In the heritage collection of patriotic songs housed at our National Library, we find several dedicated to the figure of our Liberator. Their authors—Atanasio Bello Montero, José María Isaza, Juan Meserón, and Lino Gallardo—wrote these musical testimonies either during the height of the war against the Spanish Empire or in the early years of the Republic, while campaigns were underway to demonize Bolívar. Therefore, these songs are considered a bold and courageous political statement.
One of them, which survived thanks to its inclusion in the book "Essays on Art in Venezuela" that Ramón de la Plaza published in 1883 on the occasion of the celebrations for the centenary of the birth of the Liberator, is the one entitled "To Bolívar" whose music is by Lino Gallardo, an author who, from the early years, was identified with the patriotic cause and, in addition, was related to the Bolívar family because his daughter was the goddaughter of Don Juan Vicente Bolívar.
The lyrics of this song are a poem that exalts the figure of Bolívar above great mythological heroes. Its author, the Antioquian poet José María Salazar Morales, was one of those summoned to the Constituent Congress of Angostura, wrote for El Correo del Orinoco, and, from 1820, was a Minister of the Supreme Court of Venezuela.
That hymn to Bolívar was sung many times at celebrations and concerts organized in Bogotá by the Venezuelan musician Nicolás Quevedo Rachadell, the Liberator's aide-de-camp, in his memory. According to the musicologist José Ignacio Perdomo Escobar, “The fervor for the hero reached such a point that it was sung in the churches of the five nations liberated by Bolívar's sword, as a kind of hymn, after Mass.”
