Morteza Neydavoud

Origins and early life

Morteza Neydavoud was born in Tehran in 1900 into a Persian Jewish family of musicians — his father Bala Khan played the tombak — and he was a Jew all his life, one of the many Jewish musicians who preserved Persian classical music at a time when performing it carried little social honour and religious minorities filled the profession.

Work and career

He began the tar as a child, studied under Aqa Hoseynqoli and Darvish Khan, the masters of the instrument, and by his twenties was among the finest players in Iran. From 1927 he recorded on a scale no Persian musician had attempted, some three hundred discs, and in 1969-1971 he set down for the National Radio a complete performance of the radif, the canonical repertoire of Persian classical music, in three hundred hours of recording that is now the reference document of the tradition.

He composed Morq-e sahar, The Bird of Dawn, on a poem by Malek o-Sho'ara Bahar, which the singer Qamar ol-Molouk Vaziri made famous: a song about a caged bird calling for the dawn to break the tyrant's night, it has been sung in Iran as an anthem of freedom for a century and again at every protest since. He accompanied Qamar, the first woman to perform unveiled in public in Iran, at her historic concert of 1924, and taught two generations of players, including Ruhangiz and many of the century's leading singers.

He left Iran after the revolution of 1979 and died in Los Angeles on 12 August 1990. The Jewish community of Iran, one of the oldest in the world, gave Persian music several of its greatest performers, and he was the first among them.