Mussorgsky's earliest song is "Tell me, O Star, Where Art Thou?", also known as "Where Art Thou, O Little Star?" and "Little Star." Written in 1857, when Mussorgsky was 18, for voice and piano and then rewritten the following year for voice and orchestra, "Tell me, O Star, Where Art Thou?" displays many of the elements of the future Mussorgsky already in place: the predominantly minor-key harmonies, the melodic line that flirts with recitative, the use of a visual image to focus the musical imagery of the song. It is still a strophic song, and has none of the structural ingenuity of the later songs. The harmonies are still more or less functional, exhibiting little of the chromatic ingenuity of the later songs. But in the general impression it communicates, "Tell me, O Star, Where Art Thou?" has the mature Mussorgsky's passionate pessimism, morbid fatalism, and hopeless despair.

Although for many years some scholars asserted that the artless text must have been by Mussorgsky himself, later research has demonstrated that the verse was by a contemporary minor Russian poet, N. Grekov.

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