ABSTRACT
At a certain point in their careers Fairouz and the Rahbani Brothers had become virtually synonymous with Baalbeck’s ancient ruins and annual festival. This fact is reflected in some of Fairouz’s nicknames, such as “the star of Baalbeck” (najmat Baalbeck) and “the seventh pillar” (al-‘amud al-sabi‘) (Wazin 1996: 20). In this chapter I begin tracing the formation of the tautological relationship between Baalbeck the site, Baalbeck the Festival, Lebanon, and Fairouz and the Rahbani Brothers. Different combinations of these elements are often linked in a variety of sources. In the program to the 1998 Baalbeck Festival, the Lebanese literary critic Khalida Sa‘id writes on the occasion of the return of Fairouz to Baalbeck after an absence of almost a quarter of a century:
Fairouz is a unique phenomenon who . . . became the symbol of Baalbeck. It is one of those rare times when an artist is transformed into a symbol for the nation . . . . In the darkest days she did not give up her belief that art is the most lasting face of Lebanon, nor did she lose faith in the ability of art to save the world. Thus she became a symbol of Lebanon and a sign of a desired utopian Lebanon. With this inspiration and symbolic voice she returns to the ruins of Baalbeck. We greet her return like the renewal of the promise and we hope for the resurrection of the utopian dream from its ashes.
