Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 149 h Diaghilev’s Scheherazade and Russian Orientalism The opera was called Leyli və Məcnun (‘Leyli and Majnun’); the music for it was composed by Uzeyir Hajibeyov (1885–1948), self-taught com- poser who used the folk story of pre-Islamic Arabia in the interpretation of sixteenth-century poet Fuzûlî. On the posters it was indicated that it was going to be performed for the first time ever ‘in the Muslim language’ ( на мусульманском языке ). This meant that it was going to be not in Russian, Tatar, Persian, or Italian but local Azeri. It is claimed to be the first European style opera in the Muslim world. All roles were performed by male singers, including that of Leili (Abdurrahman Farajev, apprentice at a Baku chaikha- na ), with Guseynkuli Sarabskiy (former street water seller) as Mejnun. The premiere met with quite a strong opposition from the local clerics, who were said to have organised an attack on Sarabskiy and put pressure on two violin- ists in the orchestra who announced their absence only two hours before the performance, so that Hajibeyov himself had to replace one of them. It was even more difficult to keep Farajev in the cast, so already for the second per- formance he had to be replaced by the brother of Hajibeyov’s cousin Ahmed Agdamsky who was later performing all other female roles: 24 Əsli ( Əsli və Kərəm ‘Asli and Kerem’), Gülnaz ( O olmasın, bu olsun ‘If Not That One, Then This One’), Gülçöhrə ( Arshin mal alan ), Minnat Xanım ( Ər və Arvad ‘Husband and Wife’), Təhminə ( Rüstəm və Söhrab ‘Rustam and Zohrab’), and Xurşid Banu ( Şah Abbas və Xurşid Banu ‘Shah Abbas and Khurshid Banu’). It is possible that the success of this opera encouraged in the same year of 1948 both Azerbaijani composers Fikret Amirov to write a symphony Nizami in memory of the poet Nizami Ganjavi and Gara Garayev to offer his own version of Leyli and Mejnun as a symphonic poem based on the interpretation of Nizami (1141–1209), who during Soviet times acquired the status of a cul- tural hero of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The aim was perhaps to overwhelm the fame of the pre-Soviet bourgeois Hajibeyov’s opera by the correct Soviet version composed by Gara Garayev, for which he was awarded the Stalin prize that year. 25 It is very symptomatic that the Leyli and Mejnun opera was performed in Baku for thirty years in the ‘Muslim language’ with permanent success, while Hajibeyov’s next muqam operas Sheikh S ən’an (‘Sheikh Sanan’, 1909), based on the interpretation of Persian legend by ʿAṭṭār (1145–1221) about a Sufi saint who falls in love with a Christian lady, and Rustam and Suhrab (1910) based on the most famous episode from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (‘Book of 24 Сарабский А. Г. Возникновение и развитие азербайджанского музыкального театра до 1917 года. Баку: Издательство АН АзССР, 1968. C. 57. 25 Frolova-Walker Marina. Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.. P. 230 and 288.