Republic or Death! (41 page)

It takes him about half an hour to explain all his problems with the first verse alone. ‘So what would you like it changed to?' I ask.

‘Change the anthem?' he replies. ‘How can you change an anthem? It's a national symbol. We might not understand it, we might not like singing it, but we love it.' I look at him confused, given he appears to be completely contradicting himself. ‘It's like God, y'know? You don't know God, but you love God.' I don't look any less confused. ‘Or like your wife,' he tries. ‘You love her, but sometimes …' He starts laughing again. ‘It's complicated!'

*

‘Acuña de Figueroa could write about anything,' says Coriún Aharonián, a sprightly, bald musicologist, sitting among dozens of filing cabinets in his office in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. ‘And I mean anything. He could write about very stupid daily things, like what is happening in the neighbourhood, to very important things, like God. And,' he says, pausing for effect, ‘he was supposedly the author of a lot of pornographic songs, and he also blacked up so he could write in the jargon of slaves.'

I cough into my tea in surprise and he gives me a knowing smile. It is fair to say that I wasn't expecting those last two revelations when I walked into Coriún's office. I wasn't even meaning to talk to him about Acuña de Figueroa. I've travelled overnight 1,000 miles south to see him because I was hoping he could shed some light on why exactly the Paraguayan anthem sounds so operatic; why, in fact, most of South America's anthems do. Those were the two questions I had outstanding from my time in Paraguay. There, no one had been able to help, simply guessing – ‘Wasn't Argentina's first? That's operatic. Maybe we copied it from them' – or pointing out that ‘We are a very passionate people' as if that explained everything, and so I realised I had to come here, to the city where both the poet and musician behind Paraguay's anthem had lived.

Coriún had already started answering those questions. ‘In the 1800s, we were still very much in a colonial world,' he said when I arrived, ‘but what happened here and in Argentina, and eventually Paraguay, is the fashion changed. The cultural fashion. And everyone suddenly went from being kind of prisoners of Spain, musically speaking, to discovering Italy, opera especially.'

However, he added, I had to realise that the music wasn't the place to start with any South American anthem. The continent's governments never actually seemed that worried about the music. What was important to them at first was having some words written down, officially, on paper, in law, as if the anthems were just something to ruminate on in a library rather than hear. And if I was starting with the words to Paraguay's anthem, I needed to start with the pornographer.

*

Francisco Acuña de Figueroa, portly and with sideburns so bushy they seemed to double the width of his face, was not the sort of man you would expect to write one national anthem, let alone two. He was born in 1790 in Montevideo, the son of the Spanish royal treasurer, and he grew up devoted to the Spanish throne, admitting he felt like he had lost his ‘country, employment and home' when the Spanish were eventually thrown out of Uruguay in 1814. He even went in exile to Rio de Janeiro for a few years afterwards, unable to cope with the new order of things, and so he could work for the Spanish crown from there. When he eventually returned to the city, his past somehow didn't get in the way of him becoming one of Uruguay's most important officials (he was director of the national library and museum) or one of its most popular poets and songwriters. He might not have been the best of those, but he was certainly among the most entertaining, and as Coriún delights in mentioning, he also did his best to serve people's baser needs.

He wrote one poem called ‘Apology for the Penis', for instance, that consists of little more than a hundred synonyms for that appendage (‘Sausage, trunk and sweet potatoes, eggplant, gun and schoolmaster'). This was apparently his way of proving the penis is better than the vagina (‘For which there are only eight names, and none worth a damn'). How he went from one day writing that, to the next writing celebrated religious texts, is something no historian appears to have been able to answer. ‘His life is a bad example for schoolchildren … but respectability is not a criterion for literary appreciation,' wrote one.

In the late 1820s, Acuña de Figueroa took a turn no one would have predicted, given his royalist past: he was afflicted by a bout of patriotism for his new nation and decided to write it an anthem. No one asked him to, he just decided, somewhat narcissistically, that he should be the one to do so, the only poet deserving of having such a place in Uruguay's history. The government rejected his offer, so he tried again, and then again. He made five attempts over several years, in fact, until in 1833 one of his efforts was finally deemed acceptable. ‘Orientals, the fatherland or the grave!' it goes, Orientals, or Easterns, just being another name for Uruguayans (the country's full name is República Oriental del Uruguay because it is on the east of the Uruguay river). ‘Liberty, or with glory we die!' it then adds.

This is the vow that the soul pronounces,

and which we, heroes, will fulfil.

Some people attacked the song as being so full of ‘poetic junk' it wasn't worth singing (by its end, it's talking about ‘the spear of Mars' and ‘the dagger of Brutus'), but it was clearly popular, and when a few years later he wrote similar words for Paraguay, the government there clearly thought they had something too.

Acuña de Figueroa didn't write the music for either anthem, though, so the only thing that actually guaranteed that they became operatic was their composer. Francisco José Debali was born in Romania (then ruled by Hungary), and seems to have been something of a child prodigy as he soon moved to Vienna to study under Franz Süssmayr, the Austrian composer who had an affair with Mozart's wife and completed Mozart's Requiem after his death. Debali eventually ended up in Piedmont in northern Italy, where he worked as the director of several military bands. It is there, you have to assume, that his taste for opera was formed and where, less positively, he realised he would never become as successful as the man he had studied under. He had a choice: to carry on toiling away in Piedmont, or to try his luck elsewhere, so in about 1837, already in his late thirties, he headed for Brazil.

Back then, Brazil was regularly described as a paradise – a land where fruit was always within your reach and gold was never far beneath your feet. It was also a country in desperate need of musicians to entertain European settlers. But when Debali arrived, all he found was yellow fever, and so he was soon on another boat, this time to Montevideo, where he became music director of the city's theatre (photos from the time show him in the black tie you would expect of a conductor, but with thin, round spectacles more suited to an accountant). Little is known about Debali's life in the city, or about the music he wrote at that time – most of his papers and sheet music were destroyed while being used as an improvised barricade during a war with Brazil – but in 1846 he entered a competition to provide music for the Uruguayan anthem (thirteen years after Acuña de Figueroa's words were chosen). Debali wrote three entries. One ended up going down so well with the public it became Uruguay's anthem; another, Acuña de Figueroa eventually took to become Paraguay's anthem (he first suggested singing it to the same tune as Uruguay's); the third was lost.

A lot of people argue with that story, pointing out there's no sheet music for either anthem with his name on, and Debali didn't speak good Spanish so couldn't have possibly written music to such words. The initial government decree for Uruguay's anthem also had the name of another musician on it, which Debali did not challenge until 1855, when he wrote in to a newspaper saying he hadn't realised the music had been for something so important because he was so ‘ignorant of the language'. But Coriún says it is impossible to decide either way. There are points in both anthems where the music and words are such a bad fit that maybe they could have only been written by a confused foreigner.

Both Debali's anthems (we'll give him the benefit of the doubt) could not sound more operatic. Uruguay's is even regularly criticised for being a rip-off of the ‘Prologue' of Donizetti's opera
Lucrezia Borgia
(the criticism seems a bit unfair since they only share nine notes – Argentina's anthem has far more in common with one of Clementi's sonatinas and, as we have previously mentioned, there are plenty of other far more egregious examples of anthem-borrowing). But why did Debali choose that style? Coriún is adamant it was just fashion and that he was simply fitting in with the existing anthems on the continent. Argentina's, Chile's and Brazil's, all of which had been adopted by the time Debali arrived in Uruguay, were operatic too.

But I think that answer is a shame, as it makes it seem as if Debali was just a gun for hire, writing to other people's whims rather than his own. Why can't it be that this was the music he loved and he happened to write the best tunes, two songs so good that two governments felt compelled to make them their anthems? If he had loved military marches maybe the anthems would have ended up in that style instead. Most of the other composers of South American anthems were opera fanatics like Debali. Francisco Manuel da Silva, who wrote Brazil's, founded that country's opera academy; both Bolivia's and Colombia's anthems were written by Italians; Ecuador's by a Frenchman who only went to South America in the first place because he was touring with an opera company. Of course fashion influenced things, but I would prefer to give all these composers their due.

*

Writing the two anthems didn't seem to bring Debali any fame. A couple of days after talking to Coriún, I went searching for his grave in Montevideo's main cemetery with Julio Huertas, a pianist and expert on Debali's life. We walked around for a few minutes, past statues of famous bankers with angels at their feet and clucking hens who had made the cemetery their home, until Julio said, ‘I think he was buried here,' pointing at some mud-covered yellow and black tiles on the ground. ‘It was a communal grave. He was just thrown in with everyone else. He was foreign and the people back then didn't care much for foreigners.'

‘You said he “was” buried there,' I said.

‘Yes, he's not there now. His body was stolen by the owners of a soap factory across the road.' The soap magnates, Julio said, had found a treasure map they believed would take them to gold left in Montevideo by Garibaldi, the legendary general who unified Italy. They dug a tunnel from their factory to where the ‘X' marked the spot, but all they found were the remains of an unloved composer and the many builders and craftsmen who had been buried alongside him.

‘Where's his body now?' I asked. Julio just shrugged, clearly disappointed by how little people cared.

*

Uruguay's anthem has essentially the same message as Paraguay's: its cry of ‘The Fatherland or the grave' almost interchangeable with ‘Republic or death'. But while in the country, I was repeatedly told that it did not have the same hold on people as Paraguay's does and that there is only one day a year when it is sung with any meaning: 20 May, when there is a march through the middle of Montevideo in memory of the 192 ‘missing', the people who disappeared during Uruguay's dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. As one woman was telling me this in the old city hall, she suddenly realised one of the leaders of that march worked as a repairman there, which was why I soon found myself listening to Amaral García Hernández, a forty-something who looked like he should be fronting a punk band, his hair almost mohawked and his T-shirt ripped, tell his desperately sad story.

‘I've got many memories of my parents,' he said at one point, ‘but they barely have any movement to them. They're almost like photographs. Eating soup together around the table, the three of us. Another time we were eating fish and a piece flew into my eye from the hot saucepan. How I screamed! I haven't eaten fish since.' He smiled and his eyes glistened. ‘I have another image of my father pulling up a tree by the roots, but it was probably really a twig. And I remember my mother's long hair, so sweet. And I remember when they were abducted.'

Uruguay became a dictatorship in the 1970s, the military using a clampdown on the Tupamaros – a left-wing guerrilla movement who started out simply pulling pranks but quickly moved on to kidnapping – as an excuse to take power. Amaral's parents were members of the group; his father missed his birth because he'd been jailed for his membership. When Amaral was six months old, his father was released on the condition that he left the country and so the family moved to Chile, then Buenos Aires. His parents tried to stay active in their opposition, but collaboration between all of South America's military governments at this time meant they were soon being looked for and had to continually move from house to house and assume false identities. On 20 December 1974, the family went to a birthday party. The food ran out and so his father left to buy a chicken. An hour passed and his mother guessed something was wrong. She swept Amaral up and started saying her goodbyes, but before she could finish, some men burst into the room. ‘We already have your husband. Come with us,' was all they said. Amaral's parents were flown back to Uruguay on a clandestine flight. They were the first people ‘disappeared' under Operation Condor, a US-backed campaign across South America to suppress communists. A few weeks later, they turned up in a ditch an hour outside Montevideo, ‘riddled with bullets', according to the official report. ‘My father's name was Floreal Gualberto García,' Amaral said formally, as if he needed to guarantee every letter was written down for the record. ‘My mother's was Mirtha Yolanda Hernández.'