Music: Anthemist Exhumed

Mexicans, to the tumult of war cries

Make ready your horse and your sword!

Let the earth to its core quake and tremble,

At the cannons that rumble and roar. .

Ever since famed Soprano Henriette Sontag first sang these lines in 1854 at a gala premiere arranged by Mexico’s flamboyant Dictator Santa Anna, Mexicans have sung them as their national anthem. But the man who composed the rather operatic music to which they are sung was practically unknown. His name was Jaime Nuño.

Nuño, a Spanish bandmaster, was brought to the Mexican capital by Santa Anna. When irate peons chased one-legged Santa Anna out in the revolution of 1855, Nuño left too. Tired out perhaps by a musician’s lot in upsy-downsy Mexican politics, Nuño later settled down to the less turbulent life of Buffalo, N.Y. There he ran a small music academy in the 1870s and ’80s. There, in 1906, he was buried.

Last week, the Mexican Government remembered Jaime Nuño, sent an army bomber (the first Mexican war plane to fly over U.S. soil in World War II) to fetch his remains from Buffalo. To the strains of a string quartet and a speech by Mayor Joseph J. Kelly, Composer Nuño’s body was exhumed and started on its southward flight. In Mexico City a military guard of honor, 300 music conservatory students and a parade of thousands of school children waited to bear the coffin to Mexico’s magnificent Monumento de la Revolutión.