Umm Kulthum

Umm Kulthum as a toddler, with her father Ibrahim El Beltagi

Umm Kulthum was born in the village of Tamay e-Zahayra, belonging to the city of Senbellawein, Dakahlia Governorate, in the Nile Delta[4] to a family with a religious background as her father Ibrahim El-Sayyid El-Beltagi was an imam from the Egyptian countryside, her mother was Fatmah El-Maleegi, a housewife.[4] She learned how to sing by listening to her father teach her older brother, Khalid. From a young age, she showed exceptional singing talent. Through her father, she learned to recite the Qur'an, and she reportedly memorized the entire book.[4] Her grandfather was also a well known reader of the Qur'an and she remembered how the villagers used to listen to him when he recited the Qur'an.[12] When she was 12 years old, having noticed her strength in singing, her father asked her to join the family ensemble, upon which she joined as a supporting voice, at the beginning just repeating what the others sang.[13] On stage, she wore a boy's cloak and bedouin head covering in order to alleviate her father's anxiety about her reputation and public performance.[13] At the age of 16, she was noticed by Mohamed Abo Al-Ela, a modestly famous singer, who taught her the old classical Arabic repertoire. A few years later, she met the famous composer and oudist Zakariyya Ahmad, who took her to Cairo. Although she made several visits to Cairo in the early 1920s, she waited until 1923 before permanently moving there. She was invited on several occasions to the home of Amin Beh Al Mahdy, who taught her to play the oud, a type of lute. She developed a close relationship with Rawheya Al-Mahdi, Amin's daughter, and became her closest friend. Umm Kulthum even attended Rawheya's daughter's wedding, although she ordinarily preferred not to appear in public (offstage).

During her early career years, she faced staunch competition from two prominent singers: Mounira El Mahdeya and Fathiyya Ahmad, who had similar voices. El Mahdeya's friend, who worked as an editor at Al-Masra, several times suggested that Umm Kulthum must have married one of the guests who frequently visited her household, to the extent that her father decided to return to the village they came from together with his family.[14] Her father would only change his mind upon the persuasive arguments of Amin Al Mahdi.[14] Following Umm Kulthum made a public statement regarding visits in her household, which she announced she would not receive.[15] in 1923 she struck a contract with Odeon records which by 1926 would pay her more than any other Egyptian musical artist per record.[16]

Umm Kulthum with some of the most prominent names in Egyptian classical music. From left: Riad Al Sunbati, Mohamed El Qasabgi, Farid al-Atrash and Zakariya Ahmad.

Umm Kulthum's musical directions in the 1940s and early 1950s and her mature performing style led this period to becoming popularly known as "the golden age" of Umm Kulthum. In keeping with changing popular taste as well as her own artistic inclinations, in the early 1940s, she requested songs from composer Zakariya Ahmad and colloquial poet Mahmud Bayram el-Tunsi cast in styles considered to be indigenously Egyptian. This represented a dramatic departure from the modernist romantic songs of the 1930s, mainly led by Mohammad El-Qasabgi. Umm Kulthum had abstained from singing Qasabgi's music since the early 1940s. Their last stage song collaboration in 1941 was "Raq el Habib" ("The lover's heart softens"), one of her most popular, intricate, and high-caliber songs.

The reason for the separation is not clear. It is speculated that this was due in part to the popular failure of the movie Aida, in which Umm Kulthum sings mostly Qasabgi's compositions, including the first part of the opera. Qasabgi was experimenting with Arabic music, under the influence of classical European music, and was composing a lot for Asmahan, a singer who immigrated to Egypt from Syria and was the only serious competitor for Umm Kulthum before Asmahan's death in a car accident in 1944.

Simultaneously, Umm Kulthum started to rely heavily on a younger composer who joined her artistic team a few years earlier: Riad Al-Sunbati. While Sonbati was evidently influenced by Qasabgi in those early years, the melodic lines he composed were more lyrical and more acceptable to Umm Kulthum's audience. The result of collaborations with Rami/Sonbati and al-Tunisi/Ahmad was a populist and popular repertoire that had lasting appeal for the Egyptian audience.

In 1946, Umm Kulthum defied all odds by presenting a religious poem in classical Arabic. Salou Qalbi ["Ask My Heart"] was written by Ahmad Shawqi and composed by Ryad Al Sunbati.[7] The success was immediate and it reconnected Umm Kulthum with her early singing years. Similar poems written by Shawqi were subsequently composed by Sonbati and sung by Umm Kulthum, including Woulida el Houda ["The Prophet is Born"] 1949), in which she surprised royalists by singing a verse that describes Muhammad as "the Imam of Socialists". At the peak of her career, in 1950, Umm Kulthum sang Sonbati's composition of excerpts of what Ahmad Rami considered the accomplishment of his career: the translation from Persian into classical Arabic of Omar Khayyám's quatrains (Rubayyiat el Khayyam). The song included quatrains that deal with both epicurianism and redemption. Ibrahim Nagi's poem "Al-Atlal" ["The Ruins"] was sung by Umm Kalthum in a personal version and in a melody composed by Sonbati and premiered in 1966, is considered a signature song of hers.[7] As Umm Kulthum's vocal abilities had regressed considerably by then, the song can be viewed as the last example of genuine Arabic music at a time when even Umm Kulthum had started to compromise by singing Western-influenced pieces composed by her old rival Mohammed Abdel Wahab. The duration of Umm Kulthum's songs in performance was not fixed as upon the audience request for more repetitions, she would repeat the lines requested at length and her performances usually lasted for up to five hours, during which three songs were sung.[13] For example, the available live performances (about 30) of Ya Zalemni, one of her most popular songs, varied in length from 45 to 90 minutes, depending on both her creative mood for improvisations, illustrating the dynamic relationship between the singer and the audience as they fed off each other's emotional energy. An improvisatory technique, which was typical of old classical Arabic singing, and which she executed for as long as she could have (both her regressing vocal abilities with age and the increased Westernization of Arabic music became an impediment to this art), was to repeat a single line or stance over and over, subtly altering the emotive emphasis and intensity and exploring one or various musical modal scales (maqām) each time to bring her audiences into a euphoric and ecstatic state known in Arabic as "tarab" طرب.[13] Her concerts used to broadcast from Thursday 9.30 P.M., until the early morning hours on Friday.[7]

Umm Kulthum greeting filmmaker Mahmoud Zulfikar in Cairo, 1958

The spontaneous creativity of Umm Kulthum as a singer is most impressive when, upon listening to these many different renditions of the same song over a time span of five years (1954–1959), the listener is offered a totally unique and different experience. This intense, highly personalized relationship was undoubtedly one of the reasons for Umm Kulthum's tremendous success as an artist. Worth noting though that the length of a performance did not necessarily reflect either its quality or the improvisatory creativity of Umm Kulthum. Around 1965, Umm Kulthum started collaborating with composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab. Her first song composed by Abdel Wahab, "Enta Omri" ["You Are My Life"]. According to Frédéric Lagrange, professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris and specialist in Arab music, "this is an urban legend spread by ill-informed people who would rather check the reality of their information before publishing it"[29].Another source mentions the creation of a song of war.[30] Laura Lohman[31] has identified several other war songs created for her in that same period. In 1969 it was followed by another, Asbaha al-Ana 'indi Bunduqiyyah ["I now have a rifle"].[32] Her songs took on more a soul-searching quality in 1967 following the defeat of Egypt during the Six-Day War. Hadeeth el Rouh ["sermon of the soul"], which is a translation from the poet Mohammad Iqbal's "Shikwa", set up a very reflective tone. Generals in the audience are said to have been left in tears. Following the formation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1971, she staged several concerts upon invitation of its first president Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan to celebrate the event.[33]

Umm Kulthum also sang for composers Mohammad El Mougi, Sayed Mekawy, and Baligh Hamdi.

Funeral procession for Umm Kulthum in Cairo

Umm Kulthum died on 3 February 1975 aged 76, from kidney failure before she could finish and sing her two songs ''Awkaty btehlaw ma'aak wa hyaty btekmal b'redak'' and another song that she asked for the poet Saleh Goudet to write for her to sing to commemorate the victory of Egypt in the October War (also known as: Yom kippur war) against Israel. She died before she was able to perform it on the second anniversary of the war. Her funeral procession was held at the Omar Makram mosque and became a national event, with around 4 million[34] Egyptians lining the streets to catch a glimpse as her cortège passed.[3] Her funeral's attendance drew a greater audience than the one of the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.[35][19] In the area where the funeral procession took place, traffic was cut off two hours ahead of the procession. The mourners would also wrest the casket from the shoulders of its bearers, force the procession to change its direction[19] and brought her coffin to the prominent Al Azhar mosque.[25] She was buried in a Mausoleum close to the Mausoleum of Imam al-Shafi'i in the City of the Dead in Cairo.[22] Her death was a great tragedy for the country and also acquired international media attention as news of her death was reported by the American Times magazine and the German Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine.

Umm Kulthum was a contralto.[46] Contralto singers are uncommon and sing in the lowest register of the female voice.[47] According to some, she had the ability to sing as low as the second octave and as high as the eighth octave at her vocal peak. Her incredible vocal strength, with the ability to produce 14,000 vibrations per second with her vocal chords, required her to stand three feet away from the microphone.[48] She was known to be able to improvise and it was said that she would not sing a line the same way twice.[13] She was a student of Abu al-Ila Muhammad from soon after she arrived in Cairo to when he died in 1927. He taught her to adapt her voice to the meaning and the melody in a traditional Arabic aesthetic.[49]