by Dwight Wayne Coop
photos: Historia del Himno Nacional /
Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes
Revolutionaries obey an unwritten law requiring them to be
poets, or at least try. José Palma was one who succeeded. Born in Cuba
in 1844, he had no shortage of authorities to rebel against; most of Spanish
America had won independence, but at the rate things were going he might never
see it for Cuba. It was enough to give a teenage poet a severe itch.
José Palma.
Palma married young and toiled at day jobs to support his
poet-revolutionary activity, which included anti-Spanish broadsides. His influences
included the work of fellow Cuban José Martí whose poignant Niña
de Guatemala (1870) would have immeasurable consequences for a land that Palma
would adopt as his own.
Marti’s poem was about María García, a
young Guatemalan woman who died “in early maidenhood.” Palma likely
read it before his escape from Cuba as a fugitive from the colonial authorities,
who had a price on his head. After a year of travel, he landed in Guatemala,
drawn to that country by its exceptional beauty and its own need for revolution;
the poem might have added to the urge.
The same year Palma arrived in Guatemala, an even younger,
if no less restless, artist was making a debut of another sort.
Rafael Alvarez was born in 1858 in Comalapa, a highland town
famous for its primitive painters. He might have followed his father, Rosendo,
into undertaking if the latter, an amateur musician who played dirges for his
clients, had not been named director of the music school in Santa Lucía
Cotzumalguapa. Three years after the family The Odyssey of Guatemala’s
National Anthem moved to this coastal-plain town, Rosendo succumbed to a mosquito-born
illness, leaving 15-year-old Rafael in charge of the school.
Alvarez was a prodigy who before his childhood ended would
master flute, piccolo, piano, violin and composition. It was a portentous moment
in Guatemalan history for such an individual because the ostensible Liberal
Revolution of dictator Justo Rufino Barrios was pursuing artistic patronage
at an unprecedented velocity.
Rafael Alvarez.
Like Louis XIV in France, this government drew artists from
all over Guatemala to the capital. It was inevitable that the cultural authorities
would notice Rafael Alvarez and equally inevitable that he would want to go.
In 1879 he resigned the headmastership of a backwater conservatory to join the
national Substitute School at the rank of student.
This institution was a talent pool that existed in order that
the national martial parade would always have its full compliment of musicians,
much the way that sports teams have reserve players. So, basically the institution
operated as a sort of workshop under the direction of German émigré
Emil Dresner, who became Alvarez’ personal mentor.
At this time, José Palma, in another quarter of the
city, was penning his own dedication to María García (the “Niña
of Guatemala”). In Latin American literature, historical and artistic
achievements of supreme importance breed encores; even today, literature students
write their own Ode to Bolívar. Aside from being a “senior project,”
there is an unexpressed hope that someone will someday better the original.
This tradition opened the door for Palma’s ambitious
assault, his tour de force to outshine Martí’s Niña de Guatemala.
He would not pull this off overnight, even though his fame had by now spread
beyond Guatemala and back to Cuba. By now someone had already dubbed him the
Bayamese Bard, after his hometown, Bayamo. To be acclaimed a bard is an exceptional
honor, nearly equivalent to founding a church order.
Sheet music for Guatemala
Feliz with the lyricist
listed as “Anonymous.”
By contrast, Rafael Alvarez’ fame was still confined
to Guatemala, even though he was Dresner’s clear heir apparent. A compulsive
organizer, he was forever recombining the martial band’s “substitutes”
into quartets and other assemblages, giving them such whimsical names as El
Chapín, The Joke and the Cactus Pear. He also founded the young women’s
orchestra and married one of the players. Still, for all his ability, Alvarez
had a better-connected rival who pulled some strings and engineered Dresner’s
retirement from the position as conductor of the National Orchestra. An embittered
Dresner departed for Germany three days later, never to return. This was a blow
for Alvarez, now 29, but it brought an unexpected boon to his career.
Like the United States, Guatemala dates its independence from
the commencement of its struggle, which was in 1824. The shortlived United Provinces
of Central America (1824-1838) had an anthem, but independent Guatemala had
gone for decades without its own national hymn. A poem by Ramón Molina,
variously called the Popular Hymn or Molina’s Hymn had long existed as
the de facto anthem lyric, but it was a lyric in search of a composition.
In 1887, the governor of Guatemala City decided that Molina’s
Hymn had waited long enough for its music. Dissatisfied with any of its suitors,
he did not have to look far for a composer. In Dresner’s absence, Rafael
Alvarez was Guatemala’s pre-eminent composer. The governor tactfully ordered
him to write the music — under a chafing deadline.
“Sir, I desire a national hymn,” the governor
wrote, “to be sung by the schoolchildren of this capital by the next Independence
Day; I invoke your patriotism … it would please me to know if harnessing
your renowned talent to this would behoove you … .”
Sheet music for Guatemala
Feliz with the lyricist’s real
name included.
Alvarez checked his calendar, August 18, only four weeks to
write the music and teach it to the children! He summoned his institutional
resources and began testing each bit of the composition as he produced it on
the fly.
But succeed he did, conceiving, with a nod to his marching
heritage, a splendid march. Thanks to those four weeks of activity, the pre-dawn
static of Guatemalan radio is gloriously rent by the exploding octaves of Alvarez’
stirring, ponderous melody.
José Palma, now a geriatric revolutionary at 43, was
undoubtedly enraptured by the composition when he first heard it. It not only
moved him, but moved him in a defi- nite direction: back into creative seclusion.
Alvarez’ music had, by necessity, been constrained to the iambic structure
of Molina’s Poem. The fact, and the long acceptance of the poem itself,
would otherwise have marked the end of the story of Guatemala’s national
anthem. In fact, the climatic chapter was still unwritten.
A decade passed with little cessation of output by either
Palma or Alvarez, although the former had, after 17 years of exile, grown quite
homesick. The Cuban independence struggle was approaching a boil, and he was
not present to participate. In only two more years Theodore Roosevelt and his
famed Rough Riders would charge up San Juan Hill.
But Palma mounted a charge of his own. When the poem Anonymous
surfaced in early 1896, it provoked a sensation because it was instantly recognized
as a challenger to Molina’s Hymn. For the sake of cultural due process,
the government invited every poet within earshot to take a turn spinning Ramón
Molina in his grave. Yet the contest was not a challenge to Molina’s hymn;
Anonymous was rapidly dethroning the old lyric as people memorized the pretender’s
lines. The poets were taking on Anonymous itself; it was the one to beat.
The crushing irony was that Anonymous was disqualified because,
according to contest rules, only poets native to Guatemala could compete. Its
author had won, but at the cost of remaining unknown.
Rafael Alvarez (first row, left) with some
of his talented teachers / musicians.
By the year’s end there was not even a runner-up to
the virile stanzas that serenaded Guatemalan sovereignty like no others ever
had. By decree, the poem was coupled with Alvarez’ music and christened
Guatemala Feliz. They were played together for the first time on March 14, 1897
at the Teatro Colón in downtown Guatemala City. Four days later, the
newspaper Diario de Centro América begged the poet, in an open letter,
to identify himself: “ ... the public has a right to know the identity
of the lyricist who, without justification, remains a mystery. We respectfully
implore you to come forward.”
The paper correctly speculated that the author was a foreigner,
and offered its implied support, should anyone attempt to disqualify Anonymous
on that basis. When no one stepped forward, Diario began dropping names of prominent
national poets. It was all to no avail; the public, the media, and even the
composer himself, would have to wait another 14 years for the answer.
In this, the anthem that is today called Guatemala Feliz was
exceptional. Often, the lyricist and the composer of a national anthem are not
even contemporaries. Palma and Alvarez were not only contemporaries but neighbors,
since the capital in that day had only about 100,000 residents, and the artistic
community was only a tiny fraction of this. Yet Alvarez, the composer, did not
know which of his neighbors was the lyricist.
Palma visited Cuba after its independence was declared in
1902, but he soon returned to Guatemala. Suspicion on him, as the lyricist behind
Feliz, occasionally surfaced, but he dispelled it with consistent disavowals.
Even so, the mating of his poem with Alvarez’ music was a fait accompli;
to divorce them would have been unthinkable in anyone’s mind — except
Palma’s. Would the secret die with him?
1909 front page story
incorrectly declaring
Manuel Cabral as the author
of the national anthem
(later retracted).
In July of 1911, Palma’s health was slipping fast; his
physicians gave him only a few weeks to live.
This prompted the end of the mystery; Palma came out and saw
to his relief that not
only was the rule against foreign authorship (of the national hymn) not invoked,
but that
overnight he had become the most beloved man in Guatemala. The government of
Gen.
Manuel Estrada Cabrera lost no time in ordering an homage: on July 25, Palma,
unable
to stand unassisted, and a stunned Rafael Alvarez were honored together and
decorated.
In less than a fortnight, Palma was gone.
Fellow Cuban, José Martí eulogized him as “a
poet in Cuba, but you’d have been one
anywhere ... you’d have been a scalder in Scotland, a troubadour in Spain,
a love sonneteer
in Italy ... you are one who reads in the stars, embroiders the clouds, flies
with the butterflies,
observes the love-frolic of the flowers ... you raise the spirit and don’t
understand
how.” In 1941, the centennial of his birth, Cuba recovered Palma’s
remains and reburied
them in his hometown of Bayamo, but years later his body was “repatriated”
to Guatemala
and interred in the capital.
José Palma’s collaborator, Rafael Alvarez, survived
him by 35 years, long enough to witness
Guatemala’s first truly liberal revolution. He was interred in a city
cemetery, but when
the centennial of his birth came in 1958, he, too, went home. His house in Comalapa
is
now a shrine, and in 1959 the Army, at that time firmly back in control, erected
a bust in
the square to the maestro who wrote the music to Guatemala Feliz.
The Music Academy of Milan has since declared this national
hymn as one of the best
anthems in the world; it is certainly the most glandular anthem in Central America.
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