‘Stealthily and imperceptibly,’ he said to himself.
Was he looking for a moment of absence in his music?
There was no doubt about it. He wanted Arab culture to be present in Western or classical music. As he composed his pieces, he felt his fingers grow hot with the spiritual warmth of the desert. When he was in Europe, he felt that musical notes soared high like butterflies fluttering in the depths of the desert. He wanted melodies that would awaken the phantom of fertility in the blazing heat of noon. He wanted to produce music that was like the birth of creation and the trembling of life’s genesis.
Haidar tried to make music achieve the extraordinary feat of submitting the soul to artistic experience. He did not believe in heroism, only in art, for art was the search for goodness. Was moral virtue really capable of solving society’s problems? Was there a radical difference between morality and art?
He believed that art was virtue itself. He had no idea that this view would later collapse in Baghdad, under the destructive pressure of the people. He had innumerable questions, because he wanted his artistry to lead to the good of humanity. He looked for epicurean pleasure in music, like the second character in Tobacco Shop. He felt that he was creating something important, that creativity was for him a mystical act, a deep conviction that the work he was creating had a spiritual dimension.
Could he possibly deny the presence of a spiritual force in the work of art? Not at all. Haidar felt that he was embarking on the creation of something palpable, something that drew its power from the music of the universe. At the beginning, he felt drawn to abstractions that were, nonetheless, strongly present and palpable. This was faith, no doubt. It was a belief that reconciled the different religions inside him: Judaism, which he had absorbed as a child, Christianity, which had seeped into his soul through classical music, and Islam, which became part and parcel of his inner self after his marriage to Tahira. God was One, although He appeared in various texts.
Haidar rejected Ada’s materialist interpretations of music. As they sat on the balcony of her house in spring, watching the trees change colour, he told her that he was trying to reconcile the various strands and tonalities of the three religions. He saw the presence of sand everywhere, the changes of colour and of natural phenomena. This was immortality itself. A piece of music represented partial immortality while music in total represented complete eternity.
He spent his evenings at the house of the Russian pianist, Ada Brunstein, located on a narrow street behind the Bolshoi Theatre. She had a large room on the upper floor, where a sofa overlooked the street, flanked by small windows that were permanently open. On the opposite side was a large window that overlooked the dense garden. Ada sat cross-legged on a second sofa to the left. On the mantelpiece above the fire stood a nightlight and a vodka bottle. Ada was a petite, blonde woman with full lips and a short nose. She spoke softly and was very happy with him. A world-famous virtuoso pianist, Ada was also cultured and fluent in several European languages. She would receive Moscow’s most important writers in her house, and it was through her that Haidar became acquainted with many of them.
As for how Haidar came to know Ada Brunstein, we only have the account given by the Czech violinist Karl Baruch in his memoirs. He said that Haidar Salman had taken a cruise on the Baltic Sea. On the same boat was Sergei Oistrakh’s son with his pregnant girlfriend. After the son had disembarked, it became known that the girlfriend had run away with the Iraqi composer, Haidar Salman. The girlfriend was the pianist Ada Brunstein.
So Ada Brunstein was Haidar Salman’s new girlfriend. But did she have anything to do with his trip to Paris? That was something we could never ascertain. It was a detail missing from all his letters. Nor did Farida ever comment on it. But all events indicate that Haidar and Ada were closely attached at that time.
Why wasn’t Haidar Salman a faithful husband? He never once wrote about this, as though it were natural to be married and also have mistresses. Throughout his life he experimented with these relationships and sought to avoid unhappy endings. This was predicted by the character of Ricardo Reis in Pessoa’s collection Tobacco Shop.
But why didn’t the disgraceful incident on the boat affect his relationship with Sergei Oistrakh? That was something we never discovered either, as the man died in 1990. We couldn’t get through to any of his family members either.
Whatever the case, Haidar’s relationship with the pianist was common knowledge. In 1965 he travelled with her to Paris, where he took part in the Jacques Thibaud competition. It was his first performance in front of a Western audience — most of his concerts in previous years had been in front of Russian audiences.
On a large stage in Paris, Haidar Salman stood in total darkness except for the spotlight above him. The large audience appeared to him only as ghosts. After breathing deeply, he closed his eyes and rested his bow gently on the strings. As the music soared, he felt the sounds flowing savagely but serenely along with the streaming of his soul. It rose above the wilderness and connected intimately with the Creator, expressing His true relationship with all creatures. Haidar felt that music was to be found in savage isolation while the soul grew within and rose higher and higher. As soon as the music stopped, he heard the applause in the hall. The lights came on and he could see the audience offering a standing ovation. Among those who applauding was the director of the Carnegie Hall, who later invited him to travel to New York and take part in the Leventritt Competition.
He wrote to Farida from Paris:
‘I don’t really know, but this is my first encounter with the Western world. The East carries a great symbolic legacy that I sense as it moves across all time periods. I wished to play music in an Eastern manner. You may find this ridiculous and you may laugh at my statement, but I cannot ignore a dynamic culture whose dimensions of meaning and content reach deep into my soul. When I play music, it’s as if I’m producing colours, clear lovely colours, for I understand the playing of music in terms of serenity and light. The moment I place my bow on the strings, I feel the colours emerge from the sounds.
‘When the bright light of the sun is present, nothing can possibly be absent. I kept playing music in this cold, bleak environment until the audience could feel the brightness of sunny summer days in Baghdad. That was why the audience clapped and clapped.’
Did Haidar Salman visit Baghdad between 1963 and 1967? The evidence indicates that he lived most of those years in Moscow. The reason was his fear of the political regime in Baghdad. He might have visited his family from time to time. But he always used his work at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and his composing as excuses to stay in Moscow. Tahira, accompanied by their son, Hussein, went to Moscow from time to time, either for medical treatment or to spend the summer with him. His affair with Ada, however, remained a mysterious matter, even to those closest to him. Nobody could confirm or deny it. But why did he return to Baghdad in 1967?
Was it because his work at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory came to an end? Was it because his affair with Ada had lost its spark? Or was it the 1967 War, which took place when he was playing in New York?
His visit to New York was a great opportunity for him. He played at one of the grandest halls of the great city, with its famous Statue of Liberty looking out over the ocean and the amazing Brooklyn Bridge. He stayed in the Hudson neighbourhood, the artists’ quarter. Ada always accompanied him when he walked the streets. For the first time they felt free. It was New York. He gazed at the deep darkness of the night, which was broken only by the lights emanating from hotels and huge buildings. He was charmed by the city. With its skyscrapers, its wide, crowded streets, its suspension bridges and the ships that conquered its ocean, New York seemed the total opposite of Moscow. The artists’ quarter where he lived was full of concert halls that were so different from those in Moscow. There were many other differences as well, but the real surprise came when the New York Times, commenting on his visit, wrote the following: ‘This communist did not hide his deep admiration of America.’