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| Umm Kulthum |
 |
| Background information |
| Birth name |
Umm Kulthum Ebrahim Elbeltagi |
| Also known as |
Oum Kalthoum, Om Kalsoum, Om Koulsum, Om Kalthoum, Oumme Kalsoum, Umm Kolthoum, Om Koultoum |
| Born |
December 30, 1898
Tamay Ez-Zahayra, El Senbellawein, Dakahlia Governorate,Egypt |
| Died |
February 3, 1975 (aged 76)
Cairo, Egypt |
| Genres |
Arabic classical music |
| Occupations |
Singer, actress |
| Years active |
c. 1924–73 |
| Labels |
EMI Arabia |
| Associated acts |
Fairuz
Abdel Halim Hafez
Mohammed Abdel Wahab
Maria Callas |
Umm Kulthum (
Arabic:
أم كلثوم
ʾUmm Kulṯūm;
Egyptian Arabic pronunciation: [omme kælˈsuːm]; born
فاطمة إبراهيم السيد البلتاجي Fātimah ʾIbrāhīm as-Sayyid al-Biltāǧī,
[ˈfɑtˤmɑ (ʔe)bɾˤɑˈhiːm esˈsæjjed elbelˈtæːɡi]; see
Kunya) (December 30, 1898
[citation needed]–February 3, 1975) was an
Egyptian singer,
songwriter, and
actress. Born in Tamay ez-Zahayra village, which belongs to
El Senbellawein, she is known as "the star of the East" (
kawkab el-sharq). More than three decades after her death, she is widely regarded as the greatest female singer in Arab music history.
[1]
Biography
Early life
Zinah Umm Kulthum was born in Tamay ez-Zahayra village in
El Senbellawein,
Dakahlia Governorate, Egypt, in
Dakahlia, in the
Nile Delta,
near the Mediterranean Sea. Her birth date is unconfirmed, as birth
registration was not enforced throughout the Arab world. The Egyptian
Ministry of Information seems to have given either December 31, 1898, or
December 31, 1904.
[2] She was likely born some time between these two dates.
At a young age, she showed exceptional singing talent. Her father, an
Imam, taught her to recite the
Qur'an,
and she is said to have memorized the entire book. When she was 12
years old, her father disguised her as a young boy and entered her in a
small performing troupe that he directed. At the age of 16, she was
noticed by
Mohamed Aboul Ela, a modestly famous singer, who taught her the old classical repertoire. A few years later, she met the famous composer and
oudist Zakariyya Ahmad, who invited her to come to
Cairo.
Although she made several visits to Cairo in the early 1920s, she
waited until 1923 before permanently moving there. She was invited on
several occasions to the house of Amin Beh Al Mahdy, who taught her how
to play the oud, a type of lute. She developed a very close relationship
to Rawheya Al Mahdi, daughter of Amin, and became her closest friend.
Kulthum even attended Rawheya's daughter's wedding, although she always
tried to avoid public appearances.
Amin Al Mahdi introduced her to the cultural circles in Cairo. In
Cairo, she carefully avoided succumbing to the attractions of the
bohemian
lifestyle, and indeed, throughout her life, stressed her pride in her
humble origins and espousal of conservative values. She also maintained a
tightly managed public image, which undoubtedly added to her allure.
At this point in her career, she was introduced to the famous poet
Ahmad Rami, who wrote 137 songs for her. Rami also introduced her to
French literature, which he greatly admired from his studies at the
Sorbonne,
Paris, and eventually became her head mentor in
Arabic literature and literary analysis. Furthermore, she was introduced to the renowned
oud virtuoso and composer
Mohamed El Qasabgi.
El Qasabgi introduced Umm Kulthum to the Arabic Theatre Palace, where
she would experience her first real public success. In 1932, her fame
increased to the point where she embarked upon a large tour of the
Middle East, touring such cities as
Damascus, Syria;
Baghdad, Iraq;
Beirut and
Tripoli, Lebanon.
Fame
Umm Kulthum's establishment as one of the most famous and popular
Arab singers was driven by several factors. During her early career
years, she faced staunch competition from two prominent singers:
Mounira El Mahdeya
and Fathiyya Ahmad, who had equally beautiful and powerful voices.
However, Mounira had poor control over her voice, and Fathiyya lacked
the emotive vocal impact that Umm Kulthum's voice had. The presence of
all these enabling vocal characteristics attracted the most famous
composers, musicians, and lyricists to work with Umm Kulthum.
In the mid-1920s, Mohammad el Qasabgi, who was the most virtuosic oud
player and one of the most accomplished yet understated Arab composers
of the 20th century, formed her small orchestra (
takht),
composed of the most virtuosic instrumentalists. Furthermore, unlike
most of her contemporary artists who held private concerts, Umm
Kulthum's performances were open to the general public, which
contributed to the transition from classical, and often elitist, to
popular Arabic music.
By 1934, Umm Kulthum must have been one of the most famous singers in
Egypt to be chosen as the artist to inaugurate Radio Cairo with her
voice on May 31. Over the second half of the 1930s, two initiatives
sealed the fate of Umm Kulthum as the most popular and famous Arab
singer: her appearances in musical movies and the live broadcasting of
her concerts performed on the first Thursday of each month of her
musical season from October to June. Her influence kept growing and
expanding beyond the artistic scene: the reigning royal family would
request private concerts and even attend her public performances.
In 1944,
King Farouk I of Egypt decorated her with the highest level of orders (
nishan el kamal),
a decoration reserved exclusively to members of the royal family and
politicians. Despite this recognition, the royal family rigidly opposed
her potential marriage to the King's uncle, a rejection that deeply
wounded her pride and led her to distance herself from the royal family
and embrace grassroots causes, such as her answering the request of the
Egyptian legion trapped in
Falujah during the
1948 Arab-Israeli conflict
to sing a particular song. Among the army men trapped were the figures
who were going to lead the bloodless revolution of July 23, 1952,
prominently
Gamal Abdel Nasser, who arguably was a fan of Umm Kulthum and who would later become the president of Egypt.
Early after the revolution, the Egyptian musicians guild of which she
became a member (and eventually president) rejected her because she had
sung for the then-deposed King Farouk of Egypt. When Nasser discovered
that her songs were forbidden from being aired on the radio, he
reportedly said something to the effect of "What are they, crazy? Do you
want Egypt to turn against us?"
[4]
It was his favor that made the musicians' guild accept her back into
the fold; but it is uncertain if that happened. In addition, Umm Kulthum
was a dedicated Egyptian patriot since the time of King Farouk. Some
claim that Umm Kulthum's popularity helped Nasser's political agenda.
For example, Nasser's speeches and other government messages were
frequently broadcast immediately after Umm Kulthum's monthly radio
concerts. Umm Kulthum was also known for her continuous contributions to
charity works for the Egyptian military efforts. Umm Kulthum's monthly
concerts took place on the first Thursday of every month and were
renowned for their ability to clear the streets of some of the world's
most populous cities as people rushed home to tune in.
Her songs deal mostly with the universal themes of love, longing and
loss. They are nothing short of epic in scale, with durations measured
in hours rather than minutes. A typical Umm Kulthum concert consisted of
the performance of two or three songs over a period of three to four
hours. In the late 1960s, due to her age and weakened vocal abilities,
she began to shorten her performances to two songs over a period of
two-and-a-half to three hours. These performances are in some ways
reminiscent of the structure of Western
opera,
consisting of long vocal passages linked by shorter orchestral
interludes. However, Umm Kulthum was not stylistically influenced by
opera, and she sang solo most of her career.
During the 1930s, her repertoire took the first of several specific
stylistic directions. Her songs were virtuosic, as befit her newly
trained and very capable voice, and romantic and modern in musical
style, feeding the prevailing currents in Egyptian popular culture of
the time. She worked extensively with texts by romantic poet
Ahmad Rami and composer Mohammad El-Qasabgi, whose songs incorporated European instruments such as the
violoncello and
double bass, as well as
harmony.
Golden age
Umm Kulthum's musical directions in the 1940s and early 1950s and her
mature performing style led this period to becoming popularly known as
"the golden age" of Umm Kulthum. In keeping with changing popular taste
as well as her own artistic inclinations, in the early 1940s, she
requested songs from composer
Zakariya Ahmad and colloquial poet
Mahmud Bayram el-Tunsi
cast in styles considered to be indigenously Egyptian. This represented
a dramatic departure from the modernist romantic songs of the 1930s,
mainly led by Mohammad El-Qasabgi. Umm Kulthum had abstained from
singing Qasabgi's music since the early 1940s. Their last stage song
collaboration in 1941 was "Raq el Habib" ("The Lover's Heart Softens"),
one of her most popular, intricate, and high-caliber songs.
The reason for the separation is not clear. It is speculated that this was due in part to the popular failure of the movie
Aida,
in which Umm Kulthum sings mostly Qasabgi's compositions, including the
first part of the opera. Qasabgi was experimenting with Arabic music,
under the influence of classical European music, and was composing a lot
for
Asmahan,
a singer who immigrated to Egypt from Lebanon and was the only serious
competitor for Umm Kulthum before Asmahan's tragic death in a car
accident in 1944.
Simultaneously, Umm Kulthum started to rely heavily on a younger
composer who joined her artistic team a few years earlier: Riad
El-Sombati. While Sombati was evidently influenced by Qasabgi in those
early years, the melodic lines he composed were more lyrical and more
acceptable to Umm Kulthum's audience. The result of collaborations with
Rami/Sombati and al-Tunisi/Ahmad was a populist and popular repertoire
that had lasting appeal for the Egyptian audience.
Umm Kulthum singing around 1960
In 1946, Umm Kulthum defied all odds by presenting a religious poem
in classical Arabic during one of her monthly concerts, "Salou Qalbi"
("Ask My Heart"), written by
Ahmad Shawqi
and composed by Sombati. The success was immediate. It reconnected Umm
Kulthum with her early singing years, defined Sombati's unique style in
composing and established him as the best composer of music for poems in
classical Arabic, toppling
Mohammed Abdel Wahab.
Similar poems written by Shawqi were subsequently composed by Sombati
and sung by Umm Kulthum, including "Woulida el Houda" ("The Prophet is
Born"; 1949), in which she raised eyebrows of royalists by singing a
verse that describes the
Prophet Mohammad as "the
Imam of
Socialists".
At the peak of her career, in 1950, Umm Kulthum sang Sombati's
composition of excerpts of what Ahmad Rami considered the accomplishment
of his career: the translation into classical Arabic of
Omar Khayyám's quartets (
Rubayyiat el Khayyam). The song included quartets that dealt with both
epicurism and redemption.
Ibrahim Nagi's poem "Al-Atlal" ("The Ruins"), composed by Sonbati and premiered in 1966, is considered by many
[who?]
as Umm Kulthum's best song. While this is debatable, as Umm Kulthum's
vocal abilities had regressed considerably by then, the song can be
viewed as the last example of genuine Arabic music at a time when even
Umm Kulthum had started to compromise by singing Western-influenced
pieces composed by her old rival Mohammed Abdel Wahab.
The duration of Umm Kulthum's songs in performance was not fixed, but
varied based on the level of emotive interaction between the singer and
her audience and Umm Kulthum's own mood for creativity. An
improvisatory technique, which was typical of old classical Arabic
singing, and which she wonderfully executed for as long as she could
have (both her regressing vocal abilities with age and the increased
Westernization of Arabic music became an impediment to this art), was to
repeat a single line or stance over and over, subtly altering the
emotive emphasis and intensity and exploring one or various musical
modal scales (
maqām) each time to bring her audiences into a euphoric and ecstatic state.
[citation needed] For example, the available live performances (about 30) of
Ya Zalemni, one of her most popular songs, varied in length from 45 to 90 minutes, depending on both her creative mood for
improvisations
and the audience request for more repetitions, illustrating the dynamic
relationship between the singer and the audience as they fed off each
other's emotional energy.
The spontaneous creativity of Umm Kulthum as a singer is most
impressive when, upon listening to these many different renditions of
the same song over a time span of five years (1954–1959), the listener
is offered a totally unique and different experience. This intense,
highly personalized relationship was undoubtedly one of the reasons for
Umm Kulthum's tremendous success as an artist. Worth noting though that
the length of a performance did not necessarily reflect either its
quality or the improvisatory creativity of Umm Kulthum. Some of her best
performances were 25-45 minutes in duration, such as the three
available renditions, including the commercial version of
El Awwila Fi'l Gharam ("First in Love"), and
Ana Fi Intizarak
("I am waiting for you"), (commercial and 3-3-1955 performance). On the
other hand, her songs as of the mid-1960s would extend sometimes over a
duration of two hours (premiere of
Enta Omri,
Enta el Hobb,
etc.); however, the repetitions, mostly executed upon the request of
the audience, were often devoid of creative musical improvisations and
limited to vocal colorful variations on a syllable, letter or word.
Around 1965, Umm Kulthum started cooperating with composer Mohammed
Abdel Wahab. Her first song composed by Abdel Wahab, "Enta Omri" (You
are my Life"), was considered the "summit meeting". Several beautiful
songs composed by Abdel Wahab followed, such as "Amal Hayati" ("The Hope
of my Life"), "Fakkarouni" ("They reminded Me"), and others.
Umm Kulthum also sang for composers Mohammad El Mougi and Sayyed Mikkawi.
Legacy
Monument to Umm Kulthum in
Zamalek,
Cairo. It is located on the site of the former house of the singer.
Umm Kulthum has been a significant influence on a number of musicians, both in the
Arab World and beyond. Among others,
Jah Wobble has claimed her as a significant influence on his work.
Bob Dylan has been quoted as saying, "She's great. She really is. Really great."
[5][6] Maria Callas,
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Marie Laforêt,
Salvador Dalí,
Nico,
Bono,
Farin Urlaub, and
Led Zeppelin are also known to be admirers of Kulthum's music.
[citation needed] Youssou N'Dour, a fan of hers since childhood, recorded his 2004 album
Egypt with an Egyptian orchestra in homage to her legacy.
[7]
One of her best-known songs, "Enta Omri", has been the basis of many
reinterpretations, including one 2005 collaborative project involving
Israeli and Egyptian artists.
She was referred to as the Lady by
Charles de Gaulle and is regarded as the Incomparable Voice by
Maria Callas.
Umm Kulthum is remembered in Egypt, the Middle East, and the Arab world
as one of the greatest singers and musicians to have ever lived. It is
difficult to accurately measure her vocal range at its peak, as most of
her songs were recorded live, and she was careful not to strain her
voice due to the extended length of her songs. Even today, she has
retained a near-mythical status among young Egyptians. She is also
notably popular in Israel among
Jews (of
Mizrahi/
Arab background) and
Arabs
alike, and her records continue to sell about a million copies a year.
In 2001, the Egyptian government opened the Kawkab al-Sharq (Star of the
East) Museum in the singer's memory. Housed in a pavilion on the
grounds of Cairo's Manesterly Palace, the collection includes a range of
Umm Kulthum's personal possessions, including her trademark sunglasses
and scarves, along with photographs, recordings, and other archival
material.
[8]
Voice
Kulthum had a
contralto vocal range.
[9]
It is known that she had the ability to sing as low as the second
octave, as well as the ability to sing as high as between the seventh
and the eighth octaves at her vocal peak;
[citation needed]
yet she also could easily sing over a range surpassing two octaves near
the end of her career. Her ability to produce approximately 14,000
vibrations per second with her
vocal cords[citation needed],
her unparalleled vocal strength (no commercial microphone utilized for
singing could withstand its strength, forcing her to stand at a 1- to
3-meter radius away from one
[citation needed]),
and her voice surpassed convention arguably made her one of the most
incomparable voices in the world. Her ability and capability to sing
every single
Arabic scale made her one of only five women in the history of the Arab world to be able to do this, along with
Asmahan,
Fairouz,
Sabah, and the late
Thekra.
[citation needed]
Selected discography
- Aghadan alqak ("Shall I see you tomorrow?") maqam ajam (1971)
- Ana Fi Entezarak ("I am waiting for you") (1943)
- Alf Leila wa Leila ("One Thousand and One Nights").....maqam nahawand (1969)
- Arouh li Meen or Arook Lemeen ("Whom Should I Go To").......maqam rast (1958)
- Al Atlal ("The Ruins")......maqam huzam (1966)
- Amal Hayati"; Sono ("Hope of My Life") (1965)
- Ansak Ya Salam ("Forget you? Come on!") (1961) maqam rast
- Aqbal al-layl ("Night has arrived") (1969)
- Araka asiya al-dam ("I see you refusing to cry") (1964)
- 'Awwidt 'ayni ("I accustomed my eyes") (1957) maqam kurd
- Baeed Anak ("Away From You").......maqam bayyati (1965)
- Betfaker fi Meen ("Who Are You Thinking Of?").....maqam bayati (1963)
- Dalili Ehtar ("I am lost") (1955) maqam kurd
- Dhikrayatun (Qessat Hobbi or the story of my love) ("memories") (1955)
- El Hobb Kolloh ("All The Love").......maqam rast (1971)
- Ental Hobb ("You Are The Love").......maqam nahwand (1965)
- Enta Omri – Sono ("You Are the love of my life")........ maqam kurd (1964)
- Es'al Rouhak ("Ask yourself") maqam hugaz kar (1970)
- Fakarouni ("They reminded me").......maqam rast (1966)
- Fit al-ma' ad ("It Is Too Late" or "the rendezvous is over") Sono Cairo.......maqam sikah (1967)
- Gharib' Ala Bab erraja ("Stranger at the door of hope") (1955)
- Ghulubt asalih ("Tired of forgiving") (1946)
- Hadeeth el Rouh ("The Talk of The Soul")......maqam kurd (1967)
- Hagartek or Hajartak ("I left You") EMI (1959)
- Hasibak lil-zaman ("I will leave you to Time") (1962)
- Hathehe Laylati ("This is My Night")......maqam bayyati (1968)
- Hayart Albi Ma'ak ("You Confused My Heart")......maqam nahwand (1961)
- Hakam 'alayna al-haw'a ("Love has ordered me") (1973)
- Hobb Eih ("Which Love").....maqam bayyati (1960)
- Howwa Sahih El-Hawa Ghallab ("Is love really stronger?") (1960) maqam saba
- Kull al-ahabbah ("All the friends") (1941)
- La Diva – CD, EMI Arabia, 1998
- La Diva II – CD, EMI Arabia, 1998
- La Diva III – CD, EMI Arabia, 1998
- La Diva IV – CD, EMI Arabia, 1998
- La Diva V – CD, EMI Arabia, 1998
- Leilet Hobb ("a Night of Love") (1973) maqam nahawand
- Lel Sabr Hedod ("Patience Has Limits")......maqam sikah (1964)
- Lessa Faker ("You Still Remember").......maqam ajam (1960)
- Men Agl Aynayk ("For your eyes") (1972)
- Othkorene ("Remember Me") (1939)
- Raq il Habeeb ("My Beloved Tendered Back") (1941)
- Retrospective – Artists Arabes Associes
- Rihab al-huda (al-Thulathiyah al-Muqaddisah) ("the paths to repentance or the holy trinity") (1972)
- Rubaiyat Al-Khayyam ("Quatrains of Omar Khayyám").......maqam rast (1950)
- Sirat el Houb ("Tale of Love").......maqam sikah (1964)
- Toof we Shoof ("Wander and wonder") (1963)
- The Classics – CD, EMI Arabia, 2001
- Wi-darit il-ayyam ("And Time Passed By").......maqam nahwand (1970)
- Ya Karawan ("O Plover") (1926)
- Yali Kan Yashqiq Anini ("You who enjoyed my cries") (1949)
- Ya Msaharny ("You that keeps me awake at night") (1972) maqam rast
- Ya Zalemny ("You who were unjust to me") (1954) maqam kurd
- Zalamna El Hob ("We Have Sinned Against Love") (1962)