José Rufino Reyes y Siancas, known simply as José Reyes, was a Dominican composer born in Santo Domingo on 15 November 1835 and died there on 31 January 1905, remembered for one work above all others: he wrote the music of the Dominican national anthem.

A soldier-musician

The son of a poor shopkeeper, he grew up in a bohío on what is now Arzobispo Nouel street and enlisted as a soldier while still a boy amid the wars that followed independence. As a regular army musician he studied under the military bandmaster Juan Bautista Alfonseca, learning several instruments and excelling on the cello.

An anthem

In 1882 he set a patriotic melody to staff notation and asked a group of the country’s writers to supply verses for it; Emilio Prud’Homme’s version, later revised in 1897, became the lyrics that endure today. The anthem premiered on 17 August 1883 at a Masonic lodge in Santo Domingo and was an immediate favorite — the music chosen, above all others written for the occasion, when Juan Pablo Duarte’s remains were repatriated from Venezuela.

A hymn without a country

Reyes’s tune kept being performed at major national occasions over the following decades — a railway inauguration, patriotic galas — and was twice put before Congress for official adoption, once under the dictator Ulises Heureaux, who left it unsigned before his 1899 assassination. It was not formally adopted as the Himno Nacional until 1934, twenty-nine years after Reyes’s own death.

Legacy

In 1932, on the anniversary of his birth, his forgotten pasodoble «Salve al Progreso» was rescued from an old archive and broadcast on national radio; his birth centennial in 1935 was marked with tributes across the country. He is buried in the Panteón Nacional de la República Dominicana, the composer of a song that outlived every dictator who refused to sign it into law.