Hajibeyov [Gadzhibekov], Uzeir (Abdul Huseyn)

(b Agjabedï, nr Shusha, 17 Sept 1885; d Baku, 23 Nov 1948). Azerbaijani composer, musicologist and teacher. He was the founder of modern art music in Azerbaijan and of a national school of composers. It was while he was at the teachers’ seminary in Gori (1899–1904) that his youthful interest in folk music developed into a professional one, for he sang in the choir as a baritone, played the violin, the cello and folk instruments and also began to compose. From 1905 he lived in Baku, where he worked as a teacher, engaged in compiling textbooks and dictionaries, translated Gogol into Azerbaijani and published newspaper articles on issues of the day, criticizing retrograde social attitudes. In 1907 he created the first opera of eastern Islam, Leyli i Mejnun, in which only the parts for chorus and European orchestral instruments were fixed. For the majority of cases he indicated only mugam and certain features of improvisational performance, using folksongs as well as mugam for his material. Within the next five years he had produced a further four examples of mugam opera.

In 1911 and 1912 Hajibeyov attended private courses in Moscow with Ladukhin for solfège and Sokolov for harmony; in 1913 he entered the organ class of the St Petersburg Conservatory and studied harmony with Kalafati. While in the capital he wrote his best musical comedy, Arshin mal alan, in which, as in his previous comedies, he reflected the morality of pre-Revolution Azerbaijan and satirized its patriarchal-feudal customs. In Azerbaijan the arias, couplets and dances of the work became accepted as folk music. Having returned to Baku in 1914, Hajibeyov became director of the arts section of the Red Army’s political administration after the October Revolution, and then director of the National Commissariat of Enlightenment. He was also one of the founders, and from 1938 permanent director, of the city’s conservatory. During the post-Revolution years he acquired a greater public, proving in both articles and compositions the originality and value of Azerbaijani music while protesting against the musical isolation of any nation; for him, Azerbaijani composers had to master European techniques as well as develop their own traditions.

The first collection of Azerbaijani folksongs, edited by Hajibeyov and Mahomayev, came out in 1927. A year earlier Hajibeyov had organized a polyphonic choir, a bold innovation at a time when monody was still dominant in Azerbaijani musical culture; in 1931 he formed the first orchestra of Azerbaijani folk instrumentalists playing from notation; and in 1936 he established the State Choir. His compositions of the 1930s included mass songs and marches, fantasias, the trio Ashug sayagï (the first chamber work based on Azerbaijani mugam) and choral pieces, while at the same time he worked on the basic research for his study Osnovï azerbaydzhanskoy narodnoy muzïki (‘The foundations of Azerbaijani folk music’). But his most important work of this period was the epic-heroic opera Kyor-oglï, a more mature work than any of his previous dramatic compositions in which he succeeded in achieving the synthesis he desired of European operatic forms with the national melos: of Western with Eastern principles of development. The text is based on episodes from the Azerbaijani epic about Kyor-oglï, the leader of a peasant uprising and an ashug (folk musician); accordingly, his musical material is based on ashug intonations. The opera presents themes which concerned its composer all his life: art, love and his nation’s struggle for freedom.

In 1941 Kyor-oglï won Hajibeyov a State Prize of the USSR; he had already been made a National Artist of the USSR in 1938, and in 1946 he won a second State Prize for the film version of Arshin mal alan. He wrote marches and battle songs for World War II, and during the war years made re-creations of the heroic genres of national music (jengi and gakhraman) and wrote the music for the national anthem of the Azerbaijani SSR. He was elected to the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences in 1945, the same year that he was appointed director of the Institute of the History of Azerbaijani Art. In 1947, for the eighth centenary of the poet Nizami, he composed the remarkable romance-gazelles Sensiz (‘Without You’) and Sevgili janan (‘The Beloved’).

Hajibeyov’s achievement was to prove the possibility of combining the traditions of Azerbaijani folk music with those of European art music. The singlemindedness with which he pursued this aim is clearly evident from his early mugam operas through to Kyor-oglï: from recitational constructions to a completely original folk-style work. His constant striving towards the unification of Eastern and Western sources, both philosophical and aesthetic, shows as much in the historical-legendary operas, celebrating the strength and beauty of human feelings, as in the musical comedies on social themes; and his success owed something to the fact that he was a gifted writer and wrote most of his own librettos. The theory of Azerbaijani folk modes he established is reflected in his compositional work. Indeed, his style is notable for its modal thought, which influences the principle of thematic development; national traits are particularly evident in his melodies, with their modality, cadences, sequences and so on, for the most part in a descending movement. He introduced many new genres into Azerbaijani music, and his greatest work, Kyor-oglï, proved a particularly important model: its monumental and dramatic choral scenes contained the seeds for the cantatas and oratorios of later Azerbaijani composers, and its numerous dance numbers prepared the way for the evolution of a national ballet. There is a Hajibeyov archive at the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijani SSR (manuscript stocks M-22).

WORKS

Edition: U. Hajibeyov: Sochineniya (Baku, 1964–8)

(selective list)

WRITINGS

Osnovï azerbaydzhanskoy narodnoy muzïki [The foundations of Azerbaijani folk music] (Baku, 1945)

O muzïkal'nom iskusstve azerbaydzhana [On Azerbaijani musical art] (Baku, 1966) [collection of articles]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Vinogradov: Uzeir gadzhibekov i azerbaydzhanskaya muzïka (Moscow, 1938)

Arshin mal alan (Baku, 1938) [collection of articles]

Izvestiya Akademii nauk azerbaydzhanskoy SSR (1945), no.9; (1948), no.12 [special nos.]

S. Korev: Uzeir Gadzhibekov i yego operï (Moscow, 1952)

Ye. Abasova: Operï i muzïkal'nïye komedii Uzeira gadzhibekova (Baku, 1961)

I. Abezgauz: ‘Melodicheskiy stil' Uz. Gadzhibekova v opere “Kyoroglï”’, Uchyonïye zapiski Azerbaydzhanskoy gosudarstvennoy konservatorii (1968), no.5, pp.3–48

Z. Safarova: Muzïkal'no-ėsticheskiye vzglyadï Uzeira Gadzhibekova (Moscow, 1973)

Ye. Abasova: Uzeir Hajibeyov (Baku, 1975)

Z. Kafarova: ‘Kyor-ogli’ Uzeira Gadzhibekova (Baku, 1981)

A. Isazadeh, ed.: Slovo ob Uzeira Gadzhibekova [A word about Uzeir Hajibeyov] (Baku, 1985) [articles, memoirs and recollections]

Z. Safarova: Uzeir Gadzhibekov (Baku, 1985)

M. Ibrahimov: Tufanlara komek edan bir galam: Uzeir Hajibeyov shahsiyati va yaradijiligi [The pen that helps the storms: the personality and art of Uzeir Hajibeyov] (Baku, 1987)

YURY GABAY