"MANY KINGS, ONE ORPHEUS"

Talent cannot be hidden - it is not possible for talent to remain unnoticed. People's desire for power, intelligence, beauty, goodness and justice makes them act like butterflies that are always attracted to the light. The unforgettable Muslim Magomayev was just such a light for people. He passed away on 25 October 2008. And I think that this year, which was an eventful year for all of us, remained in my memory, first of all, as the last year in the life of the great Muslim Magomayev, and as a year in which we all suddenly became orphaned. This date has become a kind of benchmark - "before" and "after". "Before" was an era of immutable truth, generosity, talent, naturalness, chivalry, admiration and rejection of falsehood, and "after" - the emptiness you feel with every cell of your soul. What pride it is to feel your patriotic involvement in this man and how bitter to see and empathize with the unfeigned universal pain arising from the fact that he is not with us. And this pain emerges from local and even Russian TV channels, newspapers and electronic media. And it existed throughout this year and will always exist. Here it is, soaring over the impermanence of life, here they are - the wings. Memories, memories, memories. White tuxedo, white piano, dark eyes and an intoxicating baritone penetrating the fibres of your soul. How difficult it is to keep promises, how difficult it is not to speak idly, how difficult it is to keep to your principles and nobility, how difficult it is not to stumble and not to succumb to temptation. This can be said about each of us, but probably not about Muslim Magomayev. He quietly left pop music, where he had reigned since 1963, flatly refusing a personal star in front of the Russia concert hall and pompous farewell ceremony. He kept the promise he gave in his first interview to the magazine Ogonyok at 19 - to leave the stage once his voice "trembles"... So let's remember Muslim Magomayev as he was and who remains in our hearts forever.

Farhad Badalbayli:

- This was a great man and he will remain in my memory forever as a childhood friend and an outstanding performer. Muslim Magomayev made an enormous contribution to the promotion of Azerbaijani art worldwide. I remember his birthday on 17 August - how many friends he brought together for a luxurious meal. How warm those evenings were. Alas, this will not happen anymore. One feels an unspeakable emptiness with his departure. Muslim was always at the centre of attention. He was loved by all. In his final years he shunned publicity, rarely leaving his home - he was an extremely modest man. It is very sad that Muslim Magomayev is no longer with us.

Tamara Sinyavskaya:

For the whole year since Magomayev's death, Tamara Synyavskaya has kept a vow of silence. The government of Azerbaijan gave the great singer's widow the right to fly to Baku free of charge to visit the grave of her husband in the Alley of Honour any time she likes. Tamara Sinyavskaya said that their long-standing alliance with Magomayev was not based only on love.

- We had many common interests, especially when it came to music and singing. As soon as Muslim saw someone singing on television who provoked an outburst of emotion in him, he immediately asked me: "Did you hear that?" And he would begin an evening of questions and answers, enthusiasm and indignation. Muslim was a very emotional person, though our tastes and values always coincided. Now I have no-one to engage with in this fascinating dialogue...

Xuraman Qasimova:

- You can never be ready for sad news. You can never be prepared for the loss of people close to you in spirit, truly talented people. And when that happens, you begin to "play back the tape of memory" and to assemble bit by bit the brightest and the best things that linked you to this man. Muslim Magomayev was an epoch. This was a glorious time of culture, not only for Azerbaijan. The idol of millions of people never followed volatile fashion, never flirted with the audience, and his talent and charm won millions of hearts. He was very good at opera arias. He gained no less resounding success on the pop stage. Overcrowded halls, flowers, legends and numerous fans - Magomayev tasted it all wholly and preserved not a sham, but a true modesty, combining inner dignity with sober self-esteem. He sang not with his voice, but with his soul. And today we can announce to the whole world that there will be no second Muslim Magomayev.

Dmitriy Gordon:

- Soviet girls papered the walls of their rooms with Magomayev's photographs instead of wallpaper, and declarations of love for him were spray-painted on stairwells, lifts and even fences... He was adored by secretaries general and ministers, while all-powerful regional committee secretaries spent hours waiting in hotel corridors for him to wake up. The boy, as the legendary Furtseva dubbed him, was forgiven anything: irrepressible, bourgeois bow tie, singing themes from "The Godfather" and other ideologically alien hits, the lack of a party card, and the presence of relatives abroad...

Magomayev was called a darling of fate, a sex symbol and "Mr. No" for his categorical unwillingness to do what he did not want to. Well, the great artist knew his own price. "In my voice - there is a whole fortune," he said, and indeed it could have yielded to the Soviet Union no less hard currency than Baku's oil fields. Suffice it to say that a local philharmonic hall earned four million roubles from four solo concerts by Magomayev in Krasnodar and was able to pay six months' salary to the Symphony Orchestra, while his six concerts in Rostov made it possible to sew new costumes for the ensemble of Kuban Cossacks...

At the same time, the singer himself was not a millionaire, as many thought. His room, where money lay around, was never locked, and the musicians could come in at any time and borrow money (which they never returned).

Today Magomayev's "vinyls", which were sold in millions of copies, have become a rarity and have been put up for online auction as lots, while the Melody company has imposed a heavy tax on the two Golden Discs he received in international record competitions in Cannes, as well as on proceeds from his recordings. The singer was generously given medals for 140 concerts in a 130-day tour, but he never earned a pension in Russia. Moreover, he received his residence registration quite recently, since for all those years he lived in Moscow as a resident of Baku who was married to a Muscovite. No-one knows how Muslim Magometovich would have survived in his final years, if the late President Heydar Aliyev had not granted him and his wife Tamara a presidential pension, and if the succeeding president - Heydar Aliyev's son, Ilham - had not continued to pay it. The amount was small for Magomayev, but it was much more than the pension of a Bolshoi Theatre soloist...

Svetlana Morgunova (from a speech at the Crocus City Hall concert hall in Moscow, on 25 October, at a soiree in memory of Muslim Magomayev)

- Exactly one year ago when the country set the clocks back one hour, Muslim Magomayev's heart stopped forever. And with him, we lost hope that the miracle embodied in this great artist and singer would return and continue. It is only after suffering such a loss that we begin to understand how much we all needed Muslim Magomayev. I do not know anyone who remained indifferent to the way he sang. Not only time shifted with Magomayev's departure, the border separating our show business from what was called "art" in his time, collapsed. The king left in a royal manner, without ceding his crown to anyone in his lifetime, and not because he did not want to give it to the young, but because there was no one worthy... You cannot stop time, others will come, but such a phenomenon, to which happy moments are so clearly and inextricably linked, will never return. The magic, tremulous melodies of Orpheus, who was selflessly devoted to music, will always be heard in our minds and hearts.

Maksim Semelyak:

- In my conscious childhood which was at the very beginning of the 1980s, Muslim Magomayev was a constant, but in the distance.

I remember very well how we learnt Kobzon's "Sunny world - yes, yes, yes! Nuclear explosion - no, no, no!" at school. I remember Leshchenko on TV, but Magomayev was already a certain rarity, like a thunderstorm or hail. On the one hand, his singing was something ordinary, on the other - it always had an exotic note. In his appearance, name and voice, there was something unusual. At five or six, a "vinyl" is always more pleasant to look at than to listen to - and most of all I was struck by one of Magomayev's recordings, on the cover of which he was smoking. It was only later that I learned that he smoked from 19 until the end of his days, but then I just could not take my eyes off the boldly lit cigarette and thought that this man, in all probability, was allowed to do anything he liked. This is how it was, in essence. "He could do anything" - that is how, in a nutshell, we can determine our feelings about Magomayev. In terms of music, it really made no difference. His voice condescended from operatic peaks to the almost recitative introduction of "male fidelity". With equal grace, he enjoyed the poetry of banners and the art of nuances. He could portray everything: Italian beat, American pop music, Odessan couplets, Azerbaijani folklore, gypsy music, Russian chants, nomenklatura officialdom and even the dubious track about snow by the group "Time Machine" which he sang on one of his rare public appearances in the late 1990s. In his songs, he could be as imposing as Dean Martin, as lyrical as Frank Sinatra, and as boisterous as Sammy Davis Jr. - in a sense, he alone was worth all the famous "Rat pack".

Polad Bulbuloglu:

- We had known each other since childhood. We fought in companies. And we both began to sing by shouting like Tarzan. Of course, we had quarrels and disputes. But on my 55th birthday, Muslim wrote me a very warm note saying that we had sort of quarrelled and made it up, but at that age it was time to stop. And I gave him my word from the stage that we would never quarrel any more.

Valeriy Leontyev:

- This was an infinitely talented and interesting man. A colourful personality. This is a case when one wants to become an all-powerful being, to turn back time and fix everything. But, alas, it is impossible.

Ilya Reznik:

- We met in 1962 at a stadium in St. Petersburg. There was a concert, I played a Cuban revolutionary, and he was also playing one. We got acquainted behind the scenes over a bottle of beer. And in the 1980s, we were close. Alla Pugacheva and I came to Baku on tour. He invited us to his home. Oh, how he received us! How hospitable he was! Alla and he played a duet on the piano "How Disturbing This Way Is". Then I got the idea that it would be great if they both sang together: to play on two pianos on the stage - on one red and one black piano. Everyone liked the idea then, but it died away. I am very grateful to him for his help. He helped me release my first book "Monologues of a Singer". At that time, there was a very bad attitude towards us; those who composed pop music - they could not stand us. Muslim put in a word for me. He was on a par with the great ones - Edith Piaf and Mario Lanza. Someone said that pop music lost much with his death. No, for him pop music is too narrow. The musical arts suffered a huge loss.

Vladimir Vinokur:

- We were good friends. Muslim Magomayev stuck in my mind as a humble, but extremely talented man. He did not need protection or admiration, because he was a world star. Many said that people are not indispensable and that there will be a replacement for Magomayev. A year has passed, but no miracle has happened... No-one has replaced Magomayev, and no-one will.

Vladislav Verestnikov:

- He was too critical of himself. If he could not make even one note, he refused to sing the whole song. He worked for many opera theatres despite the fact that he sang not only popular songs, but also a classical repertoire. For all his popularity, Muslim was very accessible, clean and even na?ve. Magomayev was a man of the world. In his youth, Muslim Magometovich was compared with Agent 007 - the actor Sean Connery - as they had something in common in their appearance. And he liked to star in films, even though he joked about his work. He was offered the role of Vronskiy in "Anna Karenina" by Aleksandr Zarkha. He declined in favour of Vasiliy Lanovoy, but agreed to play the Persian poet Nizami. In the evenings we strolled on the Tverskoy boulevard. Muslim had to walk, and I persuaded him to buy a treadmill. But this idea did not arouse his enthusiasm. Doctors told him that by smoking (he smoked three packs a day), he was robbing himself of 15 years of life. But he did not agree to quit smoking or change his way of life. He said: "I will not give up smoking even on pain of death." A different, correct life was not interesting to him. In my opinion, he carried a burden. He said repeatedly: "Let them remember me young." This applied not only to his early departure from the scene, but to his life in general. He believed that he had done everything, as nationwide fame and public love came to him at 19. The only thing he asked God for was a quick death...