Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 140 h Firuza Melville during his journey through the Caucasus in 1823. 16 This particular tune was still extremely popular when Hajibeyov was composing his Arşın mal alan (‘Fabric Salesman’) and so he implemented it for a female chorus. The same motif was used by Johann Strauss in his Persischer Marsch (‘Persian March’), which he composed first to be performed during his ninth Russian summer season of 1864 in Pavlovsk, outside St Petersburg. However, later he dedicated it to Naser al-Din Shah Qajar when he visited Vienna in December that year, for which Strauss received from the Shah the Persian ‘Order of the Lion and the Sun’. 17 It is quite possible that Strauss deliberately wanted to establish the link between his piece and that of Glinka, who was famous for his Russophile ideas in music, as a tribute to the country where he had such a triumph. Paradoxically, he chose for such a Russian national link Glinka’s Persian music of Turkic origin. 16 There are two more suggestions how Glinka could acquire this tune: one during the visit of Khosrow Mirza who arrived to St Petersburg from Tabriz in 1829 as the head of the Redemption mission after the massacre of Griboedov’s mission in Tehran. According to the other one, Glinka heard this song from ‘a Persian-born secretary’ of the Russian Foreign Office (Taruskin R. Defin- ing Russia Musically. 2000. P. 172). 17 Curiously, nine years later when Naser al-Din Shah Qajar came back to Vienna to visit the 1873 World’s Fair, this march was performed as Persian national anthem. What is even more notable is that its influence was quite pronounced in the real national anthem of Persia (1896–1933) which Naser al- Din Shah commissioned to the French composer Jean Baptiste Lemaire (1842–1907), who spent the rest of his life in Persia after his arrival in 1867 to help with reorganizing the Shah’s military orchestras. Pl. 12. Valentin Serov, Portrait of Ida Rubenstein, 1910, 233 × 147 cm © State Russian Museum