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DUBAI: She is the Arab world’s best dwelling musical icon, however Fayrouz stays an enigma. She retains a sometimes-infuriating aura of thriller, hardly ever giving interviews and ardently defending the privateness of her household. On stage she seems devoid of emotion — immobile and expressionless. These traits have themselves grow to be iconic, with Fayrouz’s placing however impassive options adorning every part from purses and posters to Beirut’s metropolis partitions.
Born Nouhad Haddad in 1934, in the course of the course of her profession Fayrouz has recorded lots of of songs, starred in dozens of musicals and flicks, and toured the world. From 1957 onwards, when she first carried out on the Baalbeck Worldwide Competition, she has grow to be one of many Arab world’s most beloved singers. And in doing so she would unite her often-fractious homeland.
All Lebanese keep in mind the primary time they heard Fayrouz. For Tania Saleh, it was throughout a drive to Syria to flee the start of the Lebanese Civil Conflict. She remembers one music specifically — “Roudani Ila Biladi” (Take Me Again To My Homeland).
“That music actually marked me,” says Saleh, a singer-songwriter and visible artist. “My mom was crying whereas she was driving and the music created this actually intense emotional second. And I keep in mind considering, ‘How can a music have an effect on somebody a lot? It’s only a music.’ Nevertheless it affected me, too, in a way that I didn’t perceive again then.”
Fayrouz remained in Lebanon for everything of the warfare and refused to take sides. Though she continued to sing in venues internationally, she didn’t carry out in Lebanon till the battle was over. This neutrality, and the patriotic nature of lots of her songs, meant she was a uncommon image of nationwide unity, with all sides listening to her music all through the 15 years of civil warfare. She was, as Saleh says, an “emotional anchor for all Lebanese in the course of the warfare,” no matter faith or political opinions. When she launched “Li Beirut“ (organized and tailored by her son Ziad Rahbani) in 1984, Fayrouz and Beirut grew to become inseparable. Greater than ever she embodied the very essence of what it meant to be Lebanese.
None of which might have been potential with out the music of the Rahbani Brothers. Fayrouz, who was a refrain singer at Radio Lebanon within the early Fifties, met Mansour and Assi Rahbani by means of the composer Halim El-Roumi in 1951. She went on to marry Assi just a few years later and collectively the trio would revolutionize standard Lebanese music. The Rahbani Brothers fused musical genres, together with Levantine folkloric traditions and the music of Latin America, and included each Western and Russian components into their compositions. It was Fayrouz, nonetheless, who gave voice to their musical imaginative and prescient.
Fayrouz sang of an virtually legendary Lebanon. She sang of affection and want, but in addition of an idealized Lebanese mountain village, of olive timber and jasmine, of vineyards and streams. “Lyrically, they created the Lebanon we now love,” says Saleh of the brothers, who adopted within the footsteps of writers reminiscent of Khalil Gibran and Mikhail Naimy, who helped to forge a romanticized picture of Lebanon that lots of its residents nonetheless cling to at present.
Because the Palestinian poet and movie director Hind Shoufani notes, Fayrouz represents “the village woman, the tales of affection, the fetching of contemporary water, the mountain, the resistance, the facility of the individuals; that sort of easy, lovely every day existence that’s in concord with nature.” As such, her songs have an extra, heartbreaking poignancy, as a result of the Lebanon she sings of bears no resemblance to the Lebanon of at present. She sings of a fading dream — one that’s shared by a lot of the Arab world.
That imaginative and prescient was rooted in Lebanon’s golden age, with Fayrouz intimately linked to the formation of a nationwide cultural identification within the years following independence from France. Because the acclaimed indie-music producer Zeid Hamdan says, Fayrouz would carry that identification “with class and depth like no different singer.”
Fayrouz and the Rahbani Brothers modified standard Arabic music perpetually. Umm Kulthoum, one other icon of the Arab world, sang songs of affection that would final for as much as an hour and had been deeply embedded within the tarab custom. The songs of Fayrouz and the Rahbani Brothers, nonetheless, had been far shorter, utilized the Lebanese dialect, and embraced new melodic types.
“As a musician, I’m very impressed by the dialect that Fayrouz sings,” says Hamdan, “arguably finest often known as one half of the trip-hop duo Soapkills. “It’s not solely classical Arabic, it’s usually trendy Lebanese, and the Rahbanis — from Assi to Ziad — used the Lebanese dialect in a really intelligent manner all through their repertoire.”
Hamdan was launched to Fayrouz within the late Nineteen Nineties by Yasmine Hamdan (no relation), his Soapkills accomplice. Inspired by her, he purchased a double K7 cassette of Fayrouz’s “Andaloussiyat” and instantly fell in love with three tracks, one in every of which was “Ya Man Hawa.”
“The lyrics are merely unbelievable,” he says. “It’s a type of poetry that’s a number of hundred years outdated referred to as muwashshah and I want I may do justice to the great thing about the phrases.” One other was “Yara El Jadayel,” on which, at a sure level, Fayrouz “sings at a really excessive pitch and really softly, the melody virtually whispered on a piano arpeggio”.
It’s the surprise and flexibility of Fayrouz’s voice that continues to entrance audiences internationally. El-Roumi thought her voice so lovely that he gave her the nickname Fayrouz (Arabic for turquoise) and went on to grow to be the primary particular person to compose for her.
“Fayrouz has one of the distinctive voices within the Arab world,” says Egyptian-Belgian singer Natacha Atlas, who has labored with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Nitin Sawhney. “One can at all times inform that it’s (her) voice. It’s as delicate as it’s lovely and robust, and her voice’s capacity to (carry) such robust feelings is at all times extraordinary. She is one in every of my best influences. Once I hear her, I usually soften in tears on the sheer fantastic thing about her voice and the way it additionally evokes a deep nostalgia in me for the Center East because it as soon as was, and the way every part has modified virtually past recognition.”
Fayrouz’s fame exterior of the Levant may also be traced again to her help of the Palestinian trigger. As early as 1957, Fayrouz and the Rahbani Brothers launched “Rajioun” (We Will Return), a set of pro-Palestinian anthems. This was adopted in 1967 by the discharge of “Al-Quds Fil Bal” (Jerusalem In My Coronary heart), and as lately as 2018 she was nonetheless dedicating songs to Palestinians killed on Gaza’s border with Israel.
When her husband’s well being started to fail within the Nineteen Seventies, Fayrouz started to collaborate extra carefully together with her son Ziad — the eldest of her 4 kids. One of many albums composed and organized by him was “Wahdon,” which was launched on the Zida file label in 1979 and contains the music “Al Bosta.”
“I cherish and love her expertise with Ziad,” says Saleh. “The albums that she did with him took her to jazz and bossa nova and generally to funk. This gave Fayrouz one other dimension — that of the chance taker. She went out of her consolation zone, and that’s very uncommon.”
This helped to cement her repute with a youthful era and he or she continues to evoke a deep sense of nostalgia, not solely among the many Lebanese, however throughout the Levant and North Africa. Many Lebanese nonetheless begin their day listening to Fayrouz’s songs and, regardless of household disputes over royalties, her controversial efficiency in Damascus in 2008, and accusations of plagiarism directed on the Rahbani household, her standing as a cultural icon endures. When the French President Emmanuel Macron visited Lebanon in 2020, he selected the house of Fayrouz as one in every of his first ports of name, not these of the nation’s political leaders.
“They described this lovely Lebanon and so they made us dream that that is our nation, which was truly only a image they’d created,” says Saleh of Fayrouz and the Rahbani Brothers. “We had been in search of it: ‘The place is that this Lebanon you’re speaking about guys?’ We had been at all times looking for it however we by no means did. However fortunately they did create this picture, as a result of the bond that we’ve got with our nation is principally due to them.”
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