Creating Azerbaijani Opera: Emulation and Adaptation

• In Event: Music, Modernity, and the Nation on the Fringes of Late Tsarist Russia: Perspectives from the Caucasus and Manchuria

Abstract

In 1908, the young composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov debuted Leyli and Majnun at the Taghiyev Theater in Baku, marking the first performance of an opera composed by a Muslim. The Azerbaijani-language press celebrated this moment as a watershed for the cultural development of not just the Muslim community of the southern Caucasus, but for the whole Islamic world. Uzeyir Hajibeyov was joined by his brother Zulfuqar Hajibeyov and Muslim Maqomayev to form a small cohort of composers dedicated to the creation of an Azerbaijani opera culture. The operas and operettas they produced did not just emulate the European genre, but adapted it to fit Azerbaijani cultural sensibilities. Their pieces fused classical Azerbaijani mugham with European-style opera and drew on Persian and Shi’a Muslim performance traditions such as naqqali and taziyeh. This paper analyzes the cultural adaptations made in late-imperial Azerbaijani operas and operettas and argues that Azerbaijanis used musical innovation as a means to assert their place within both a global and Russian imperial bourgeois culture.

Author

• Kelsey Rice, Berry College