ABSTRACT
By all accounts, the debut of the Rahbani Brothers and Fairouz at the Baalbeck Festival in 1957 was a rousing success. This is how Mansour Rahbani, reminiscing to the poet Henri Zoghaib some thirty-five years later, remembers their first performance there, a series of folkloric musical and dance scenes called Days of Harvest (Ayyam al-hasad ):
Opening night came and none of the ladies of the committee knew what was going to be in the show. At the beginning of the first scene the director Sabri Sharif [Sabri al-Sharif] put Fairouz on the base of one of the columns and shined the light on her from the bottom of the pillar and from different angles. This made it seem to the audience that she was flying in the air while singing “Lebanon, How Beautiful and Green.” The first scene was stunning in terms of the audience’s reception, the applause igniting in a wave that was a mixture of excitement, tears and bliss. The whole event was put on before a very responsive crowd. We did the show for just two nights, as had been previously decided (each night approximately 5000 spectators came to see what Lebanon would present between the foreign acts) . . . . The press praised us, and we were happy to see that they understood what we were trying to do . . . and they focused on the necessity of repeating these “Lebanese Nights” at Baalbeck.
