Through a Glass Darkly: Loving Music in Post-Revolutionary Iran
Research Diary‘Stranger I arrived and stranger I go hence’ (Schubert Winterreise, No. 1)
When in 1997 I finally left Iran, I was, almost literally, a mere pack of bones. The years that led to my departure were marked by my gradual descent into depression and an attempt at gaining back control over my life by refusing to eat: the one aspect of life in which I felt had agency. Life without my dream of music had lost its meaning and value.
Western classical music had been a part of my life from my earliest childhood years. I was from a music-loving family, but for me music had become something more: a religion almost, certainly a refuge, a parallel world in which I wasn’t a stranger but could be myself. The greatest irony of my life was that I was born in a place and at a time when pursuing a career in music was denied to me.
Those of us born around 1979, the year of Iran’s Revolution, were called Children of the Revolution. In fact we were more like orphans. We were of the generation that had lost the most and was denied the most. I grew up reaching for the one star that was hidden from my country’s sky. As a child I once wrote a letter to God, asking him why he would give me such a passionate love, yet make me live in a country where I could never make my dream come true.
I didn’t hear back from him.
But I followed up with a nightly prayer: please, God, one day make a great musician out of me. I still say that prayer every night.
Following the Revolution many left Iran. But my family didn’t. My parents bought me a piano from one of the families who did leave: a Yamaha U1 in beautiful Mahogany colour, my treasure, my friend, my confidant. I started piano lessons from a young age with a delicate woman, Firoozeh Khazrai. Before long, she too left. I remember the day my parents told me. I was eight and must have been shocked. I felt nothing, but suddenly couldn’t walk any more. The next teacher, a lovely Polish émigré, Mme Afkhami, also soon disappeared (they never told me why and I never dared to ask). I ended up studying with the teacher of my first teacher, a rather formidable lady (at least in the eyes of the infant me) by the name of Mme Seda Karapétian, but one who taught me how to cherish my love for music. She was an Armenian, living in what to me was the most beautiful house in the world, with a baby-grand Steinway under which her grandchildren used to play.
My first piano lesson started with her telling my father off for parking his car nearby. Piano lessons, as with other music-related activities other than Revolutionary songs, were banned, and she was worried that the patrols would notice the movements in and out of her house. Later, we even had a cover story, in case her house was raided: that she was teaching me crochet. I continued for eight years with her before moving on to an even more formidable-looking but in fact wonderful lady, Mrs Lili Sarkissian. She actually did teach me crochet, alongside piano. She had the reputation of being severe, but after a while I managed to uncover her softer side. She even once smiled - a ghost of a smile at least – when I made a complete mess of a crochet pattern she was trying to teach me.
By this time, the early 1990s, following Khomeini’s death and the presidency of Rafsanjani, there were some small ventilations in the suffocating atmosphere. Not much had changed about women’s rights, but Khomeini had finally removed the ban on the sale of musical instruments, and music-making in some controlled way had started to resurface, albeit mainly in the area of traditional music; Western music was still under intense suspicion. Women were still banned from solo performance for mixed audiences, especially singing, but clandestine gatherings and unofficial concerts were happening more frequently. The underground cassette and video markets were also booming. One of my greatest adventures was to go with my father and brother to bookshops near Tehran University, where, far removed from their main shelves, they had some classical music cassettes. The owners would take us behind the counter and discretely show us their latest acquisitions. All these were innocent little victories for us. Thanks to these cassettes and especially the informative booklets by Shahin Farhat (a musician and composer who stayed in Iran) I got to discover so much heavenly music. My father would explain to me about Beethoven ‘he composed the best in every genre, except in opera’, or the story of the fifth Symphony spelling, in morse code, V for victory. I’d take refuge in his study after school, listen to Beethoven’s Eroica’s slow movement, read one of my father’s books on music and weep. Visconti’s Death in Venice, which we watched on video cassettes thanks to our underground video-y, as we called him, opened the door into the world of Mahler in the same way as Amadeus has had to Mozart several years prior. Shostakovich’s music entered y life at the same time as did Shakespeare and his Hamlet, thanks to an underground cinema showing Kozintsev’s 1964 screen adaptation of the tragedy with Shostakovich’s music. That was like opening of a new galaxy – a story on its own – which eventually led to my PhD, years later, on Hamlet.
Then came something that shattered all illusions, in a good way – like a sealed window to the other side – in the form of satellite dishes, which, despite the strict ban, took over Tehran houses and suddenly revealed what we had been deprived of. For the first time I saw women’s figure-skating, women’s gymnastics, women models, women travel show presenters, etc. I tried to ignore the voice that kept nagging at me: ‘Why not me? Is it too late?’. But it kept playing in my head. Gradually, as hopes of ever leaving Iran disappeared, the voice mutated. Darkness descended and with it the accursed question: ‘What’s the point of it all?’. Over the next few years this voice took over every aspect of my life, until nothing else was left.
This was also when, as a part of gradual, limited opening up of the country to Western exchanges, some embassies started setting up masterclasses for musicians, the most prominent among them hosted by the Austrians. Many, like me, realised how far behind we were in everything from technique to musicianship. Many, like me, spiralled into despair. My theory lessons with a very old-style and, alas, insensitive teacher (he was considered a great maestro in Iran) only worsened my state of mind. Around the same time, I started having panic attacks, during which I couldn’t stop crying. My jumbled brain gave up on me during my then University-level studies as an electronic engineer student (a field thrust on me for being a bright student at school). Occasionally it would feel as though I had reached the end and was facing the final curtain.
But then Mozart happened. During one of those paralysing panic attacks and as I was quietly sobbing in my mother’s arms, my father pressed play on the cassette in my player – Mozart’s clarinet concerto, slow movement. Time stood still and a serenity descended – as if a light started glowing from within me dissolving the clouds that had crowded my mind. Then as if dictated by a divinity I whispered ‘I want to dedicate my life to music’. There was a pause – it felt like ages. Then my mother said ‘was it this that has been eating you from inside all these years?’ ‘yes, I care for nothing else. I don’t want life without music’, I whimpered. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’, my mother answered even though deep inside she knew I had been saying it since I learned to talk! ‘Then we make it happen’, said my father. ‘That’s it; troubles are finished;’ my father said with a part-anxious, part-relieved voice. I still remember the light that beamed across his and my mother’s faces. Troubles were by no means finished. And there was still a long and winding road ahead. But for the first time in my life I had a hope, a reason to live. Mozart had saved my life.
— Michelle Assay