Francisco José Debali

Francisco José Debali (26 July 1791 – 13 January 1859), born Debály Ferenc József, was a Hungarian-born composer who emigrated to Uruguay in 1838.

As ethnic Hungarian, his original Eastern order name was Debály Ferenc József.

After a short stay at São Paulo, Brazil, from which he departed due to a yellow fever epidemic, he arrived in Uruguay in 1838.

[citation needed] In 1845 he composed what would be adopted three years later as the Uruguayan national anthem, to a text by Francisco Acuña de Figueroa.

Fernando Quijano, his assistant, who had submitted the composition to the government's selecting contest, was credited with the authorship because of Debali's failure to grasp the content, in the Spanish language, of the governmental decree that adopted his composition as the country's anthem.