Iranian Women you Should Know: Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri

December 14, 2015

8 min read

Iranian Women you Should Know: Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri

Global and Iranian history are both closely intertwined with the lives and destinies of prominent figures. Every one of them has laid a brick on history’s wall, sometimes paying the price with their lives, men and women alike. Women have been especially influential in the past 200 years, writing much of contemporary Iranian history.

In Iran, women have increased public awareness about gender discrimination, raised the profile of and improved women’s rights, fought for literacy among women, and promoted the social status of women by counteracting religious pressures, participating in scientific projects, being involved in politics, influencing music, cinema... And so the list goes on.

This series aims to celebrate these renowned and respected Iranian women. They are women who represent the millions of women that influence their families and societies on a daily basis. Not all of the people profiled in the series are endorsed by IranWire, but their influence and impact cannot be overlooked. The articles are biographical stories that consider the lives of influential women in Iran.

IranWire readers are invited to send in suggestions for how we might expand the series. Contact IranWire via email ([email protected]), on Facebook, or by tweeting us.

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An Iranian citizen journalist, who writes under a pseudonym to protect her identity, wrote the following article on the ground inside Iran.

Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri was the first female singer to perform in public in Iran. She performed at Tehran’s Grand Hotel in 1924, and has a special place in history. Most Iranians know her simply as Qamar, or “Moon,” — and many have praised her as the shining light of Iranian classical music. With her melodic mezzo-soprano voice, she stood out as an extraordinary master of the art of singing, bringing to life the intricacies of the Persian vocal music repertoire, and adding her own magic.

Before Qamar, female singers had performed for strictly female audiences, though, until Qamar came along, none dared take off their hijab to sing for a mixed audience. The Iranian society in to which she was born enforced total gender segregation — and she was the first to break through this convention.

The beginning her life coincided with the Constitutional Revolution of Iran, a movement that shook the foundations of a traditional society. She was born in 1905 just as the revolution started, a year before the aging Qajar king Mozaffar ad-Din Shah signed the constitution. She died 53 years later on the same day that the constitution had been signed.

Qamar was born four months after her father died and she was not a year old when she lost her mother as well. She grew up in the care of her maternal grandmother, Kheir Al-Nesa, who in her youth used to sing recitals about the tragedy of Shiite martyrs at religious gatherings inside the previous kings’ harem for his wives and their female servants.

It was Kheir Al-Nesa who taught Qamar classical Iranian music and when she turned seven, she took her to her elegiac recitals during holy days of mourning, and to funerals, birthdays and anniversaries, which were without exception female-only affairs. Kheir Al-Nesa had difficulty walking and needed Qamar to help her when she left home. Soon Qamar was singing backup to her grandmother and found the courage to sing before a crowd. She later credited this experience for her success as a singer.

Very soon Qamar became famous in women’s circles in Tehran and invitations to sing at their gatherings started coming her way. This also coincided with Kheir Al-Nesa's failing health. She encouraged her granddaughter to continue her musical education, and sent her to a music teacher so that she would learn the basics of her trade in a systematic way.

In the meantime, Iran was changing even more rapidly. With the Constitutional Movement, Western-inspired ideas gained legitimacy, despite the fact that, with outbreak of World War I, England and Russia successfully strangled democracy in practice and humiliated Iranians. In 1921, Reza Khan took over the government of Iran following a coup d’état, and in 1925, he declared himself the king, ending the rule of the Qajar dynasty. But he was no friend of democracy either. Although he set up modern systems and processes, he was no modernizer. The end of compulsory hijab was still some years away, and although gender segregation was still in place in the country, it was gaining some opposition, at least in Tehran and in the privacy of the homes of well-to-do Iranians.

It was in private gatherings that Qamar became known to now legendary musicians including Darvish Khan and Musa Neydavoud. The latter offered her lessons and helped her refine her techniques.

Neydavoud later talked about the first time he heard Qamar singing at a gathering when she was 17 years old. “The moment that Qamar started singing I found out that this young woman’s voice was unbelievably powerful,” he told the magazine Tamasha. “But it was also a warm voice, unbelievably warm. It is a rare occurrence that a person can have both...I told her ‘you have an extraordinary voice. What you must learn are the “modes” of Iranian music.’”

After the party, neither Qamar nor Neydavoud could forget one another. “I was not in the mood to play for somebody else,” he later recalled. “No other voice touched my heart and I was no longer teaching with enthusiasm. One afternoon I was sitting on a carpet in the yard when suddenly the door opened and Qamar was standing there. She said ‘I have come to learn music.’”

Breaking Two Taboos

Under Neydavoud’s tutelage it took Qamar less than a year to be ready for her debut. Her first concert was performed in 1924 in the luxurious banquet hall of Tehran’s Grand Hotel. With one movement, Qamar broke two taboos. She sang to a mixed audience and she removed her hijab while doing it — at a time when a woman in the street without a hijab was most likely to be arrested or assaulted verbally or physically by enraged passers-by. What is more, she freed music from the confines of the private homes of the rich.

She was brave, but she was scared too. “After the concert a strange fear came over me,” she recalled. “A few thousand people had gathered in Laleh-Zar street [where the Grand Hotel was located]. When I was going back I was afraid that some wanted to kill me because I had received some such news, which made me more worried. Eventually I made it, under the protection of the police, through the crowd, some of whom looked angry and irritated.” Qamar refused to be paid for the concert and the box office takings were distributed among the musicians.

As expected, the traditional society and the clergy reacted with an outcry, insults and threats, but her fame grew and she gave concerts in cities outside Tehran.

Her career greatly benefited from new technology. Starting in 1927, Qamar was recorded on 78 rpm records, first by the German company Polyphon and then by the British firm His Master’s Voice. According to available information, she recorded close to 426 songs, though only a third of those remain.

In 1940 when radio came to Iran and the establishment of Radio Tehran followed, Qamar was invited to perform for a live weekly music show, which she did for close to 15 years. Physical proximity was no longer necessary for Iranians to listen to her and to other female singers who followed her.

After she suffered a stroke, she gave a farewell performance on the radio in 1956 with a greatly diminished voice. Gradually she lost her ability to talk and she died in 1959 at the age of 54.

Her last years were spent in poverty. She was generous to a fault and usually gave away the income from her concerts. Only the support of some friends and enthusiasts saved her from going hungry.

Qamar opened the doors for Iranian women to sing in public and for the public. Now, 110 years after she was born, the doors have been closed again. Perhaps it is time for another moon to rise over the skies of Iran.

Shahnaz Zolghadr, Citizen Journalist

Also in the series:

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Jinous Nemat Mahmoudi

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Simin Behbahani

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Forough Farrokhzad

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Parvin Etesami

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Farokhru Parsa

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Jamileh Sadeghi

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Fatemeh Daneshvar

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Fatemeh Moghimi

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Googoosh

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Sima Bina