Sayed Darwish

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Sayed Darwish (17 March 1892 – 1939) was an Egyptian singer and composer who was regarded as the father of Egyptian popular music and one of Egypt's top musicians and its single greatest composer.

Darwish died of a heart attack in Alexandria on September 15th, aged 31.

He is still regarded as a hero and adored figure in Egyptian history.

Early life

Sayed Darwish was born in Kôm el-Dikka Alexandria on 17 March 1892. His family could not afford to pay for his education, so he was sent to a religious academy where he mastered the Quran's recitation, studying under Muhammad Salamah. Sheikh Sayyed Darwish, the religious school's founder, spent two years at al-Azhar, one of the world's most renowned religious universities. He left his studies to dedicate his life to music composition and singing, then enrolled in a music academy, where his music teacher admired his abilities and encouraged Darwish to continue in the music industry.

Darwish was also trained to be a munshid (cantor). He worked as a bricklayer to help his family, but it so happened that the owner of a theatrical company, the Syrian Attalah Brothers, overheard him singing for his fellows and recruited him on the spot. He had the opportunity to pursue a musical education while touring in Syria, but not in a way that had no success. He returned to Egypt before the Great War, and gained little attention by performing in the cafés and on various stages as he developed his repertoire of the great composers of the 19th century, to which he added adwr (musical modes) and muwashsha (Arabic poetic-form compositions) of his own. Despite the intelligence of his compositions, he was unlikely to achieve public recognition, disadvantaged by his poor stage presence in comparison to such actors as Sâlih 'Abd al-Hayy's or Zakî Murâd.

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Career

After too many failures in singing cafés, in 1918 he decided to follow the path of Shaykh Salama Higâzî, the pioneer of Arabic lyric theater (AAA 085) and launched into an operatic career. He settled in Cairo and got acquainted with the main companies, particularly Nagîb al-Rîhanî's (1891–1949), for whom he composed seven operettas. This gifted comedian had invented, with the playwright and poet Badî' Khayrî, the laughable character of Kish Kish Bey, a rich provincial mayor squandering his fortune in Cairo with ill-reputed women... The apparition of social matters and the allusions to the political situation of colonial Egypt (the 1919 "revolution") were to boost the success of the trio's operettas, such as "al-'Ashara al-Tayyiba" (The Ten of Diamonds, 1920) a nationalistic adaptation of 'Blubeard".

Sayyid also worked for Rihânî's rival troupe, 'Alî al-Kassâr's, and eventually collaborated with the Queen of Stages, singer and actress Munîra al-Mahdiyya (1884–1965), for whom he composed comic operettas such as "kullaha yawmayn" ("All of two days", 1920) and started an opera, "Cleopatra and Mark Anthony", which was to be played in 1927 with Muhammad 'Abd al-Wahhâb in the leading role. In the early twenties, all the companies sought his help. He decided to start his own company, acting at last on stage in a lead part. His two creations ("Shahrazâd' and "al-Barûka", 1921) weren't as successful as planned, and he was again forced to compose for other companies from 1922 until his premature death on 15 September 1923.

Darwîsh's stage production is often clearly westernized: the traditional takht is replaced by a European ensemble, conducted by il Signore Casio, Darwish's maestro. Most of his operetta tunes use musical modes compatible with the piano, even if some vocal sections use other intervals, and the singing techniques employed in those compositions reveal a fascination for Italian opera, naively imitated in a cascade of oriental melismas. The light ditties of the comic plays are, from the modern point of view, much more interesting than the great opera-style arias. A number of those light melodies originally composed for al-Rihânî or al-Kassâr are now part of the Egyptian folklore. Such songs as "Salma ya Salâma, "Zurûni koll-e sana marra or EI helwa di qâmet te'gen" are known by all Middle-Easterners and have been sung by modern singers, as the Lebanese Fayrûz or Syrian Sabâh Fakhrî, in reorchestrated versions. Aside from this light production, Sayyid Darwîsh didn't neglect the learned repertoire, he composed about twenty muwashshahât, often played by modern conservatories and sung by Fayrûz. But his major contribution to the turn-of-the-century learned music is better understood through the ten adwâr (long metric composition in colloquial Arabic) he composed.

Whereas in the traditional aesthetics defined in the second part of the 19th century, the dôr was built as a semi-composition, a canvas upon which a creative interpreter had to develop a personal rendition, Darwish was the first Egyptian composer to reduce drastically the extemporizing task left to the singer and the instrumental cast. Even the "ahât", this traditionally improvised section of sighs, were composed by Darwîsh in an interesting attempt of figuralism. Anecdotic arpeggios and chromaticism were for his contemporaries a token of modernism, but could be more severely judged nowadays.

Sayyid Darwish was personally recorded by three companies: Mechian, a small local record company founded by an Armenian immigrant, which engraved the Shaykh's voice between 1914 and 1920; Odeon, the German company, which recorded extensively his light theatrical repertoire in 1922; Baidaphon, which recorded three adwâr around 1922. His works sung by other voices are to be found on numerous records made by all the companies operating in early 20th-century Egypt.

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