Uzeyir Hajibeyli — the man who reconciled East and West in one score

The history of Azerbaijani professional music splits in two: before Uzeyir Hajibeyli and after. Born in 1885, raised in Shusha, he was only 22 when “Leyli and Majnun” premiered in Baku on 25 January 1908 — the first opera anywhere in the Muslim East.

A mugham opera: notated orchestra, improvised voice

The idea was as bold as it was simple: place mugham, untouched, inside a European operatic frame. The orchestral score was fully written out; the vocal parts were marked only by the names of mugham sections, and the singer improvised them anew each night.

In one work, two musical mentalities — the Western score and the Eastern oral master-to-student tradition — were made to share a stage. What we now call East-West synthesis starts here.

Comedies that travelled

Hajibeyli was no purist. His musical comedies “If Not That One, Then This One” (1910) and “Arshin Mal Alan” (1913) were translated into dozens of languages, staged across continents and filmed repeatedly.

Their success was not accidental: in his hands the distance between folk melody and operetta form is crossed by a natural step, not an artificial bridge.

“Koroghlu” and a national anthem

Completed in 1937, the opera “Koroghlu” is the summit of his symphonic thinking: nothing is improvised, everything is notated — yet mugham intonation saturates every layer of the score.

He also wrote the music of the national anthem of Azerbaijan, composed in 1919 and restored to official status in 1992.

Hajibeyli the theorist

His least famous and perhaps most durable work is the book “Principles of Azerbaijani Folk Music” (1945), the first systematic description of the mugham modes: their structure, their emotional character, their relationships.

Without it, teaching mugham in a conservatory, notating it, or using it as compositional material would hardly be possible today.

Hajibeyli died in Baku in 1948. Every Azerbaijani composer who followed — from Gara Garayev to Franghiz Ali-Zadeh — walked some branch of the road he opened.