Uzeyir Hajibeyli — the man who reconciled East and West in one score
Staged in Baku in 1908, “Leyli and Majnun” was the first opera in the Muslim East. Its author also wrote the theory of mugham.
Composers
Gara Garayev — Shostakovich's student, a school's teacher
“Seven Beauties”, “Path of Thunder”, the Third Symphony — and an entire generation of Azerbaijani composers.
- Published
- Author
- Əkrəm Babayev
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Gara Garayev was born in Baku in 1918. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Dmitri Shostakovich and was considered one of his closest students. His output traces, within a single biography, the passage of Azerbaijani music from national romanticism to twentieth-century modernism.
Ballets: “Seven Beauties” and “Path of Thunder”
“Seven Beauties” (1952), after the poem by Nizami Ganjavi, joins national material to large symphonic form with unusual assurance.
“Path of Thunder” (1958) takes racial segregation in South Africa as its subject — an unexpected choice for the Soviet ballet stage, and the work that carried his name abroad.
Towards modernism
In the 1960s his language changes sharply. The Third Symphony (1964) and the Violin Concerto use twelve-tone technique — still a contested step in Soviet music at the time.
The symphonic engravings “Don Quixote” (1960) are among his freest works in form: a chain of short, interlinked panels.
The teacher
His largest legacy may be his classroom. Arif Melikov, Khayyam Mirzazadeh, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and dozens of others studied with him.
His teaching principle was simple: a student must not resemble the teacher.
Garayev died in Moscow in 1982 and is buried in Baku.
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Muslim Magomayev — from “Shah Ismail” to “Nargiz”
Uzeyir Hajibeyli's lifelong friend and the second founder of Azerbaijani classical music. The State Philharmonic bears his name.
Zulfugar Hajibeyov — the founder of musical comedy
Uzeyir's elder brother and Niyazi's father — author of the opera “Ashiq Gharib” and a founder of the Musical Comedy Theatre.