Zeki Müren

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Zeki Müren
Clothing worn by Zeki Müren
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Zeki Müren (born December 6, 1931 in Bursa , Turkey , † September 24, 1996 in Izmir ) was a Turkish poet , composer and singer of Turkish classical and contemporary music. He was called the "Sun of Art" (Sanat Güneşi) and affectionately Pasha ("General").

Youth and education

Müren was the only son of a well-off tobacco and timber merchant. Müren began his secondary school education in Bursa and completed it in Istanbul at the “Bosporus Lyceum(Boğaziçi Lisesi) . From 1950 to 1953 he studied decorative arts at the " Academy of Fine Arts " (Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi) in Istanbul. While still at secondary school in Bursa, he began to make music with İzzet Cerçeker, who played tanbur . In Istanbul he continued his exercises with Agopos Efendi, an Armenian musician who mastered the “ Hampartsoum notation”. The Armenian Krikor Efendi played oud . Müren later learned numerous compositions from Şerif İçli, an oud player who knew the Fasil repertoire well; Şerif İçli and another teacher named Sadri Sençalar were also members of the Turkish radio orchestra.

Music career

An early composition by Müren was sung by Suzan Güven on the radio in 1949 and 1950 respectively. Müren had his first own media appearance at the age of 19 on April 8, 1951 on Istanbul radio, he sang on Turkish radio for another fifteen years. With Bir Muhabbet Kusu ( "Budgie") he published soon after his first record. In 1955 he was the first Turkish singer to receive a gold record . He has been voted “Artist of the Year” several times. In total, he composed over 100 songs over the course of his career and recorded over 200 songs, which were published on over 50 long-playing records. When interpreting the songs, his voice should be emphasized, as well as his precise articulation of Turkish, which is important for Turkish classical music. As is customary for the genre of music, most of his songs are about love. In the late 1970s he also approached the arabesque style of music .

From 1955 Müren appeared for some time in Küçük Çiftlik Gazinosu , one of the three most famous Istanbul nightclubs of the time. There he was accompanied by instrumentalists such as Selahattin Pınar, Yorgo Bacanos, Sadi Işılay, Hakkı Derman, Şükrü Tunar, Feyzi Aslangil, Kadri Şençalar, İsmail Şençalar and Necdet Gezen. At times he made a hundred stage appearances a year. He also appeared at Turkey-specific matinees, which were reserved for female audiences, where they bring food and drink with them like a picnic and where sometimes a special repertoire is sung.

His eccentric appearance as a bird of paradise and his stage costumes, which he designed himself, were also remarkable. In addition to the suits , tuxedos , which were worn from the beginning , something extraordinary was added after an encounter with Liberace on a trip to America in the 1960s. For a while he often appeared in a kind of mini dress , sometimes with fishnet stockings and platform boots. Müren once compared it to Roman tunics , which were longer in the original. Müren was also the first to wear glittering costumes. Even in later years he often wore cloaks, was generally more feminine, always made up and wore sumptuous rings. He appeared androgynous , but never as a drag queen , but always remained recognizable as a man despite all effemination . Today his clothes can be seen in the Zeki Müren Museum . His self-staging and his appearance are often compared to Liberace, because of his popularity at the time, his glittering costumes and his weight problems in old age, he is sometimes compared to Elvis Presley .

Film, poetry and painting

In 1953 he made his first feature film Beklenen Şarkı ("The Expected Song"), together with the famous actress Cahide Sonku . She was also the wife of my father's business partner Ihsan Doruk. Up to his last film Rüya Gibi ("Like a Dream") in 1971, seventeen other films followed with him in the lead role, in which, in contrast to the show stage, he played regular men and sometimes portrayed the jealous lover who also took out his competitors . He also wrote the music for some films.

Müren was also active as a poet and wrote more than 100 poems. In 1951 he brought out the book Bıldırcın Yağmuru ("The Despondent Rain"). He also painted as a hobby.

Late years, death and fame

Zeki Müren Street in Bursa

In the course of the social reorganization after the military coup of September 12, 1980 , Müren was banned from performing, as was the transsexual Bülent Ersoy . After a few years he was allowed to perform again. In the last years of his life, Müren suffered from severe obesity and since 1992 has been living in a secluded place in his villa in Bodrum . In rare television recordings, one limited oneself to showing face and hands.

Müren died while recording a broadcast in TRT's Izmir studios . In this program, he was to be awarded a prize at the end of a documentary film about his life Batmayan Güneş (“The Never Setting Sun”). Müren was particularly excited by the announcement that he would be given the microphone with which he had sung his first song on Ankara radio in 1951. Ajda Pekkan was also a guest on this program . After he died, TRT displayed the words “The sun has set”. The funeral was like a state funeral with tens of thousands of men and women of all political backgrounds and the Turkish flag on his coffin. The then President Süleyman Demirel proclaimed "He was my friend" and Chief of Staff Hakki Karadayi sent the message "Zeki Müren loved his fatherland."

Müren bequeathed a large part of his legacy to the Foundation of the Turkish Army and the State Education Foundation. In his hometown of Bursa there is the music and culture high school Zeki Müren Anadolu Güzel Sanatlar Lisesi , with which the music school of the town of Rathenow maintains a partnership. His summer house in the holiday resort of Bodrum on Zeki Müren Caddesi ("Zeki Müren Street") was renovated by the Ministry of Culture and opened to the public on June 8, 2000 as the Zeki Müren Museum . The Bardakçı Bay in Bodrum is also called Zeki Müren koyu ("Zeki Müren Bay").

Dealing with the "extraordinary kind"

In the course of his career he was said to have romances with many famous women and starlets, especially Ajda Pekkan . He himself only talked about having had a great love between 1962 and 1970. He never revealed the gender of this person. At least in the early 1980s he lived openly with Fahrettin Arslan in his house in Bodrum. In a long interview published shortly after Arslan's death, he explicitly compared their partnership with the male-male partnerships of classic Sufism . Müren compared himself to the medieval mystic Mevalana Celaleddin Rumi and Arslan, whose partner and inspiration was Schams-e Tabrizi .

In the pseudo-autobiography Şimdi uzaklardasın by Ceyhan Güç (1996), an over-intense relationship with his mother and a childish but never fulfilled love affair in Bursa are used to explain his artistic spirit ( ince ruhlu ) and his inability to have long-term relationships with other women. In the book Dargınım Sana Hayat: Zeki Müren için bir demet yasemin by Ergun Hiçyılmaz (1997), the mother is not mentioned and the author reports in long scenes about Müren's visits to brothels in Istanbul's Galata district , where he is said to have slept with 104 women . Hiçyılmaz interprets the relationship with Arslan as one of several platonic relationships with women and men. The press also published numerous images showing him dancing or hugging female stars.

Müren was known for his selected, even aristocratic language, he was always extremely courteous, showed the best manners and always made polite statements in public. When asked about his stage wardrobe, he replied that artists often wear many colors. Another time he commented on the assumption that someone, because of their androgynous clothing, might think they had undergone a sex reassignment , and that this would not be mentioned in the case of women in pants. When asked whether a man in women's clothes had lost some of his masculinity, he replied that these were not women's clothes, but the kind of clothes that Caesar , Baytekin or Brutus wore . And when asked about how he would feel on stage in his nudity ( çıplaklığınız ), he said "like a wrestler who goes out in a swimming costume."

Many Turks who find it difficult to find the right words to their parents when they come out say: "I'm like Zeki Müren ..."

When it comes to LGBT in Turkey , Zeki Müren and Bülent Ersoy are often mentioned next to each other, sometimes even referred to as friends. Even during Müren's lifetime, journalists kept making “comparisons”. However, the two never met. “Müren was vulnerable and reserved, Ersoy, who was 21 years younger, was the opposite. Müren found Ersoy repulsive, Ersoy Müren too scared. ”So Ersoy did not take part in the 2006 tribute performances for the 13th Golden Lens Prize and the resulting album“ One voice - thirteen breath ”.

In April 2002, the well-known musician and composer Özdemir Erdoğan attacked Müren, Tarkan and Ersoy in a TV show : “Zeki Müren inspired Turkish youth to become homosexual. Since his skirt appearances in the 1960s, I have seen more and more curious figures in the Istanbul gutters. ”Zeki Müren and Tarkan are pied piper and“ Bülent Ersoy was inspired by Zeki Müren for sex reassignment. ”In response, media and artists accused Erdoğan of blasphemy .

On the second weekend in January 2010, strangers hacked into the central system for the Islamic call to prayer in the northeastern Turkish city ​​of Rize . Instead of a call to prayer, songs by Zeki Müren were heard from over 170 minarets in the city for three minutes.

Movies

(With international English distribution title if available, translated German title and other main actors)

  • 1953 - Beklenen Şarkı - ("The Awaiting Song"; Cahide Sonku)
  • 1955 - Son Beste - ( The Last Musical Composition ; Belgin Doruk)
  • 1957 - Berduş - ( The Vagabond ; Deniz Tanyerli; also film music)
  • 1958 - Altın Kafes - ( The Golden Cage ; Nilüfer Aydan; also film music)
  • 1959 - Gurbet - (Mualla Kaynak; also film music)
  • 1959 - Kırık Plak - ( The Broken Disk ; Belgin Doruk; also film music)
  • 1961 - Aşk Hırsızı - ( The Love Thief ; Leyla Sayar; also film music)
  • 1962 - Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır - ( Sometimes Life Is Enjoyable ; Belgin Doruk)
  • 1963 - Bahçevan - ( The Gardener ; Belgin Doruk)
  • 1964 - İstanbul Kaldırımları - ( Pavements of Istanbul ; Belgin Doruk; also film music)
  • 1965 - Hep O Şarkı ("Always this song"; Belgin Doruk; also film music)
  • 1966 - Düğün Gecesi - ( The Wedding Night )
  • 1967 - Hindistan Cevizi - ( The Coconut ; Filiz Akın)
  • 1968 - Kâtibim - (Sezer Güvenirgil)
  • 1969 - Kalbimin Sahibi - (Sema Özcan)
  • 1969 - Inleyen Nağmeler - (Mutlu Mine)
  • 1970 - Aşktan da Üstün - (Filiz Akın; also film music)
  • 1971 - Rüya Gibi - ("Like a dream", Esen Püsküllü)

Web links

Commons : Zeki Müren  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g h i j k Martin Stokes: The Tearful Public Sphere: Turkey's "Sun of Art", Zeki Müren in: Tullia Magrini (Ed.): Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean , University of Chicago Press, 2003, ISBN 0-226-50166-3 , p. 307 ff.
  2. a b c d Summary of the political and economic news in the Turkish press this morning - TURKEY MOURNS DEATH OF MUSIC IDOL ZEKI MUREN ( Memento from August 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), byegm.gov.tr, September 26, 1996
  3. a b c d e Sean Killeen: The Late, The Great Zeki Muren ( Memento from May 10, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) - In conversation with Terken Hacaloglu and Aykut Kansu, Studies in Popular Culture 22.3, 1999
  4. Hakan Saygun'un haberi: Page no longer available , search in web archives: Sanat Güneşi Zeki Müren anılıyor , WDR, Funkhaus Europa, September 24, 2007@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.funkhauseuropa.de
  5. For example, photos in the picture gallery at Hürriyet : No. 1 , No. 3 , No. 10 , No. 12
  6. Zeki Müren -Biography ( Memento from December 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), turkishmusicclub.com, accessed: January 7, 2009
  7. Jürgen Gottschlich: " The long way to tolerance ", taz , May 29, 2008
  8. Pictures from the Zeki Müren Museum in Bodrum ( Memento from April 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ^ Susan Taylor Martin: A city comes out , St. Petersburg Times, Jan. 17, 2003
  10. a b page no longer available , search in web archives: Homosexuality in Turkey - 'Zeki Müren is to blame for everything' , vaybee.de, 2002, accessed: January 7, 2009@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.vaybee.de
  11. a b c d Peter Lachnit: Turkish Divas - Border Crossers , Ö1 , Spielraum Spezial, 25 September 2005
  12. Kerem Öktem: Another Struggle: Sexual Identity Politics in Unsettled Turkey , merip.org, September 2008
  13. ^ Carsten Weidemann: Turkish TV travesty canceled , queer.de, May 9, 2006
  14. love in the heart . In: Der Spiegel . No. 50 , 1997, pp. 180 ( online ).
  15. Dirk Ludigs: Migrants - A Question of Honor - Interview with psychotherapist Halis ÇiÇek, Lifestylemagazin FRONT, issue 03/08; Fokus.de, March 5, 2008
  16. a b Joachim Schönert: The General is dead - or - A concept of life , LUST No. 39, December 1996 / January 1997
  17. Associations and institutions with partnership relationships ( Memento from August 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 41 kB), havelland.de, accessed: January 5, 2009
  18. 16 Turkish Press Review - ZEKI MUREN ART MUSEUM ( Memento from August 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), byegm.gov.tr, July 10, 2000
  19. Koray Ali Günay, GLADT eV: Minority in the Minority - Experiences of Non-Heterosexual People from Turkey in Berlin and Germany , in: Anti-Discrimination Network Berlin of the Turkish Federation in Berlin-Brandenburg (Ed.): Page no longer available , search in Web archives: Visions for a non-discriminatory Berlin (PDF; 808 kB), July 16, 2003, at gladt.de@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.gladt.de
  20. Jim & Perihan Masters: Modern Turkish Music Stars Salute the 'Past Master' Zeki Muren , practicalturkish.com, May 31, 2006
  21. ^ "Rock the Mosque" ( Memento of January 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), Financial Times Online, accessed: January 12, 2010