The fourth day of May marks the centenary of musician Assi Rahbani, one of the sides of the lyrical golden triangle that has charmed Lebanon and the Arab world for decades, and sticks to absence.
And his nephew, Osama Al-Rahbani, says about him that he “created a new formula for the distribution of Arabic music.”
Osama Rahbani acknowledges the family’s negligence towards the “huge Rahbani repertoire that needs concerted efforts to collect it,” lamenting “the many works that went into broadcasting the Near East.”
However, the songs, plays and films that were spread over four decades of the work of the Rahbani trio Asi, Mansour and Fayrouz became ammunition for the coming centuries, and not only for the first Rahbani century.
Osama Al-Rahbani adds about his uncle: “He was a volcano boiling with work… He writes quickly and does not stop at the obsession of making what is more beautiful, but rather lets the narration walk so that the flow does not stop.”
As for the journalist and researcher Mahmoud Al-Zibawi, who delved deeply into the legacy of Al-Rahbanah, he believes that the real honor is the formation of a committee that will classify what has not been published of his works and his lyrical paintings that are on Radio Damascus and Lebanon.
Al-Zibawi adds, “Assi is the embodiment of passion and a person obsessed with his work… Some of Mrs. Fairouz’s exercises and recordings could have lasted 40 hours straight. He re-registers if he does not like a detail, and this used to exhaust her. Although he is the husband and father of the four children, “Assi remained the professor who married his student,” according to al-Zibawi’s description.
100 years of Assi Rahbani
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