Ruhi Su

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Ruhi Su at a concert in Germany in 1979

Mehmet Ruhi Su (* 1912 in Van ; † September 20, 1985 in Istanbul ) was a Turkish opera singer , folk singer and Saz player, presumably of Armenian origin.

Life

origin

It is not certain whether Ruhi Su was of Armenian origin and whether his parents were killed in the Armenian genocide . He himself never spoke publicly about this topic, only said that he was "one of those children who were left alone by the First World War". The identity of his parents is not known. His son Ilgın said in 2012: "If you consider that my father was born in Van in 1912, he grew up in an orphanage and no relative was ever found, the probability is very high that he was Armenian." What is certain is that Ruhi Su grew up in a destitute family in Adana and attended a boarding school for orphans there from the age of ten.

Education and early years

Su started playing the violin at the age of twelve . According to the Family Name Act of 1934, he chose the surname Su and also took the first name Ruhi. He successfully applied to the Ankara Music School and studied at the Ankara Conservatory from 1936 to 1942 . In the following years he worked as a teacher at a middle school in Ankara-Cebeci and at the Hasanoğlan Village Institute . From 1945 he worked at the State Opera and sang in operas such as Madama Butterfly , Fidelio , Tosca and Rigoletto . During his training in classical music, he began to deal with Turkish folk music. To protect his vocal cords, he gave up playing the violin in 1937; later he learned to play saz.

In 1942 Su got a broadcast on the state broadcaster Radyo Ankara with the title The baritone Ruhi Su sings songs . In 1945 the program was canceled because Su had sung an Alevi song critical of the rule . During this time Su continued his work on the opera, but intensified his preoccupation with folk music. In 1944 he gave his first folk song concert in Halkevi Ankara . In 1946 he founded a choir at Ankara University , in which his future wife Sıdıka Umut also met. The choir was banned the following year.

Persecution and distress

Su was a member of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), against which mass persecution began in 1951. In November 1952, Su was arrested from rehearsals for the opera The Consul . He never returned to the opera stage.

Su was first imprisoned in Sansaryan Han , a former Armenian-owned department store in Istanbul's Sirkeci district , which was expropriated after the genocide and used as a police prison in the 1940s and 1950s. Sansaryan Han was considered a torture facility; Su was also tortured, including having his fingernails pulled out. Locked in a tiny cell called tabut (“coffin”), he wrote the text of Mahsus Mahal (for example: “special place”), which would later become one of his most famous pieces. The song was dedicated to Sıdıka Umut, also a member of the TKP, who was sitting in another “coffin” cell in the same prison at the same time. While they were still in prison, they married, for which they were driven from prison to the registry office.

Su spent six months in Sansaryan Han, then three and a half years in Harbiye Prison. Eventually he was transferred to Adana. Another of his most famous pieces, Hasan Dağı , is a reworking of this crossing. This was told much later by the writer Vedat Türkali , who was transferred with the same prisoner transport. After serving full five years' imprisonment, Ruhi and Sıdıka Su were released in June 1958. This was followed by 22 months of exile, first in the provincial town of Çumra , later in Ankara, where their son Ilgın was born in 1959. The job opportunities remained difficult. Su provided the soundtrack for the film Karacaoğlan'ın Kara Sevdası by director Atıf Yılmaz . But before the film was released, Sus's music was deleted from the film - officially because his opera voice was not right, actually for political reasons because the producer feared reprisals.

After the fall of the Menderes government by a military junta , the situation for Su became a little easier. He got an engagement at Taksim Gazino in Gezi Park , at that time the most famous entertainment place in Istanbul, and appeared in other clubs. But record companies continued to shy away from the risk of working with him. That is why intellectual friends who were friends started a subscription campaign . In 1963 four singles were released. A photo by the Turkish-Armenian photographer Ara Guler was chosen for the cover of the first . With four subscriptions, Su released a total of 16 singles.

Most successful phase

In 1971 his first album Seferberlik Türkuleri ve Kuvayi Milliye Destanı was released , a setting of Nâzım Hikmet's epic about the Turkish Liberation War . There followed more albums in quick succession. In 1975 Su founded the Dostlar Korosu choir , whose members he selected in a casting and which often accompanied him in the following years. The choir was located in the Dostlar Theater in Istanbul, later also worked with other artists and continues to the present day.

1977 Su first appeared in Europe. He processed his impressions there in the songs Almanya acı vatan (“Germany, bitter homeland”) and Almanya'da Çöpçulerimiz (“Our garbage collectors in Germany”). Both pieces appeared in 1977 on the album El Kapıları , the first of two albums he recorded in a duet with the musician Sümeyra Çakır .

In the same year, the Su couple bought a house in the coastal town of Ören . A studio was set up there, and friends and colleagues often visited the couple. Those years were the happiest of their lives together. Su remained politically active there. Another of his most famous pieces was created during this time: Şişli Meydanında Üç Kız , an appraisal of the May 1st massacre on Taksim Square .

Last years

After the military coup in 1980 , Sus's working and living conditions deteriorated again. He was not arrested, and his works were not officially banned, but they were no longer available in Turkey. In addition, there was a de facto ban on performing.

In February 1983, Su was invited to a gala in the Şan cinema in Istanbul. The organizers decided not to announce it for fear of reprisals. The writer and journalist Zeynep Oral , who was involved in organizing the evening, later described how a never-ending applause Su received on stage: “We didn't just applaud him. That applause was a protest against oppression, a demonstration for the ideals we believed in. ”It was Su's last public appearance.

He was already suffering from cancer . Medical treatment was not available in Turkey at the time. He was unable to leave the country because his passport expired at the end of 1980 and the military junta refused to renew his passport. In his struggle for an exit permit, Su received support from home and abroad; then turned Wolf Biermann , Heinrich Böll , Ingeborg Drewitz , Gunter Grass , Siegfried Lenz and Günter Wallraff in a letter to the Turkish government. In mid-1985, Su was finally allowed one-time travel for medical purposes. But that came too late, the cancer was already too advanced. Nevertheless, Su wanted to travel to Germany. In the middle of his travel preparations, he died on September 20, 1985 in Istanbul.

His funeral became the first mass protest against the junta since the coup five years earlier. Soldiers and police attacked the funeral procession and 163 people were arrested. His grave in the Zincirlikuyu cemetery has been desecrated several times to the present day.

Sıdıka Su died on October 18, 2006.

meaning

Since the 1960s, Su roamed Anatolian villages and the slums of Istanbul, where immigrants from Anatolia had settled, and "discovered" orally transmitted songs. He also set works by the old Turkish-Alevi poets called Aşık such as Yunus Emre and Pir Sultan Abdal . Against the background of his education, Su combined traditional Turkish folk music with elements of classical European music . Together with Aşık Veysel , it was he who introduced the Turkish urban milieus to the music of Anatolia. At the same time, Su modernized and politicized folk music.

He became a pioneer of Özgün Müzik and influenced both folk musicians such as Rahmi Saltuk , Zülfü Livaneli , Arif Sağ or Ahmet Kaya as well as rock musicians such as Cem Karaca or Haluk Levent . Several Turkish artists covered songs that he had written or discovered. The band Grup Yorum released an entire album of his songs in 2015.

Ruhi Su is considered one of the most influential Turkish musicians of the 20th century.

Grave in Zincirlikuyu

Discography

Albums

  • 1971: Seferberlik Türküleri Ve Kuvayi Milliye Destanı
  • 1972: Yunus Emre
  • 1972: Karacaoğlan
  • 1972: Pir Sultan Abdal
  • 1974: Şiirler - Turkish student
  • 1974: Köroğlu
  • 1977: El Kapıları (together with Sümeyra )
  • 1977: Sabahın Sahibi Var (together with Sümeyra)

After his death

  • 1986: Pir Sultan'dan Levni'ye
  • 1987: Kadıköy Tiyatrosu Konseri I
  • 1987: Kadıköy Tiyatrosu Konseri II
  • 1988: Beydağı'nın Başı
  • 1988: Dadaloğlu Ve Çevresi
  • 1989: Huma Kuşu Ve Taşlamalar
  • 1990: Sultan Suyu "Pir Sultan Abdal'dan Deyişler"
  • 1991: Dostlar Tiyatrosu Konseri (together with Sümeyra)
  • 1992: Ankara'nn Taşına Bak
  • 1993: Semahlar
  • 1993: Çocuklar, Göçler, Balıklar
  • 1993: Zeybekler
  • 1993: Ezgili Yürek
  • 1993: Ekin İdim Oldum Harman
  • 1993: Uyur İken Uyardılar
  • 1994: Barabar
  • 1995: Aman Of

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Murat Meriç: 100 yaşında bir dev: Ruhi Su . Radikal, September 5, 2012
  2. ↑ a b c d Ruhi Su Kültür ve Sanat Derneği: 100 yaşında bir dev: Ruhi Su . Biography on the website of the Ruhi-Su-Foundation, accessed on January 28, 2017
  3. ↑ Sedat Kaya: Sabahin bir sahibi var sorarlar birgun sorarlar , Haber Hürriyeti, July 19, 2015
  4. ↑ a b Ruhi Su in an interview with BBC-Türkçe , radio interview from 1977, reprocessed in 2015 for the broadcast Arşiv Odası , accessed on January 28, 2017
  5. ↑ a b Seval Deniz Karahaliloğlu: Ruhi Su ile Birligte Kırk Yıl: Sıdıka Su . Interview with Sıdıka Su. Bianet, October 21, 2006
  6. ↑ a b Deniz Yücel : Taksim is everywhere. The Gezi movement and the future of Turkey , Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2014
  7. ↑ a b c d e f Ruhi Su Belgeseli , documentary by Hilmi Etikan from 2004 with English subtitles, accessed on January 28, 2017
  8. ↑ a b c Murat Meriç: Özlediğimiz Ruhi Su . Kültür Servisi, September 20, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Su, Ruhi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Su, Mehmet Ruhi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Turkish folk singer and saz player
DATE OF BIRTH 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Van
DATE OF DEATH 20th September 1985
Place of death Istanbul