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In Baghdad, There's Little Romance in Music by Candlelight

26/12/2002 |

 

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 25 — The musicians of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, elegant in black tie or long black skirts, were just settling into their places on the final night of their Christmas week concerts when the electricity failed and the performance hall was plunged into darkness.

For a while afterward, the performance unrolled with a dreamlike quality. A note from the oboe floated through the pitch black, guiding the players tuning their instruments, until candles affixed to the music stands illuminated their scores. The musicians played an initial overture and then the tenor soloist, Emad Jamil, sang the Agnus Dei from Bizet's "L'Arlésienne."

Versatile bands provide powerful resistance training but with each turn of the sheet music, the players grew increasingly nervous about the risk of igniting the barely legible pages. So they stopped before the final Bach piano concerto.

"We might as well have been playing in Bach's time," Mr. Jamil later joked ruefully. "But at least I could forget myself in the music. For a short period of time there was nothing but music. It's very hard living with the thought that soon we will have another war."

Baghdad used to pride itself as the living soul of "1,001 Nights," a cosmopolitan place where sophisticated music, theater or cabaret acts spun on long into the night, and where the Iraqi middle class kept every publisher in the Arab world afloat.

Since the beginning of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in 1980, however, Iraqis have ricocheted from one crisis to the next. The once thriving middle class has been groping through an especially long dark night of plunging living standards since economic sanctions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Now they find themselves bracing for yet another conflagration in which they have little voice. In response, they cling to what normalcy they can, defiant one minute and utterly gloomy the next.

"In life, sorrow tends to last just a little longer than joy," said Abdul Razak al-Alawi, who helped found the orchestra in 1950 and has been its conductor since 1974. His son and daughter, elementary school students, died in 1985 when their home took a direct hit from an Iranian missile.

"So we try to just touch the joy to alleviate the sorrow."

Most Iraqis seek any brief escape, although even the jokes tend to swirl around their desperation. Audiences have been packing the National Theater every night for a show called "Vagabonds," which gently mocks Iraqis for having become a nation of beggars.

The show starts with a beleaguered intellectual staggering on stage and waving a book while lamenting, "People just want to eat and earn money; nobody is thinking about reading."

A gyrating belly dancer replaces him, caterwauling about her rise from penury to plenitude. Baghdadi intellectuals bemoan the fact that most of what passes for a play these days is thin on plot and long — up to four hours long — on song-and-dance.

Much of it is slapstick. When the dancer's handlers say they need to change her name to enhance her attractiveness, one character suggests they name her after any brand of Iraqi beer. Some jokes poke fun at the tendency of Iraqi television — one of 14 available channels — to play bootlegged American movies.

But the loudest laughs come for characters who reflect the sad changes that have beset a once wealthy country, like the man reduced to selling plastic bags.

"Imagine the difficulty of making people laugh after 20 years of war and 12 years of sanctions," says Abed Ali Qaed, the show's writer and director, weighing in with his own twist on an oft-heard political remark, "The conspiracy against our people by the Zionists and the Americans is to kill our ability to laugh."

Iraqis sense they are caught in a twilight zone. The Draconian sanctions imposed in 1990 were alleviated somewhat by an oil-for-food program started in 1996, but virtually everything the country wants to buy must be approved by the United Nations.

When the last two passengers holding up a plane from Amman to Baghdad were stopped at security, the officer rummaging endlessly through their bags asked the airline agent, "Are they journalists?"

"Of course, they are journalists," the agent shot back. "Who else would want to go to Baghdad?"

Sahar N. Kharrufa, a Baghdad University architecture professor, finds that his students have a far narrower view of life than previously. "They have never been to a museum, never been to a theater, never been to the movies, nor to a library," he says. "The general quality of all these kinds of places has degraded."

Abdul Sattar Jawad, chairman of the university's English department, comes back from a class teaching Sophocles' Theban Plays and offers herbal tea. Asked what the term "regime change" — the Bush administration's phrase for ousting Saddam Hussein — means to him, he scoffs.

"This is wishful thinking," he said, saying real respect for human rights should mean the United Nations would lift its sanctions. "What is the benefit of changing the regime if you bring another group of quislings?"

It is difficult to gauge the mood in Baghdad toward what the Bush administration says and does about Iraq. Virtually every interview for this article took place in the presence of one of the shepherds from the Ministry of Information who guide the flock of foreign journalists.

No doubt Iraqis dread the deprivations another war would bring, and few would want to be American colonial subjects. But in unguarded moments — in parking lots and elevators and amidst grocery store shelves — they will suddenly let rip with an unvarnished opinion.

"If it weren't for the Americans, the prisons would not have been emptied," said one man, referring to the general amnesty the government granted in October.

Another points to a typically crumbling cement apartment block with broken windows and says, "This should be the richest country in the world, so why are people living like that?"

The story of Iraq's lone symphony orchestra follows the arc of the country's development and subsequent decay. Formed with a few strings, woodwinds and horns, by the early 1970's it blossomed into a full 70-piece orchestra with 20 to 30 foreign members.

It has by now shrunk to some 45 musicians. Big booming pieces like much of Tchaikovsky, Brahms's Fourth Symphony or Beethoven's "Eroica" are out of reach. Most of the best instruments have been taken abroad for sale, and replacement parts are rare and costly.

When the orchestra started, its members got the then princely sum of 10 dinars, or $30, a month. Now they get 25,000 dinars, which is worth $12. That's a little less than the cost of a new set of strings.

Every member of the orchestra has another job. The tenor grinds coffee beans. One horn player drives a cab. The man who plays the bassoon also fixes electric heaters.

They try to give one concert a month, but sometimes too many miss practice because of their jobs. The audience turns up faithfully whenever they perform.

"The good musicians have all retired or left Iraq," said one man in his 60's, a patron for decades. "Still, it's better than spending a lonely evening at home where you don't know when the electricity might be cut."

Moments after he spoke on Monday night, the power failed in the performance hall. Mr. Jamil, the tenor, stepped to the edge of the stage before his solo to say the candlelight made the night seem blessed, expressing his wishes for a Merry Christmas and a far happier New Year for all.

"Everybody always makes wishes, but nothing ever changes," said a voice in English from the dark.

Neil McFarquhar
New York Times