Translated material
Muslim Magomayev died
Singer, songwriter and born artist Muslim Magomayev was born on August 17, 1942 in Baku. Almost everyone in his family is professional musicians. At the age of three, Muslim was picking out melodies on the piano. At five I composed a song. I never thought about what to be in life - of course, a musician. He probably could have become not only a singer, but also a dramatic actor, composer, and pianist. That same talented person who is “talented in everything.”
Having successfully performed abroad, in the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s, Magomayev achieved some completely abnormal fame. Worship of Magomayev is hysteria, spreading like an epidemic. Throughout the Soviet Union. He was, as they would say now, a sex symbol. Mothers of today's thirty-year-olds fell in love with Magomayev. It was impossible to get to the concerts. The listeners liked everything about him: the way he sings, the way he looks, the way he behaves, and what he sings. The perfect artist and the perfect gentleman. And yet, when applied to Magomayev, the expression “sex symbol” turns out to be superficial and inaccurate.
The fact that his concerts were packed is nothing unusual for us, today's music lovers: almost any more or less good group, singer or singer packs a stadium. We go, we are fans, we get a lot of pleasant impressions. We admire the show, the image, the atmosphere, the “not giving a damn” and how “crazy they all are.” But they made it to Magomayev’s concerts precisely to listen to the music.
This was that rare Soviet pop music that the most notorious rock fan and Westerner would not be ashamed or bored to listen to. Because, if you think about it, this is neither “pop” nor “Soviet”, but real art. Magomayev is a true phenomenon who easily broke many stereotypes of mass culture. A bright oriental man, as they would say now, “an intelligent macho,” but how rude, rude it all is... Azerbaijani by origin, he combined East, West, Europe and the Union, rock and roll and classics in his work. This could have been called the fashionable term world music, if such a term existed then. It is not strange that Magomayev gained his first success in the West, at the VIII World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki. A large delegation arrived from the USSR to the Finnish capital, the Azerbaijan Radio and Television Orchestra led by Tofik Akhmedov, and Magomayev was the only soloist. In 1964, Magomayev was lucky to get an internship at La Scala in Milan.
Magomayev performed in the opera with great success. No one performed the role of Mozart's Figaro with such artistry as he did. But he chose not the classics, but the so-called light music, the song genre, which gave reason to narrow-minded aesthetes and purists to lament: oh, well, with such and such a voice - and sing songs... They did not care at all that The songs are basically a miracle, how good and varied, and Magomayev sings them, sincerely enjoying and not sparing his vocal cords at all. In the end, what is left of Magomayev? In addition to the legend, there are a bunch of excellent recordings from which you can imagine what this is all about - a “song of the twentieth century.” His repertoire combined the incongruous: songs by Soviet composers (immortal hits from Arno Babajanyan, Alexandra Pakhmutova and Oscar Feltsman), opera arias, Neapolitan songs, even rock. He was the first to perform a song by The Beatles on the Soviet big stage. It was Yesterday, the authors of which entertainer Anna Chekhova announced funny: “Lenn about n-McCartney.” If he had only done this, he would have already deserved a monument. And this is only a small episode in his grandiose history. But the singer did not like his famous “Wedding” (they joked that if Magomaev had performed only this and only at weddings, he would have lived well), which he admitted a couple of years ago in a television interview.
Farewell to People's Artist of the USSR Muslim Magomayev will take place on October 28 at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall.