Seyid Mirbababev ( az, Seyid Mirtağı oğlu Mirbabayev) was an Azerbaijani singer,

khanende A khananda ( az, xanəndə ; fa, خواننده; alternative spellings in English: khanende, khanande, khanandeh) is a name generally given to singers of mugham, an Azeri folk music genre. The word is of Persian origin and means "singer". W ...

, and oil industrialist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The prototype of Seyid Mirbabayev was created by the composer

Jahangir Jahangirov Jahangir Shirgasht oglu Jahangirov (Azerbaijani: ; 20 July 1921 – 25 March 1992) was a Soviet and Azerbaijani composer, conductor and choirmaster; he was named People's Artists of the Azerbaijan SSR in 1964. Biography Jahangir Jahangirov was bor ...

in his opera "The Fate of the Singer".

Life

Seyid Mirbabayev was born in 1867 in

Baku Baku (, ; az, Bakı ) is the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, as well as the largest city on the Caspian Sea and of the Caucasus region. Baku is located below sea level, which makes it the lowest lying national capital in the world a ...

. He lived and worked in

. Mirbabayev took an active part in the work of the

mugham meetings. A number of mugham performed by Seyid Mirbababev were recorded on gramophone records. In 1906 Mirbabayev received an invitation to

Riga Riga (; lv, Rīga , liv, Rīgõ) is the capital and largest city of Latvia and is home to 605,802 inhabitants which is a third of Latvia's population. The city lies on the Gulf of Riga at the mouth of the Daugava river where it meets the Ba ...

to record his performance by

gramophone A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...

. The singer was one of the stars of

weddings. Singing in a millionaire Shikhbalayev's only son's wedding changed the life of the singer, as the groom's uncle gifted a plot of land to the singer. An oil fountain was discovered on his plot and Mirbabayev became a millionaire. Having become one of the representatives of the oil industry and a wealthy man, Mirbababev moved away from music. He began to feel embarrassed about his former profession, and even bought up his records and smashed them into smithereens so that nothing reminisced about his past .In

Mirbababev bought a building called "Governor's House" (built in 1865-1867), where the Azerbaijan State Conservatory was located since 1920 and Mirbababev rented it to the governors of Baku. The current building of

Azneft The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic ( az, Azərbaycan Respublikası Dövlət Neft Şirkəti), largely known as SOCAR is fully state-owned national oil and gas company headquartered in Baku, Azerbaijan. The company produces oil and natu ...

(Built in 1896), which was acquired from Aramyan and in which Mirbabayev lived until the establishment of Soviet power in Azerbaijan in 1920. After 1920, Mirbababev emigrated to Paris. Mirbabayev, who moved to Paris after the Baku operation, was in a miserable position in this city. Meanwhile, Teymur bey Ashurbeyov from the Ashurbeyovs' family met with the khanende and brought him to Tehran. Seyid Mirbabayev lived under the protection of Ashurbeyov in this city until his death. Seyid Mirbabayev died in 1953 in Tehran.

References

{{Reflist 1867 births 1953 deaths 20th-century Azerbaijani male singers Soviet emigrants to France 19th-century Azerbaijani male singers Male singers from the Russian Empire 19th-century businesspeople from the Russian Empire