Pneumonia Claims Mansour Rahbani, Lebanese Composer, at 83
Renowned Lebanese composer Mansour Rahbani died Tuesday following a bout of pneumonia, leaving a legacy of innovation in the music and theater of Lebanon and the wider Arab world. He was 83. For much of his career, Rahbani was known for his decades-long collaboration with his brother Assi – who was himself married to legendary Lebanese diva Fairouz. The Rahbani Brothers composed numerous songs and plays for her, many of which became hugely popular with Arab audiences.
“We have lost the last of the great ones,” remarked Lebanese poet and playwright Paul Shawul. “Mansour has joined his second half, Assi,” who died in 1986.
“You cannot talk about Mansour alone,” Shawul continued. The Rahbani Brothers “created a musical revolution that brought with it an innovative extension to the pioneers of Arabic music.”
As with many creative collaborations, the question sometimes arose as to how the Rahbani Brothers’ genius was distributed. It was claimed, for instance, that Mansour Rahbani “discovered” Fairouz. In fact, says Fairouz authority Ines Weinrich, a research associate at Beirut’s German Orient Institute, the Lebanese diva was “multiply discovered.”
She was first found by Muhammad Fleifel, then again by Halim al-Roumi (the father of diva Majida al-Roumi), who claims he introduced Fairouz and Assi Rahbani in 1951. “Fairouz got her musical training from them,” Weinrich told The Daily Star, “before being ‘discovered’ by the Rahbanis in 1949-50.”
In her 2006 book on the three-way collaboration, “Fairouz and the Rahbani Brothers: Music Modernity and Nation,” Weinrich remarks that – though their fans liked to say Assi and Mansour’s work was inseparable – the two men did have different tendencies.
Both wrote poetry – Assi in dialect, Mansour in literary Arabic. Assi was fond of 6th-and 7th-century poetry and folk music. Mansour preferred to compose for very large orchestras, especially toward the end of his career with Fairouz.
Mansour himself wrote in Al-Wasat magazine that, when the brothers co-wrote their plays, Mansour would work on one scene, Assi the next. Then they would exchange their work for corrections.
Contemporaries remarked that Mansour was a more adept organizer than Assi, and brought structure to their work. This was particularly important when Assi suffered post-stroke brain damage in 1972. Impatient with the rigors of teaching himself to write again, Assi dictated his work to Mansour.
The brothers had endured an impoverished childhood. According to Lebanese poet Henri Zoughaib’s Rahbani Brothers biography, their father played the oud at local coffee shops to make ends meet. Much of the brothers’ work focused on themes of village life, growing up, love and patriotism.
“Assi and Mansour made Arabic and Lebanese music belong to the modern world. They composed poetry that transcended the time period in which they were born,” said Akl Aweet, poet and culture editor of local daily An-Nahar.
Weinrich concurs that the duo did make a great contribution to regional music. In the 1940s and ’50s, she says, they contributed to the diversification of the Lebanese music scene by introducing such new elements as rumba, foxtrot, and bossa nova to their palette of folk music and muwashahat. They made Lebanese music more international, reflecting the cosmopolitan current that was moving through the region at the time, and opened the Lebanese dialect to a wider audience.
“The Rahbani brothers and Fairouz created a unique school which brought old songs back to life and introduced new ones,” said playwright Nidal al-Ashkar. “They created musicals that portrayed Lebanese village life and weaved in famous Arab historical figures as characters such as Zenobia [the 3rd-century queen of Palmyra].”
The brothers’ real genius, Weinrich added, was evident at the social level – in an ability to transpose traditional Lebanese folk music to a new context.
She said this genius had ideological ramifications. Rural Lebanon played a major role in Lebanese nationalism – poets like Gibran Khalil Gibran wrote a lot about the countryside. The Rahbani Brothers’ compositions play with these old forms but modified them, sped them up. They used mawal, an improvisational genre, but they composed them, with just a hint of the improvised element.
The local elite saw rural music as unsophisticated, Weinrich said. Like their colleagues in the early 1950s Zaki Nassif and Tawfiq Basha – who brought dabke to the stage of the Baalbek Festival – the brothers made rural forms acceptable to urbanites.
The duo wrote several acclaimed musicals, including “Season of Glory” (1960), “A Love Poem” (1973), “Petra” (1977) and “Biyaa al-Khawatem” (The Ring Seller – 1964), which was adapted on screen by Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine.
The music did change over the years. The compositions in the 1950s was very heterogeneous, Weinrich said, using many different international styles. From the late ’50s until 1966 the music became almost exclusively Lebanese.
It was a reflection of the times. In the wake of the 1958 troubles (aka “civil war”), armed forces commander General Fuad Shihab retired from the military and was appointed president of the republic. During his single term in office, he introduced several measures aimed at integrating Lebanese Muslims so that they could feel like full citizens.
In 1966 the brothers’ work opened up to more pan-Arab themes. “The Days of Fakhr al-Din,” for instance, took the story of the 16-17th-century Lebanese emir and gave it an Arab (that is, an anti-imperialist) reading.
Fairouz had been singing about Palestine since 1955, with the song “Rajaaoun” (“We will Return”), Weinrich said, but these earlier songs were unlike those of the late 1960s. They weren’t revolutionary but more honest and realistic. They addressed loss, especially the beauty of the land, and promised to return.
Like everywhere else in the region, the Rahbani brothers’ work became more political after 1967. The plays in the ’50s were like fairy tales, where the little village was a microcosm of Lebanon. In the late ’60s, Weinrich observed, the plays moved to the city, telling stories that were less lyrical, more direct, even brutal.
Fairouz and the brothers went their separate ways in 1979 – the brothers working with other female singers and Fairouz turning to her son, composer Ziyad Rahbani.
Assi died in 1986 but Mansour continued to compose musical stage plays for large orchestra, including “Legacy,” “Kings of the Sects” and “Socrates.” His most recent work, “The Return of the Phoenix,” opened in the summer of 2008 and is still being performed in Lebanon.
“Mansour was a great man,” Ashkar said, “and was able to keep giving creatively to the end of his life.”
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