In Iraq, the Symphony Orchestra Plays On
By MELIK KAYLAN
March 27, 2008; Page D6
Baghdad
Karim Wasfi, age 36, arrives driving a white Range Rover and dressed in a blazer, vest and ascot. Sporting aviator shades, his ample form topped by lush black hair, he could be one of the Three Tenors -- or a staunchly civilized orchestra director, which is, in fact, what he is. When orchestra directors go around the streets of Baghdad looking exactly as they should, you know that things are bucking up. Except that Mr. Wasfi has held that post at the Iraq National Symphony Orchestra since 2004, through the darkest of times, and he has always looked like this. We set off at speed out of Mansour toward downtown Baghdad listening to Wagner. "The Ride of the Valkyries" to be precise.
Among the challenges the members of the Iraq National Symphony Orchestra face is that on any given night, they don't know who won't show up.
"In the car, I also listen to the Saint-Saëns requiem and the Mozart requiem -- that's usually the right mood for Baghdad," says Mr. Wasfi, in his cultivated English, as the checkpoint militias gape incredulously and wave us on. He has lost count of the times he has just missed being caught in a bomb blast or a firefight. "I vary my route to work -- which I think may be more dangerous. In '06 I had to leave town and disappear for six months for my safety, but we still kept going -- I organized two concerts from afar. . . . At one point, I had to tactfully get a formal religious proclamation from a top cleric that music was not profane. That took care of one group only. Still, these days, it's certainly better than it was -- I'm trying to up the concerts to twice a month, but that includes a lot of chamber performances which I initiated some months ago," he says.
"At the very least, the audience must know for sure that somewhere in the city there will be a concert on the last Saturday of every month," says Mr. Wasfi, who is also co-conductor with Mohammed Amin Ezzat. "Then we give out the location in the last moment, for security. We do it by email, word-of-mouth, phone calls -- I tell everyone I know. Even then, many hundreds turn up, depending on the place. That's our problem: We don't have a regular home. Well . . . one of our problems."
Mr. Wasfi launches into a bewildering tale. The symphony performed at the Al Rashid theater downtown for years, but soon after the invasion the place was looted and burned. So the orchestra moved to Al Ribat Hall, which was merely vandalized. But it was officially given Al Shaab Hall, which was attacked in '06 and has been ineffectively repaired twice, while the Convention Center popped open briefly before that deal was rescinded.
So now the symphony performs regularly at the Hunting Club in Mansour, a kind of haute-suburban country club with a large ballroom, and anywhere else they can. It uses Al Shaab Hall for rehearsals. For many orchestra members, that requires driving down Haifa Street: Its once-elegant bullet-pocked apartment blocks saw some of Baghdad's most intense sectarian firefights before the Surge and pro-government Sunni militias had an effect. As in much of the city, open streetfighting has abated. Suicide and car bombs are the new threat. During one trip I took with friends to the auditorium, an Iraqi soldier shot a car behind us.
That the symphony has kept playing appears nothing less than heroic to the outsider. Aside from location, Mr. Wasfi has to worry about the audience, orchestra members, instruments and sheet music, funding, punctuality, electricity, bathrooms, air supply -- every aspect of the job. He is also the orchestra's solo cellist. Many essential professionals have fled the country, from musicians to technicians.
"Any of us could find a job abroad," Mr. Wasfi says. "In fact, I moved my sisters to Sweden -- they think I'm crazy to stay. So why stay? To fight back against the malevolent and the ignorant. I like to think that we inspire people -- they see us and they see the barbarism everywhere. It gives them a choice: It could be like this, or like this."
Ultimately, though, Mr. Wasfi is disdainful of the heroic; every day he faces a highly complicated and distracting logistical challenge that gets in the way of the music and its quality. He has also launched a nationwide composition contest and his wife, who lives with him in Baghdad, has just had a baby.
"Of the 70-something orchestra members, we have some 50 left in town. Of those, on any given occasion, you can't tell how many won't show up, especially for rehearsals -- most do, thank God. We adapt. We play pieces that favor the orchestra we still have . . . a lot of Mozart and Haydn. Instead of a harp we use the piano and so on. Also our library was badly looted so we choose pieces from what sheet music we can muster. I've developed a number of new young players and others have had to become proficient in second instruments -- finding music teachers is another problem.
"We need new instruments, cases, maintenance tools. Things wear out here quickly what with Baghdad's weather, the absence of heating or air conditioning, the dust storms, and the like. At one point, carrying around a musical instrument was such an invitation to disaster -- to kidnapping, robbery or attack from a religious fanatic -- that we all had to keep one at work and one at home."
At Al Shaab Hall, Mr. Wasfi calls the orchestra to attention. Of the almost 40 members who turn up, three are girls in their teens -- the mingling of the sexes is a recurrent provocation to some religious circles. Mr. Wasfi tap-tap-taps his baton and the strains of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A waft incredibly onto the air, a fragile and defiant idyll from another world. He tells the musicians that it all sounds too "asabee" (anxious, intemperate). "Try to leave your stresses outside," he says.
Later, when they rehearse Stravinsky's "Firebird," it all comes together. "Could you tell?" he asks. "It's simply because the 'Firebird' is full of eruptions and noise. It came more naturally to them. But you can never tell. Sometimes they prefer the Mozart."
As a boy, Karim Wasfi lived for many years in Cairo, where his father, a renowned actor in Arabic films, moved after the first Gulf War. His mother, a Cairene by birth, had fallen ill and needed treatment outside an Iraq hit by sanctions. By then, Karim had embarked on the cello under the disciplined watch of Soviet tutors. Saddam had strong cultural ties with the Iron Curtain countries and, in that tradition, Karim was picked out to apprentice on the cello at age 6 owing to his build and strength. He studied at the School of Music and Ballet where he now teaches. At age 13 he became a cellist in the National Symphony, and later he became assistant principal cellist at the Cairo Opera House. In 1997, at age 23, he won a place at Indiana University, Bloomington, to study under the great Hungarian cellist Janos Starker. (He also studied political science at Boston University.)
As the invasion loomed, he headed back and waited in Jordan, driving into Iraq two months after Saddam was toppled. Soon after, he began to play cello in the symphony, ending a decade of absence. "I didn't care about the politics. With or without Saddam, I wanted to bring back for Iraqis what I'd learned in the wider world, and I wanted to show the world that Iraq has a civilization."
In the Middle East, an orchestra is not merely a Western institution, and Mr. Wasfi commissions and plays many Iraqi pieces. In addition, Iraq has a long post-Ottoman tradition of Western classical culture that Saddam redoubled as part of his program of imposed secularism. Hence, there is strong demand among the middle classes for Mr. Wasfi's endeavors. A good deal of his audience fled the country, but enough remained behind -- and others are trickling back, having used up their funds abroad. Who are they? "Friends, bohemians, artists, professionals, bureaucrats -- they're out there," he says. "They love the music, but they also want us to succeed as a symbol for them."
The symphony gets a bare minimum of funding. Its parent body is the Culture Ministry, which pays the salaries and little else. Hence the orchestra often survives on single concerts funded by the U.N. or the foreign community.
These days, Mr. Wasfi struggles not merely to keep going but to make gains against adversity. He has organized a quartet to perform all around the city, and he plays the cello wherever he can, sometimes solo, as he did at the Ibn Rushd mental asylum. "I had one chair, and everyone sat on the floor. I played Bach suites, and I improvised. You can imagine what it was like. They were intensely delighted, absolutely grateful. They asked for an extra hour. Of course I sometimes wonder why I do this, until something like that comes along. Then you know that you have to. Most of the time, that's how I feel about Baghdad."
Mr. Kaylan writes about culture for the Journal.
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