Dawud Husni

Origins and early life

Dawud Husni was born David Haim Levi in 1870 in Cairo, into a deeply rooted Karaite Jewish family of the city — a Jew, as all the historiography of Egyptian Jewry treats him, of the Karaite branch that had lived in Cairo since the Middle Ages, and this fiche notes the branch as the sources do.

Work and career

Trained on the oud in the Cairo of the khedives, he became one of the composers who made modern Egyptian music: more than five hundred works — songs, muwashshahat, pieces for the theatre — in which the classical Arab forms met the new stage. His boldest achievement was Samson and Delilah, the first complete opera ever composed in the Arabic language, which he wrote for the Cairo stage in the 1920s. And he was a teacher whose pupils became the century: a young singer from the Delta named Umm Kulthum studied with him, and so did Asmahan, the great voice of the 1930s, and Leila Murad, the daughter of his friend Zaki Murad.

He died in Cairo in 1937, honored by the Egyptian musical world without distinction of faith, one of the last generation of Jewish musicians at the heart of Arab culture.