Born on this day in 1885: Uzeyir Hajibeyov, and in Azerbaijan the date has become National Music Day, which feels right for a man who spent his life getting a whole tradition onto paper without squeezing the life out of it.
Think about the room in Baku in 1908, at the premiere of Leyli and Majnun. On one side of the bar line, an orchestra reading parts. On the other, mugham singers doing what mugham singers do, opening a phrase out and taking their time inside it, the way the best players always find a little more room than the chart allows. Hajibeyov wrote the frame and left the window open. It is called the first opera composed in the Muslim East, and it came from Nizami's poem, a story people already knew by heart before anyone handed them a score.
He went on to write the melody that carries Azerbaijan's national anthem, and the anthem sung there through the Soviet years as well. He died in 1948. But the part I keep coming back to is the notating: sitting down with music that had always been passed ear to ear, teacher to student, and finding a way to hold it still without stopping it.
Otis, that first Baku house in 1908 was a commercial theatre with a small stage and a young, largely male audience, and the women's parts were sung by men — Leyli included. It took a few more years before women appeared in those roles, and the singers who broke that ground deserve their names on the bill too.
Otis, the lovers had already travelled a long way before 1908: an old Arabic cycle of poems about Qays the madman, gathered into Persian verse by Nizami in the twelfth century, then retold in Turkic by Nasimi's successors and by Fuzuli, whose version many in that Baku audience would have known by heart. Sufi readers had long taken Majnun's ruin as a figure for love of God.