Fairouz, the last living legend of Arabic song, celebrated his 90th birthday on Thursday while his country, the Lebanon he celebrated so much, is mired in a deadly war between Hezbollah and Israel.
Internet users set the Internet on fire by spreading the diva’s songs, a rare symbol of national unity in the divided country, while media outlets everywhere paid tribute to her.
In 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron, visiting Beirut, visited Fairouz’s house and decorated her with the Legion of Honor.
“To the one who worthily embodies the soul of this region, happy birthday,” he wrote on his Instagram account on Thursday.
“The voice of Fairouz is my country,” famous Lebanese composer Marcel Khalife wrote on Facebook.
“I love you, oh Lebanon, my country.”
Having performed for more than half a century from Beirut to Las Vegas, via Paris and London, the star has not appeared in public for more than a decade.
“When you look at Lebanon today, you see that it’s nothing like the Lebanon I sing about,” the diva lamented in an interview with the New York Times in 1999, referring to decades of war and destruction.
At the height of the civil war, he sang “I love you, oh Lebanon, my country” (“Bhebbak ya Lebnane”), a song that has become iconic.
Fairouz praised his native Lebanon but also love, freedom and Palestine.
He gave life to the words of great Arab poets – the Lebanese Gibrane Khalil Gibrane, Saïd Akl or the Egyptian Ahmed Chawki – while his patriotic songs have remained engraved in the memory of the Lebanese and the rest of the Arab world.
Nouhad Haddad, his real name, was born in 1934 into a modest Christian family living in the Zokak el-Blatt district, the target of an Israeli attack on Monday.
youth icon
Faced with the radio, the composer Halim al-Roumi, impressed, gave him his nickname.
In the 1950s, she married the composer Assi Rahbani who, with his brother Mansour, revolutionized traditional Arabic song and music by mixing Western, Russian and Latin American classical pieces with Eastern rhythms, with modern orchestration.
After his first concerts at the Baalbeck International Festival, amid the ruins of this ancient Lebanese site near which Israeli bombs are currently falling, Fairouz’s career took off.
Adored by her elders, she became the icon of young people when her son Ziad, enfant terrible of Lebanese music, composed songs for her influenced by the rhythms of jazz.
Source: BFM TV
