivir” (“To Love and to Live”) and “Verdad Amarga” (“Bitter Truth”).

But it was the plaintive “Besame Mucho” (“Kiss Me Many Times”), with its urgent plea to “kiss me as if this night were for the last time,” that caught the passionately fatalistic tenor of the early 1940s. It has since been translated into dozens of languages and covered by artists as diverse as the Beatles, Joao Gilberto, Placido Domingo, Frank Sinatra, Diana Krall and Luis Miguel.

Mexican writer and critic Carlos Monsivais described “Besame Mucho” as “one of the great personal reservoirs of various Latin American generations.”

Velazquez’s son said his mother wrote the song when she was in her teens. But although she was “a romantic person,” he said, his mother was “a very sound person.”

“She never smoked, she never drank,” he said. “She was very disciplined, very tenacious.”

Born in Ciudad Guzman in the western Mexican state of Jalisco in 1916, Velazquez began playing piano as a girl and studied in the state capital of Guadalajara, then at Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts in 1938.

While pursuing a career as a classical pianist, she began writing popular songs and ran a classical music program for radio station XEQ.

There she met her future husband, Mariano Rivera Conde, the radio station’s programming manager. Rivera at one time was a recording executive with RCA Victor who worked with such legendary artists as the Mexican composer Agustin Lara and mambo king Perez Prado.

According to her son, Velazquez demonstrated her true romantic nature when in 1944 she visited Hollywood and was offered a screen test by Walt Disney to perform in his film “The Three Caballeros.” Instead, she returned to Mexico and married Rivera.

Roberto Belester Quevedo, a fellow member of Mexico’s Society of Authors and Composers, said Velazquez was a pioneer in a field that admitted very few women in the 1940s and ‘50s. But, he said, it was a good era for all Mexican composers, partly because of the nation’s booming film industry.

Last weekend, Velazquez’s body lay in state at the Palace of Fine Arts, where hundreds of people paid their respects.

Her husband died in 1977. In addition to her son Sergio, she is survived by another son, Mariano Rivera.