Uzeyir Hajibeyli

Uzeyir bey Abdul Huseyn oglu Hajibeyli was an Azerbaijani and Soviet composer, conductor, scientist, publicist, playwright, teacher, translator, and social figure. He is recognized as the father of Azerbaijani classical music and opera. Uzeyir Hajibeyli composed music for the national anthem of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (also the anthem of the modern Republic of Azerbaijan) as well as the state anthem of Azerbaijan SSR. Uzeyir Hajibeyli was born in September 18, 1885, Agjabadi. 

His father, Abdul Huseyn Hajibeyli, was the secretary to Khurshidbanu Natavan for many years, and his mother, Shirin, grew up in the Natavan household. Growing up, Hajibeyli was strongly influenced by Natavan's work. Shusha, often dubbed as the cradle of Azerbaijani music and culture, had a reputation for its musical heritage. The town was also referred to as "the Music Conservatory of the Caucasus" because of its many talented musicians and singers. 

And the fact that Hajibeyli grew up in Shusha explains how at 22, in 1908, with very little formal musical education, he was capable of writing a full-length opera. Hajibeyli received his early education in a religious school (madrasah), where he perfected his Arabic and Persian. Later he studied at a two-year Russian-Azerbaijani school. Here, with the help of his favorite teacher Mirza Mehdi Hasanzadeh, he familiarized himself with the heritage of the famous classic writers of the East and the West.

 The richness of the musical performance tradition of Shusha greatly influenced the musical education of Uzeyir Hajibeyli. He would later reflect on his experiences: "The first musical education I got as a child in Shusha came from best singers and saz-players. At that time I sang mugam`s and tasnif`s. The singers liked my voice. They would make me sing and taught me at the same time.

 Uzeyir Hajibeyli`s first teacher was his uncle Agalar Aliverdibayov, an excellent connoisseur of Azeri folk music. In 1897–1898, when Azerbaijani playwright Abdurrahman Hagverdiyev and singer Jabbar Garyagdyoglu staged the episode Majnun on Leyli's grave from “Leyli and Majnun”, 13-year old Uzeyir sang in the choir. From 1899 to 1904 Uzeyir Hajibeyli studied at the Gory Pedagogical Seminary. 

There, along with general education, he also acquired music. In this school Hajibeyli learned to play the violin, the violoncello and the brass instrument. After his graduation from the Pedagogical Seminary, Uzeyir Hajibeyli was appointed a teacher to the village of Hadrut in Upper Karabagh. Having worked there for a year, Hajibeyli permanently settled in Baku, where he carried on his career in teaching mathematics, geography, history, Azeri and Russian languages, and music.

 He wrote the Turkish-Russian and Russian-Turkish Dictionary of Political, Legal, Economic and Military Terms, used in Press in 1907 and the textbook Arithmetic Problems in 1908, and had them published by the Orujov Brothers Publishing House in Baku. Hajibeyli was no stranger to the tragic chaos of war; he lived through the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the fall of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan in 1920, and both World Wars.

 The political repercussions of these military conquests often manifested in other forms of chaos. For example between 1920 and 1940, the alphabet systems for writing Azeri were changed three times - from Arabic to Latin, and from Latin to Cyrillic a process which greatly hindered and interrupted the educational and cultural process and may well have been one of the factors influencing Uzeyir Hajibeyli to present his ideas verbally on the musical stage.

Throughout all the tumultuous change in Azerbaijan that took place between 1900 and 1940, one characteristic consistently reflects the character of Uzeyir Hajibeyli. He always searched for ways to merge and integrate the past with the present rather than to discard either form. Rather curiously, even files at the Gory Pedagogical Seminary have shown his persistence in holding on to his own roots even under pressure.

 On December 3, 1900, when he was 15, it is noted that "the student, Uzeyir Hajibeyli, was rebuked because he was talking in his native language." Conversely, when Russian-influenced musicians tried to ban traditional Azerbaijani instruments like the tar, zurna and kamancha. Hajibeyli and his colleagues pushed to incorporate them into the western orchestra, thereby, giving them an even higher status and ultimately a chance to survive.
In 1908, Hajibeyli wrote his first opera “Leyli and Majnun” based on the tragic love story by the 15th century poet Fuzuli.

 This would be the first of 7 operas and 3 musical comedies that Hajibeyli would compose throughout his life. In “Leyli and Majnun”, the uniqueness of the traditional modal music of mugam was incorporated into a western genre with the use of instruments indigenous to both traditions. Hajibeyli's second opera Sheikh Sanan was written in 1909 in a form that was entirely opposite to the first.

 This time Hajibeyli employed a purely european style. Sheikh Sanan received raves as a musical composition, but the content was too progressive for the period. In this opera, Hajibeyli advocated that marriage should not be bound by nationality or religion - in essence, it was another form of integration. But this time, it backfired. The story line follows a religious sheikh on his way to Mecca who meets a very beautiful Georgian lady. To his horror, the lovely creature's father turns out to be a swineherd, caring for what, to him, was a forbidden animal. In the end, the sheikh denounces his religion to win the woman. It is said that when the opera was performed, many people were offended and walked out, leaving Hajibeyli with the realization that he had outpaced his generation too much this time. As a result, he made a drastic decision and burned the score. 

When asked by Ramazan Khalilov, his assistant, how he could do that, Hajibeyli replied: "I didn't destroy my opera. It's my own creation so it's always in my head." Khalilov said that Hajibeyli went on to use this same magnificent music 27 years later to create, Koroghlu, an opera that many acclaim to be his finest. In 1908, Hajibeyli wrote his first opera “Leyli and Majnun” based on the tragic love story.

In contrast to Sheikh Sanan, Hajibeyli's operas “Rustam and Zohrab" (1910), “Asli and Karam” (1912), “Shah Abbas and Khurshudbanu” (1912), and “Harun and Leyli” (1915) were entirely based on Azeri folk music elements, primarily mugam.

In October 2006, the musical comedy “Arshin Mal Alan” ("The Cloth Peddler") by Uzeyir Hajibeyli, written in 1913, was announced to be performed on western stages for the first time. One of Hajibeyli's greatest legacies was bringing forward the idea of establishing a professional music school. Hence the Baku Academy of Music (known then as the Azerbaijan State Conservatoire), was founded in 1920 and named after Hajibeyli after his death. The school has trained Azerbaijan's finest composers such as Gara Garayev, Fikrat Amirov, Jovdat Hajiyev, Soltan Hajibeyov, Tofig Guliyev, and Vagif Mustafazadeh. 

His statue "sits" in front of this grand building that is still devoted to the synthesizing eastern and western musical traditions. In 1931, Hajibeyli helped in establishing the Azeri Folk Instruments Orchestra affiliated with the Radio Committee. This orchestra performed european classical pieces, such as those by Mikhail Glinka, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Georges Bizet and others. Hajibeyli thus was the first musician to adapt the note system to traditional Azeri musical instruments. In 1936, Hajibeyli assisted in founding of the Azerbaijani State Choir within the Azerbaijan Philharmonic Society. One of the most serious problems he faced was the mono-voiced repertoire of Azeri folk songs, which allowed harmonization distort style of the song and, on occasion, even alter the melody line when it changed modes. Hajibeyli resolved this problem by using contrapuntal polyphony and unison-doubling rather than four-part singing in the problematic sections. 

Hajibeyli devoted much energy to the idea of integrating woman's role and status into the male-dominated world. The concept of women's emancipation runs through many of his works often in the form of comedy or sanitization as in the case when he makes fun of the process of selecting marriage partners, a process hindered by the fact that women were still wearing veils until the 1920s when the Soviet regime prohibited them. From 1919 to 1920 Hajibeyli served as editor-in-chief for the newspaper Azerbaijan, the main governmental media body of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan. In 1927, Hajibeyli published Collection of Azerbaijani Folk Songs along with composer Muslim Magomayev. For the first time, more than 300 pieces of Azeri folk music were documented by notation.

 In 1945, he published the book entitled The Basis of Folk Music in Azerbaijan, which has been translated into several languages including English. Hajibeyli was the creator of the first operas and operettas in the Orient. In 1938, he was awarded with the title of People's Artist of the USSR. During the entire Soviet history, only three or four Azerbaijani musicians ever attained this level. He was also honored with the Order of Lenin and the State Stalin Prize which he won twice, once in 1941 for the opera Koroghlu (1936), and the other time in 1946 for the 1945 film based on his opera “Arshin mal alan”.

 Hajibeyli was a professor at the Baku Academy of Music (of which he was also head in 1928–1929 and 1939–1948) and Active Member of the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan. For the last 10 years of his life, he was Chairman of the Union of Azerbaijani Composers. Hajibeyli joined the Communist Party in 1938. He served twice as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the highest legislative institution in the Union. Hajibeyli died of diabetes at the age of 63. He is buried in Fakhri Khiyaban (Cemetery of the Honoured) in Baku.