Ziad Rahbani: Farewell to a Genius in Full Bloom

Some extremists have held that music is an undeserved gift, an unnecessary addition to the business of living. Yet despite the many who might wish for deafness in the face of those who were, in music's long register, nothing more than mercenary stonemasons — and despite the temptation to embrace a kind of atheism toward the heresies of poor performance — one must concede that a rare and intimate understanding has always existed between melody and those few who are struck by genuine talent. Ziad Rahbani was one of them. In such artists, music's waves fuse the senses together without any intermediary, lifting them to the summit of their craft. With them, beauty is made whole. They arrive, in their pioneering, as if from temples where the incense itself is a form of composition.

From the moment his consciousness first formed, Ziad Rahbani was searching — for his musical self, for the meaning of his artistic gift, for his relationship to pure melody. The artistic substance that remained his primary concern, before any other, until his final breath, bears witness to this lifelong search. Perhaps Ziad knew, even in the womb, that the life of music was the life to which he had been called.

It has been said that Ziad Rahbani's boldness of position manifested as boldness of mastery. But his talent did not exist simply to compose — it existed to act upon music: to grant it freedom, liberation, renewal. The worst of all errors, in his view, was to suffocate music in the ignorance of convention. And so, although Ziad trained rigorously in the foundations of the musical arts — its rules, its conditions, its inherited forms, as all serious students must — he ultimately committed a kind of rupture, a breaking free. But it was a breaking free that carried within it excellence, innovation, skill, and taste, distinguishing him sharply from the many rebels against tradition who fell instead into a careless randomness that exposed their limits rather than their genius.

Ziad mastered the body of music itself. He honored the notes' right to interact, to develop by degrees, to fuse into a compact and agile unity. He honored the smooth, fluid feeling that moves between the parts of a phrase, creating an atmosphere of solidarity between the musical modes and their effect as they infiltrate the ear — drawing out the beauty of the performed melody and placing the listener in a state of excessive admiration and deep resonance. This quality perhaps arises from what can only be called a unity between the composer and his composition, an artistic sincerity that produces nothing less than creation itself.

In Ziad's compositional structures, passages move from one rhythm to another, from one beat to the next. He determined their threads himself, weaving his own temperament into their shapes, until what emerged was a spellbinding canvas that spoke in pure miracle. To wander through Ziad's musical archive is to discover his true message: as much as he was a composer who possessed extraordinary creative gifts, he was also a researcher propelled by a relentless momentum toward all that was new. With him flourished a movement of renewal that invested fully in the full scale of instruments and voices, making his compositions drift through an imaginative atmosphere so vivid it made the ear jealous of the eye.

Some denied the value of what Ziad's musical imagination produced. They considered that what this "reckless revolutionary" brought forth carried more danger to the continuity of music than it offered in useful innovation. His school, in their view, transgressed against the familiar, colonized strangeness, and dressed itself in an obsessive quality that made music twist its neck in discomfort, frustration, and anxiety — as though it had been composed by someone who had drunk until he overflowed, utterly intoxicated. But these critics, for all their democratic right to express their opinions, failed to notice the transcendent dimension in Ziad's music — a dimension that sparked a remarkable renaissance, and one that left behind, in music's quiver, works performed by choirs and orchestras on stages across the world, and which continue to be performed to this day.

Ziad Rahbani never regarded his theater as a constrained form in the traditional sense. He refused to allow it to become a mere sign that could be confined within a definition. His theater was a portrait whose essence was creation, freedom, knowledge, stance, and audacity. When ideas collide in his text, when positions attract or repel one another, when they strive to live through each other, the true test emerges: an intelligent and magnetic invention, filled with dynamism and the capacity to reconcile the audience with reality, producing astonishment and resonance. His audiences were of flesh and blood — or they were the active element that provoked a tremor, a thunder carrying the blades of spears. The flat ceiling of the stage was transformed, with Ziad, into a vaulted dome of insight, cry, wisdom, revolution, and the intimate realism of human nature — drawing him squarely into the circle of applied social science.