Milestones

Abdel Halim Hafez

Name: Abdel Halim Hafez – Fatet Ganbena
Item: Fatet Ganbena
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Fatet Ganbena

1974 (Soutelphan)

traditional Arabic pop, ughniya

by Federico Romagnoli

Abdel Halim Ali Shabana was born in El-Halawat, just north of Cairo, in 1929. He was orphaned of both parents almost immediately: his mother died from complications during childbirth, and his father from illness a few months later. After a few years in an orphanage, he was entrusted to the care of an uncle, with whom he spent a childhood marked by poverty. His pronounced sensitivity for music emerged already during his early school years and would prove to be his salvation: he began by playing the oboe, then learned several other instruments, tied both to local tradition (theoud), and to Western music (piano, guitar, drums). He began earning a living by teaching music in local schools, then by playing in clubs, where he also enjoyed singing.

In 1953 he fortuitously landed a slot on a performance radio broadcast and caught the attention of Hafez Abdel Wahab, an executive at Egyptian national radio, who advised him to adopt a stage surname. To thank him for his interest, the singer took the first part of his name and thus renamed himself Abdel Halim Hafez.

From there, the road ahead was smooth: through this new acquaintance, the newly christened Hafez gained entry into the upper echelons of the local entertainment industry, where everyone was struck by his performing talent and stage presence.

His launch came through the world of cinema, to make the most of his good looks and elegant bearing: as early as 1955, the first two films in which he starred were released. The impact was immediate, so much so that even Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser wanted to meet him (the two would forge a lasting friendship).

Fourteen more films would follow by 1969. In them, Hafez always sang one or more songs, composed for him by some of the finest authors in Arab music, particularly Mohamed Abdel Wahab, referred to from here on simply as Wahab (the same surname as the radio executive, who however will not come up again).

To capitalize on his ever-growing fame, in 1961 Hafez, together with Wahab and lawyer Magdi el-Amroussi as legal consultant, founded the record label Soutelphan, one of the most successful in the history of Egyptian music, still existing today as a subsidiary of the Mazzika Group.

Although he was not a composer, Hafez stood out from many performers of Egyptian music of the era by taking an active part in the arrangement of his own songs, drawing on his skill as a multi-instrumentalist. It's no coincidence that there are numerous films showing him conducting the orchestra that accompanied him.

During his first fifteen years of career, his output changed the face of Arab music: he was the performer who brought to prominence al-Firqa al-Masiya (trans. diamond orchestra), one of the most important Egyptian orchestras; he was one of the artists who pushed hardest for the blending of local music and Western instruments (he introduced the electric guitar, played by Omar Korshid); he was the performer who popularized a more linear, less melismatic vocal style compared to the previous generation (this simplification would continue over time, so much so that today Hafez himself appears rather ornate compared to Arab singers who emerged in later decades – Western singers, in this respect, don't hold up to comparison regardless of era, unless one brings opera into the discussion).

The most important artistic turning point in his career came in 1970, when he decided to devote himself to creating long songs (in Arabic: ughniya in the singular, aghani in the plural), a format of Arabic music, particularly Egyptian, that spread starting in the 1960s.

The most important name who contributed to the success of the long songs is obviously Umm Kulthumthe queen of Egyptian music. Hafez, who fame-wise is a sort of male counterpart to her, actually arrives at it a few years later, but manages to channel into the format all the innovations he had introduced up to that point, leaving a deep mark on it.

The first long song released by Hafez is “Zay El-Hawa” (“زي الهوى”), in 1970, composed by Baligh Hamdi, a key author and his close collaborator. This article, however, focuses on “Fatet Ganbena” (“فاتت جنبنا”), a track from a few years later written by Wahab, which marks an ideal high point for the format ughniya.

As much as Hamdi may be perhaps the most important Egyptian composer to emerge in the 1950s (not by chance, he is the author of “Alf Leila We Leila”, chosen by OndaRock as a milestone of Umm Kulthum), Wahab is generally considered the greatest of all time, having shaped, if not dominated, the local industry from the 1920s to the 1980s, an enormous span of time in which Arabic music underwent the most unimaginable upheavals, often caused by his own creations.

“Fatet Ganbena” was the first long song Wahab conceived for Hafez, a milestone the singer had long craved, since up to that point the composer had written them exclusively for Umm Kulthum. The diva's death in 1973 opened the door to collaboration between the two in this specific format.

Like all of Hafez's long songs, it was recorded live. The premiere concert took place on June 30, 1974, and the album was released later that same year, on vinyl. This review refers to the CD reissues that came out starting in 1991, which contain the full performance from that first concert, running about 49 minutes.

The first 50 seconds of the recording feature Hafez's voice introducing the song to the audience:

Today I would like to say... I would like to say many things about the man who carried Arabic music on his shoulders his entire life. Truthfully, I cannot find the words to describe him. My teacher, my master, Mohamed Abdel Wahab. I will sing, on his music, the song “Fatet Ganbena”. The words were written by the great poet, master Hussein Elsayed.

Elsayed was one of the most sought-after Egyptian lyricists and wrote lyrics for performers both from his own country and from across the Middle East. Singers of the caliber of Farid El Atrache, Shadia, Nagat El-Saghira, the Lebanese Sabah, and the Syrian Fayza Ahmed all performed his words.

“Fatet Ganbena”, which can be translated as “She Passed By Us”, was written in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic. It is a love poem with a cinematic quality, telling the story of two friends who share the same feelings for an unknown woman. In Elsayed's original version, it was the narrator's friend who received the woman's attention, but Wahab asked him to change the ending in favor of the protagonist, one might guess in order to better match the triumphant character the music takes on at that point.

While reading the full translation of the lyrics, provided below, one should bear in mind the difficulty of rendering the nuances of Arabic in Italian, which has led to some unavoidable liberties, and above all the fact that in the original version almost all the lines are repeated several times, in order to induce a sense of trance which is therefore missing, as already explained in OndaRock's article on "Alf Leila We Leila" by Umm Kulthum.

She passed in front of us, passed in front of me and him.

She smiled at us, smiled at me and him.

I smiled back, and kept smiling back until it was too late.

And I got lost in myself, and when I woke up, I saw her sunbathing and then leaving. [note 1]

I started thinking, I thought about it far too much.

I asked myself a question that left me confused:

why am I thinking about this? Why am I worried?

How will I know if she wants me and not him?

How will I know if that smile was for me and not for him?

And why me? Why me? Why not him?

On another occasion, a coincidence:

he and I were out on the street,

we saw soft footsteps approaching, and a third shadow, [note 2]

a third shadow chasing us.

I turned around and it was her.

Unbelievable, it was her, her.

I felt in my heart

a melody of love, a melody of love new to me.

I heard some words,

[Yet] she didn't say a single one.

But I felt it, I felt it for the first time

and for the first time I'm alive and I feel something.

And I found myself melting, melting into her whisper,

into the words of a soundless whisper.

She smiled again, the same smile, and then she was gone

Like life, which comes and goes in a second.

I looked at my friend, but his mind wasn't there with me.

He would have liked to express my own feelings. [note 3]

I wanted to ask him. Did he hear it too? Did he think about it too?

And I asked myself again and again:

why am I thinking about this? Why am I worried?

[…]

I came back home, I came back home.

I don't understand what's wrong,

I don't understand what happened to me.

So happy that I wanted to laugh,

so sad that I wanted to cry.

I couldn't reach the tears

and I have no shoulder to cry on.

I fell in love with her,

yes, I fell in love with her, I can't forget her laughter.

Couldn't this be the joy of my life? Have I finally found it?

Where was this day hiding? Where?

Blessed be her and her laughter.

Two days later my heart lurches and shakes me:

it asks me when and where we'll see her.

Nights torment me with dark thoughts and dreams,

the specter of jealousy has appeared before my eyes.

If I see my friend happy, I think:

they must have met.

If I see worry in his eyes, I think:

they must have broken up.

I find no way to save myself from this torment,

except to seek her out and get an answer from her.

I managed to find her, I found her,

after a hard search, I found her.

I sent her a couple of words,

no more than two lines,

I asked her: have mercy, tell me, where do I stand?

And the answer comes, and I find her waiting for me.

She tells me: "From the very first time I smiled at you, [boy] with the dark skin".

Me! Yes, me! Me! Not him!

The piece was composed in a hybrid form, drawing partly on the schemes of Western music and partly on the maqamat of Arabic music, and arranged with the same approach, blending traditional local instruments, modern Western instruments and orchestra.

The degree of contamination is actually even higher than that, if one considers that some local instruments were modified to cope with the higher volumes typical of Western music, while Western instruments were modified in order to adapt to the scales and quarter tones of Arabic music (in fact, most musicologists speak of an Arabization of Western instruments, a very long process that starts in the late nineteenth century and continues throughout the following century: Hafez was one of its leading figures in his own era).

Among the Arabized Western instruments is the accordion (which enters at 1'02", with a mournful atmosphere a Western listener would hardly associate with the instrument), the organ [note 4], the electric guitar (free of effects, so as not to jar the audience) and the mandolin (its moment of glory beginning at 29'51").

At 3'14" a hybrid electric instrument appears, clearly visible in footage of the various live performances of the piece: it has the body of a oud, but the neck of a guitar.

The most prominent traditional instruments are the ney (a reed flute with a simple single-reed mouthpiece, widespread throughout the Middle East, albeit with some variants), whose first solo can be heard at 5'29", and the percussion, played by a large ensemble and whose layers are, more than anything else, what gives the arrangement its density. The rhythmic backbone is in several passages supported by the organ, which, playing staccato chords, effectively mimics a percussion instrument.

The most pervasive sound in the orchestra is obviously that of the string section, which calls for a clarification: the violin (and closely related instruments) was imported into Egypt starting in the late nineteenth century, quickly becoming one of the most important instruments in urban Arabic music and relegating local bowed instruments to the folk music of rural areas. Its use goes back so far in time and is so deeply ingrained in most classics of Arabic music that it is now perceived as a local element rather than a factor of Western contamination.

The track is divided into four sections: a muqaddima (a purely instrumental introduction) lasting just under seven minutes, followed by three sung segments (one for the first encounter with the beloved woman, one for the second encounter, and one for the ending of the story).

Running 49 minutes long, it contains an impressive variety of approaches: from the most intimate and delicate passages to festive ones bursting with percussion, with dense rhythmic textures and lush melodic solutions, often in call-and-response between the solo instruments and the string section, while the voice and orchestra seem to move in unison only to drift apart by a fraction - with the latter trailing in a barely perceptible delay - before finally reuniting.

Before his death, Hafez would go on to tackle two more of Wahab's long songs: "Nebtady Menein El Hekaya" ("نبتدي منين الحكاية") and "La Takzebi" ("لا تكذبي"), both released in 1975. Unfortunately, his health, precarious throughout his adult life due to the schistosomiasis he contracted as a boy, would rapidly deteriorate in the mid-1970s, leading to his death from cirrhosis on March 30, 1977, at the age of 48.

His passing plunged Egypt into mourning and is now considered the event that, together with the death of Umm Kulthum just four years earlier, brought the golden age of Arabic music to an end.

Wahab outlived him by fourteen years, and in 1989 he surprised everyone by releasing a long song sung in the first person, "Men Gheir Leh" ("من غير ليه"), which he had conceived many years earlier for Hafez, though his friend did not live long enough to sing it.

[Note 1] In this scene the protagonist gets distracted by his own musings and loses sight of the woman. The scene is set at sunset, hence the symbolic choice of the woman carrying the sun away with her.

[Note 2] Since the shadow chases after them, the woman is behind them, and the two cannot see her footsteps, only hear them. Nevertheless, the poet uses the verb to see.

[Note 3] Literally, "the words in my heart," which can be interpreted as "my own feelings."

[Note 4] The Arabized organ is a transistor organ equipped with the option to shift the A, B and E keys by a quarter tone. This feature allows it to cover most of the maqamat of Arabic music.

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18/06/2023

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition