Fairuz recorded nearly fifteen hundred songs across six decades
Lebanese singer Nouhad Haddad, known as Fairuz, began in late-1940s radio choruses and exploded with the 1952 hit Itab. Across more than sixty years she logged nearly 1,500 songs, over eighty albums, twenty musicals and more than 150 million records sold worldwide.
Nouhad Haddad was born in Beirut to a Syriac Orthodox and Maronite family. Her father, Wadie, an Assyrian from Mardin in today's Turkey, had fled the Sayfo massacres and set type in a print shop; her mother came from a Mount Lebanon village. By ten she was known at school for her unusual voice. In February 1950 Mohammed Flayfel, a teacher at the Lebanese Conservatory, heard her at a school show, began coaching her in pitch and poetic form, and brought her to Halim el Roumi, head of the national radio, who noticed she could handle both Arabic and Western modes.
At the station she met two staff musicians, the brothers Assi and Mansour Rahbani. Assi began writing for her, and the third song he gave her became her breakthrough. Together the trio pulled Lebanese music out from under the dominant Egyptian template, weaving in Western sounds. She married Assi, and their son Ziad later became her composer.
Her first big concert came at the Baalbeck festival in 1957, under President Camille Chamoun's patronage; she was paid a single Lebanese pound but became a festival fixture. A 1971 North American tour made her internationally famous, and she went on to headline the Albert Hall, Carnegie Hall and the Paris Olympia. When Assi suffered a brain haemorrhage on 22 September 1972, crowds held candlelit vigils outside the hospital.
During the civil war of 1975 to 1990, which killed some 150,000 people, she refused to move abroad, yet gave no concerts at home except the operetta Petra, staged in both halves of divided Beirut in 1978. After the artistic split with the Rahbani brothers in 1979 she worked with Ziad, lyricist Joseph Harb and composer Philemon Wahbi. When Assi died in 1986, Beirut's factions called a ceasefire so his funeral could pass. Admirers call her the Bird of the East and the Cedar of Lebanon.
Source: Fairuz
