Ziad Rahbani, Composer Who Defined a Tragic Era in Lebanon, Dies at 69

New York Times

3 days ago

Ziad Rahbani, an era-defining Lebanese composer, playwright and musician whose songs forged a new sound for the Arab world and whose plays leveled biting critiques of his country's corrupted politics, died on Saturday in Lebanon after a long illness. He was 69.
His death was reported by Lebanon's government-run National News Agency.
Since Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war, from which it has never fully recovered, generations of Lebanese have grown up learning Mr. Rahbani's Arab-meets-Western songs by heart and quoting his satirical plays, such as 'A Long American Film' and 'What About Tomorrow?'
Those who came of age during the war, like Mr. Rahbani, saw in his pensive, sardonic lyrics the brutalities and contradictions of their tiny country on the Eastern Mediterranean as it tore itself apart. He remained beloved by Lebanese who grew up later, in the war's long shadow, when sectarian divides, corruption and economic malaise came to haunt Lebanese life.
Mr. Rahbani came from Lebanese music royalty. His mother, Fayrouz, is a living icon, considered one of the Arab world's greatest singers. His father, Assi Rahbani, was a pioneering composer, who, with his brother Mansour, wrote many of Fayrouz's songs. After his father's death, Ziad Rahbani later assumed the mantle of Fayrouz's chief composer, shifting her style late in her career.
In her earlier music, Fayrouz and the Rahbani brothers cast a golden-hued, nostalgic spell, weaving an idyllic vision of life in Lebanon's mountain villages in the prosperous days before war, displacement and upheaval tore the Middle East apart.
Ziad Rahbani's compositions for his mother and others were a departure in style and substance. In albums like 'Houdou Nisbi' and 'Abu Ali,' he blended the quarter tones and instruments of traditional Arab music with Western-style jazz and funk, once describing his music to an interviewer as 'Oriental jazz,' or 'something like a hamburger that tastes of falafel.'
Yet while he admired Western musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, he said, his music was Lebanese. It was music that spoke to Lebanon's distinctive position as an Arab society that embraced Europe and the West. Unlike his mother's earlier work, his songs hewed closer to the reality Lebanon's people lived.
'He left the so-called image of a unified Lebanon or the state of an ideal homeland for the state of a real, divided and fragmented Lebanon,' said Jad Ghosn, a journalist and filmmaker who made a 2019 documentary about Mr. Rahbani. 'He came after Fayrouz to say, 'Enough with the romantic art and enter into realistic art with jazz, contemporary music and realistic poetry.''
The ethereal Fayrouz floated above politics, a difficult feat in a country where most people are identified, and divided, for life by their religious and ethnic backgrounds.
But her son Ziad was avowedly political, though not in the way his Greek Orthodox Christian identity might have predicted. An avowed Communist, Mr. Rahbani long supported the Palestinian quest for rights and statehood. His ideas took shape, he said, after right-wing Christian militiamen besieged and massacred Palestinians in Lebanon's Tal el-Zaatar refugee camp in 1976, early in the civil war.
He lived with his parents across from the camp during the 53-day siege, and he later told an interviewer that he had surreptitiously recorded meetings between Syrian intelligence officers and right-wing Christian officials that took place at his parents' house so he could report them to pro-Palestinian groups.
Because he 'could not bear the situation,' he later told an interviewer, he decided to move to Muslim-dominated West Beirut and leave the family home in Christian-dominated East Beirut, where his pro-Palestinian stance made him unwelcome.
Ziad Rahbani was born in 1965 and grew up in Antelias, a coastal town north of Beirut. He began composing when he was around 7 years old, Mr. Ghosn said. By the time he was a teenager, he had already launched a career as a songwriter and musician.
The plays he wrote starting in his teens became famous for their sardonic takes on Lebanese politics and society, with humor dark as ink. In 'What About Tomorrow?' (or 'Belnesba Libokra Shou?' in Arabic), which Mr. Rahbani wrote, directed and starred in, in 1978, when he was 22, he depicted a couple struggling to run a bar in the trendy Hamra neighborhood of Beirut.
A grainy collage of footage taken during performances of the play was released in 2016 as a film, breaking box-office records in a Lebanon still struggling with many of the same roadblocks.
'They say tomorrow will be better, but what about today?' one character says, one of a number of Rahbani quotes that circulated among Lebanese on social media on Saturday after his death.
Lebanese politicians across the political spectrum paid tribute to Mr. Rahbani on Saturday. President Joseph Aoun called him 'a living conscience, a rebellious voice against injustice and an honest mirror for those who suffered and were marginalized,' adding, 'He wrote about people's pain and played on the strings of truth, without ambiguity.'
Yet many Lebanese social media users pointed out that such authority figures were exactly the type Mr. Rahbani spent his career skewering.
Later in life, Mr. Rahbani openly aligned himself with the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, celebrating the 2006 war with Israel in which the Iranian-backed militia fought the much better-armed Israelis to a draw. He also voiced support for former President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the dictator who brutally repressed his own people during Syria's civil war, which began in 2011 and ended with Mr. al-Assad's overthrow in December.
Such attitudes alienated some fans. But Mr. Rahbani was growing more bitter and alienated himself, despairing of Lebanon's prospects and increasingly socially isolated as he grew older. He had stopped answering most calls, Mr. Ghosn said, and had developed a liver condition.
Besides his mother, Fayrouz, he is survived by a brother, Haly, and a sister, Rima.