Mohammed Abdel Wahab was the most prolific Arabic

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composer of his time, responsible for more than a

thousand songs. He personally sang hundreds. For his

orchestration of the Egyptian national anthem, Anwar

Sadat awarded him the rank of general.

Abdel Wahab was born in 1907 in Cairo. He made his

first recording at the age of 13. In 1924 he was taken

under the wing of Ahmed Shawky, then known as the

Prince of Poets. Shawky saw to the furthering of Abdel

Wahab's musical and literary education, so that in time

if Shawky was the Prince of Poets, Abdel Wahab was

known as the Singer to Princes and Kings.

In the late 1920s Abdel Wahab wrote traditional

melodies, well suited to Shawky's texts. But as

European rule replaced Ottoman rule, Western influences

affected local music.

In particular, stage musicals in Arabic incorporated

Western elements. In 1926, it fell to Abdel Wahab to

complete a musical left unfinished by the late Said

Darwish, a great composer of the previous generation.

The musical centered on Antony and Cleopatra, and Abdel

Wahab himself played Antony to great acclaim.

After visiting Paris and familiarizing himself with

French musical presentations, Abdel Wahab invented the

Arabic film musical. To a popular culture in which

romantic love was commonly associated with suffering,

Abdel Wahab introduced a romantic hero of light-hearted

wit and urbane sophistication. His films portrayed a

Westernized social elite and featured music that broke

from tradition. Fellow composers noted that the music

was simplistic compared with Abdel Wahab's previous

work, and Abdel Wahab used lip-synching rather than the

improvisation on which Arabic music had traditionally

relied; but audiences loved it. The film "The White

Flower" was a phenomenon, breaking attendance records.

Abdel Wahab enjoyed introducing new female singers to

the public through his movies; many became stars,

including the great Leila Mourad, who would go on to

produce her own films. Musically, his films continued

controversial, as he began to feature large orchestras

with admixtures of Western instruments. Into his art,

he hybridized Western song forms such as the tango,

samba, and rhumba.

In the 1950s Abdel Wahab left film and concentrated on

his last recordings as a singer, assuming a new and

more serious musical style. In the 1960s he stopped

singing, but he continued composing for other singers.

It was in 1964 that after years of rivalry at the top

of their profession Om Kalthoum released a record of

his "Ente Omry" written for her to a text by the poet

Ahmad Ramy. Perhaps partly because of its timing--

coinciding with the flowering of Nasserism-- the

recording became Egypt's all-time best-seller. It was

the song the young generation thought of when they

thought of Om Kalthoum, though it was certainly Abdel

Wahab, not Om Kalthoum, who spiced up the orchestration

with an electric guitar.

For many years Abdel Wahab appeared very little in

public, but his popularity never faded. In 1988, at

the age of 81, he made a surprise return to the studio,

singing a new composition, and despite lyrics that

seemed unacceptably iconoclastic to some radicals, the

disk sold two million copies.

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Some biographical information about @abdel Wahab

from a TV program by Simone Bitton for Arcadia

Films, written up and contributed by Mark Levinson.

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.