The First Eastern Opera "Leyli and Majnun"

Uzeyir Hajibeyov and his wife Maleka in 1926

Leyli and Majnun was first performed on 12 January 1908 (25 January in the modern calendar). Ninety-five years later the opera remains a popular fixture in the repertoire of the Azerbaijan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre.

Uzeyir Hajibayov made Azerbaijani opera history when he composed Leyli and Majnun. The opera is based on Azerbaijani mugam and folklore, which gives it originality and endears it to audiences.

Birth of an Opera

Shusha, 1898: a 13-year-old boy watches a dramatization of the story of Majnun at Leyli’s Tombstone. He is astonished at the performance of the amateur actors. That boy was Uzeyir Hajibayov. Remembering the occasion, the great composer wrote: "That performance affected me so much that when I came to Baku years later, I decided to write something like that." So, Leyli and Majnun was born in the heart of 13-year-old Uzeyir in 1898.

The opera’s first director was Huseyn Arablinski and its first conductor was Abdurahimbey Hagverdiyev, a famous Azerbaijani writer. All the parts were played by men, as at that time women were not allowed to perform on stage.

Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich

Born on 27 March 1927 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mstislav Rostropovich began musical studies in early childhood with his parents. His mother was an accomplished pianist, and his father a distinguished cellist who had studied with Pablo Casals. At the age of sixteen he entered the Moscow Conservatory where he studied composition with Prokofiev and Shostakovich. In 1945 he came to prominence overnight as a cellist when he won the gold medal in the first ever Soviet Union competition for young musicians. Thereafter, despite his continued battle with the communist authorities, he became one of the central figures of the music life there, for twenty five years inspiring Soviet cellists, composers and audiences alike.

Due to international recording contracts and foreign tours, Mstislav Rostropovich also came to the attention of the West. He recorded nearly the entire cello literature during this time and attracted an unprecedented large quantity of new repertoire for the instrument through his personal contact to composers such as Benjamin Britten, who wrote his Cello Symphony, his Sonata for Cello and Piano and the three Suites for Solo Cello especially with Rostropovich in mind. Other composers who have written for Rostropovich include Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Boulez, Berio, Messiaen, Schnittke, Bernstein, Dutilleux and Lutoslawski.