Aníbal de Peña, born Newton Aníbal de Peña, was a Dominican singer, pianist and composer. He spent a career writing love songs and is remembered above all for one that was not: the hymn of the April revolution, whose words and music are both his.

Rahintel and the first records

He came out of Barahona and into the television studios of the capital at the turn of the sixties, part of the crop of singers that Rafael Solano brought through Rahintel from 1959 onward. That channel functioned as a conservatory with cameras, and a great many Dominican careers of that generation begin in it.

His first recordings were Mi Debilidad and Tú No Tienes La Culpa. He later said, in 1966, that Mi Debilidad had been the filler — the throwaway on the other side of the record he actually cared about. It became the song people still ask for, which is the ordinary fate of a hunch about one’s own work.

He recorded for the Kubaney label out of Miami and New York, backed on one album by the group Los Diplomáticos, and on another by Rafael Solano himself. He worked as a singer in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, New York, Miami and Boston, which was the ordinary circuit for a Dominican romantic singer and remains so.

The April hymn

He had opposed the Trujillo dictatorship and was arrested and imprisoned for it. That is the background to the thing he is best known for.

When the constitutionalist revolt broke out in April 1965 he wrote a hymn for it — words and music both — and it was recorded at a studio in the capital during the closing months of the fighting. A song written inside a war, by someone who had already been jailed by the previous regime, is not a commemorative piece composed afterwards at a safe distance. It was made while the outcome was unknown.

He also wrote the music for the hymn of the Dominican Revolutionary Party, to words by José Francisco Peña Gómez. The distinction is worth keeping: on the April hymn he wrote everything, and on this one he wrote the tune.

Formal recognition took a long time to arrive. He said as much himself, half a century later, when it finally did.

The boleros

The rest of the catalogue is romantic song, and it is what he was doing before and after the war. Déjame Beber, Virgen Negra, Muchachita De Mi Pueblo and Tú No Tienes La Culpa are the ones that lasted, alongside the accidental hit.

He produced for television too, sharing a programme in 1968 with Jorge Taveras on the state channel. A singer who is also a pianist and a composer tends to end up on that side of the desk eventually.

He spent his later life in the United States and died there in 2023, at ninety. The obituaries in the Dominican press led with the hymn rather than with the boleros, which is probably right and is certainly what he would have expected.