Iraqi symphony orchestra is dying and Azzaoui waves his final farewell

There is a sentence the late maestro Abdulrazzaq al‑-;-Azzaoui told me more than three decades ago, and it still echoes inside me like a musical refrain that refuses to fade:
“Karam … this entire orchestra owes you something, just as our souls owe their life to music.”
A sentence that fills me with a quiet pride every time memory retrieves it, and returns me to a moment when music seemed to be the last force resisting the death of a country.
I recall that line whenever I walk past the Royal Military School of Music in Twickenham, only a few steps from my home. In summer, the sound of British military bands drifts across the school grounds, and I often find myself wondering:
Did Azzaoui ever pass through here?
Did he once walk these corridors as a young Iraqi studying music in Britain before returning home as a military conductor?
These questions are not about information-;- they are about trace, about the lingering shadow of a man who carried Iraq’s musical taste the way a violinist carries his instrument: with care, with jealousy, and with fear that it might break.
I remember the day my friend Asaad Mohammed Ali, novelist, music critic, and flutist in the Iraqi Symphony Orchestra, called me with a voice that sounded like a sad wind instrument:
“Karam … come to the orchestra. There is something worth writing.”
The orchestra was rehearsing in Al‑-;-Ribat Hall in Baghdad’s Adhamiya district, at a time when Iraqis were living under the suffocating grip of international sanctions. Music was the last thing anyone could think about. And yet, the orchestra resisted despair the way a thirsty tree resists a merciless summer.
They behaved like a single family, holding one another together with a kind of devout loyalty to music. One member would drive around picking up the others so they could gather for rehearsals—small, fragile evenings that felt like a refuge from a collapsing world.
During that visit, I heard fear in their voices … fear that the orchestra might fall apart just as the country itself was falling apart.
Beatrice Ohanesian spoke with the confidence of someone who believed time must remain strong.
Aram Babakhan looked wounded as he told me how he lost his most precious violin during the American bombing of his home on Al‑-;-Rasheed Street.
Asaad listened silently, letting me collect their stories, their disappointments, their stubborn hope.
Azzaoui told me then:
“If this orchestra breaks, an entire Iraqi musical taste, one that has grown since the days of Sharif Muhyiddin Haydar—will break with it. Do not let it be forgotten.”
He knew the orchestra was not merely a musical institution-;- it was a national memory. Losing it meant losing a part of Iraq’s soul.
So I wrote a long investigative report, one I still remember after more than thirty‑-;-five years, titled:
“The Iraqi Symphony Orchestra Is Dying!”
It occupied half a page in Al‑-;-Jumhuriya newspaper and sounded like an alarm bell that reached the highest levels of government.
Two days later, Asaad came to the newsroom, smiling with relief:
“Karam … you threw a stone into stagnant government waters.”
Soon after, -dir-ectives were issued from the presidency to meet all the orchestra’s needs, protect its members, and facilitate its work.
Calls followed, Beatrice thanking me formally, as if I were a policymaker rather than a journalist obsessed with musical taste-;- Azzaoui calling me brave for carrying the orchestra’s voice to the top of the state, repeating his unforgettable line:
“Karam … this entire orchestra owes you something, just as our souls owe their life to music.”
Today, Azzaoui is gone.
Before him, Asaad Mohammed Ali departed, the man who wrote about music as if he were writing about his own heart.
Before him, Aram Babakhan died, his tear for the violin he lost accompanying him to the grave.
And later, Beatrice Ohanesian passed away in her Armenian exile, the quintessential Iraqi lady, from the way she sat at the piano to the way her dresses seemed to dance with the brushstrokes of time.
Azzaoui was not merely a conductor. He was the guardian of Iraq’s musical soul.
He composed, arranged and re‑-;-imagined the great Iraqi songs of the 1950s, turning them into orchestral pieces played on Western instruments, pieces that pulled the listener’s spirit out of its hiding place.
Listen to his arrangements of that era’s songs, and you will understand how he made music walk on memory, and memory walk on music.
Today, as Azzaoui waves his final farewell, he does not leave alone.
He takes with him an entire chapter of Iraq’s aesthetic history, a chapter in which sound was resistance, music was homeland and the Iraqi Symphony Orchestra was the last surviving fragment of beauty that destruction could not swallow.

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