The First Nightingale of Armenian Opera, Shazig ‘Lousnag’ Keuyluyian (1854-1895)

Shazig’s extraordinary beauty and enchanting voice immediately won the hearts of everyone present at her audition and the training began.

Maghakian taught her to read and write (girls of poor families had no opportunity to get a proper education in those days) and among other basic subjects he taught her the techniques of acting. Tchouhadjian personally trained her to read music and understand its nuances and intricacies. Serovpe Benklian, a good base, who would soon become the manager and lead actor/singer of Tchouhadjian’s operas, coached her in arias and the art of role interpretation.

Shazig was a sharp, quick learner and endowed with natural talent. She was a hard worker too. She amazed her teachers by the extraordinary speed of her progress. Soon she began to play small parts in Vartovian’s theatre. It was evident that she was going to turn many heads and steal hearts.

ACT TWO: The Tenor

Enter tenor Hovhannes Ajemian! He was the only true professional singer of this entourage to have graduated from a school in Italy. He was also a multilingual intellectual who wrote musical reviews in local papers in different languages. He had joined Tchouhadjian’s team and written the libretto of his first operetta called “Sherif Agha” (Later re-named “Arif’s Tricks” (Arif’in Hilesi) based on Gogol’s The inspector General.

Soon rehearsals began in a most enthusiastic, festive ambiance with the handsome Ajemian in the title role of Arif and the attractive Shazig in the role of his love interest, Meryam. Despite being surrounded by many young admirers in the company, Shazig remained totally dedicated to her work.

Tchouhadjian’s “Arif’s Tricks” composed during 1872 would mark the foundation of musical drama in Constantinople and thereby the entire Near East. “Arif” was finally produced in the early months of 1873.

ACT THREE: Short Love Duet in a Minor Chord

The production was a triumph, followed by the creation of Tchouhadjian’s own theatre group, the Ottoman Opera Company, to Vartovian’s dismay. The company opened its season with a revised, entirely new version of “Arif” on October 12, 1874 with even greater success. Soon, two other comic operas by Tchouhadjian would follow: “The Beardless Notable” (Köse Kahya), in April 1875 and the composer’s most popular work “Hor-Hor Agha, the Chickpea Vendor” (Leblebici Horhor Aga) on November 17, 1875, Shazig becoming the first to sing the lead roles of Gül and Fatimeh (Garineh in later adaptations) respectively.

She was the talk of the town! She also would go down in history as the very first professional prima donna of the Armenian and Turkish stage.

Already after the first performances of “Arif,” Shazig’s and Hovhannes’ photos were displayed in store windows, on music sheet covers and even for the promotion of gloves, hats and other women’s wear.

The famous couple was celebrated all over the city and, sure enough, during the 1874-75 season’s performances Ajemian asked for her hand. She accepted to marry him, confident that an end would be put to advances by younger fans.

She was 19 years old and Ajemian 34! In the company’s later publicity announcements her name would appear as Shazig Ajemian.

Constantinople’s cosmopolitan theatre fans, Armenian, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Jewish, French and Italian, were enthralled. Tchouhadjian’s melodies were on everyone’s lips. The Ottoman Opera Company also produced works by Turkish writers as well as Offenbach’s “La Belle Hélène,” “Orphée aux Enfers” and “Les Brigands.”

Every performance used to end up in a celebration. Bouquets, exclamations of “bravi”s! Fans would push over Shazig’s carriage driver and make the horses gallop across the city streets taking her home, waving torches and lanterns all the way.

But despite the tremendous success, the company lost money! The powerful Vartovian jumped at the opportunity and recruited Tchouhadjian’s singers offering better wages. The early months of 1876 marked the end of the Ottoman Opera Theatre.

Serovpe Benklian, who was an enterprising manager besides his acting and singing talents, began a new company in the following months under the name of La Troupe Arménienne d’Opérettes Turcs (The Armenian Troupe of Turkish Operettas), entrusting the musical direction to Dikran Tchouhadjian. Certainly, Shazig was still the star of the new company.

It is said that during a tour in Adrianople, in 1878, performing for the Tsar’s representative and the Russian army, soldiers would carry her in the same manner as in Constantinople from the Café Cristal where performances were held to Café Luxembourg where she resided. The occasion was the celebrations of the end of the Russo-Turkish War, 1877–78, between the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Orthodox coalition led by the Russian Empire and composed of several Balkan countries.

In the meantime, the pretty “singing doll” with a golden voice, the muse of Tchouhadjian’s operas, grown up in the theatre had become a woman of 24. Her marriage to Ajemian hadn’t lasted long. Just one or two years.

ACT FOUR: True Opera-Worthy Love and Ill-Starred Passion

As a separated young woman, especially a shining star, she was constantly solicited by infatuated admirers. Avoiding all advances, for quite some time, she had devoted herself to art and assiduously continued to perfect her craft. But now, the young woman’s heart was beginning to feel alone.

One fine day, a brilliant young physician, in his early 30s, appears on the scene: Dr. Vichen Ormanian, younger brother of the legendary Bishop Maghakia Ormanian, later Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople from 1896 to 1908. Ormanian had returned to Constantinople after graduating from medical schools in Rome, Paris and London.

Upon discovering Constantinople’s idol, the young physician, like everyone else, would soon fall head over heels in love. And for the first time Shazig was not indifferent. In fact, her feelings for Ormanian were so strong, so overwhelming that she took the sort of drastic measure only blind love can provoke. She quit her career at the top of her glory!

Tchouhadjian, Maghakian, Benklian and all her stage partners were left speechless. Running away from their pleas as well as society’s condemnations, seeking total privacy and freedom for her new life, Shazig rented a small place in Maltepe, a village south of Constantinople on the shores of the Marmara Sea.  There, the new lovers would regularly meet, giving free rein to their passion.

Ormanian’s family, especially his mother and elder brother the bishop, were in shock. They pressured the young physician to immediately stop this “immoral” relationship with a “vulgar stage actress and what is more a divorcée” in the name of the family’s reputation and respectability. They tried to convince him by introducing him to suitable daughters of society families. The tension was such that Ormanian finally consented to his parents and cut off all relations with Shazig. She also felt that being no longer under the limelight, he had slowly fallen out of love.

Shazig was devastated.

Typical of romantic artists of the period, she had led a carefree, exorbitant life, spending her money lavishly and helping generously all who needed assistance.

At this point she was left alone, not daring to go back to the theatre and gradually sank into deep depression. The lack of money also didn’t help. She refused to see anyone, even old stage colleagues who only wanted to be of assistance.

She decided to end it all.

ACT FIVE: Curtain Down

On a cold winter day, sad and gloomy, as the gray tempestuous sea seemed to foreshadow the finality of death, Shazig lit up the stove and made coffee. She then put into the cup the poison she had bought the day before and began to pray. She recalled her days of glory, her debut, her wedding and her only true love, the enormous sacrifice she committed for his sake, her bliss and then her lonely isolation. Her fairy tale life, both joyful and tragic, crossed before her eyes.

Suddenly, she hears soft footsteps in the snow, looks from the window and sees Ormanian …her love! A miracle — he was once again knocking at Shazig’s door!

The physician walked in, silent and gloomy and sat down. She knelt next to him, crying her heart out. Extremely moved, Ormanian picked her up and looking straight into her eyes solemnly declared that nothing could ever separate them anymore.

After spending several months together, meeting each other sporadically, in secret, they finally got married despite vehement objections by the young man’s entire family. She would henceforth be called Mrs. Shazig Ormanian.

Happiness would stimulate the physician even further in his work. Having been appointed director of the Holy Savior Hospital in Constantinople in 1879, he relentlessly explored and published records of his research on the therapeutic and psychic lives of patients, thus becoming the first psychiatrist in Turkish and Armenian reality.

Several enchanting years passed by until … tragedy struck again. Ormanian got sick and died at the age of 45.

EPILOGUE

Abandoned and penniless, Shazig would spend a few more years in utter misery and loneliness, once again refusing to see anyone and never allowing herself to bother people with her misery to ask for help.

Across the sea from Maltepe, in a hotel on Princes’ Islands (Büyükada) she happened to meet the famous writer Anaïs, who was spending the summer vacation there.

Anaïs was a modern woman with an open mind, full of compassion and understanding. Shazig, by then her hair completely turned white, desperate to talk of her past glorious days, would open her heart to her and emotionally narrate her tragic story. In the end, she begged Anaïs to promise her to write it one day.

The writer kept her promise, publishing her memoirs, adding information she had heard from Tchouhadjian himself, thereby saving the “lovely singing doll” from total oblivion.

Anaïs would be one of the very last persons to see Shazig. Soon after, in 1895, in a lonely room on beautiful Princess’ Islands, Shazig once again chose to lower the final curtain. She ingested chloroform.

No fairy tale miracle happened this time …

A shooting star in the eastern sky, Lousnag’s (Little moon) stage career had barely twinkled for 7 or 8 years since the day she enchanted a passing stranger while singing at her window.

NOTES

This writer has not been able to find any information on exactly when Hovhannes Ajemian and Shazig got married nor how long their marriage lasted.

The above article was mainly inspired by the eye-opening and fascinating book The First Actresses, written in Armenian by the remarkably erudite theatre specialist Varsik Grigorian and her actress daughter Hasmik Ter-Karapetian, published in Yerevan in 1993.

Other Armenian-language sources include: Smpad Kessedjian’s unpublished memoirs, Literature and Art Museum (Yerevan, Armenia); Sharasan, The Turkish-Armenian Stage and Its Actors from 1850 to 1908 (Constantinople, 1914); Anaïs, My Recollections (Paris, 1949); Neshan Beshiktashlian, Theatrical Portraits (Beirut, 1968); Garnik Sdepanian, An Outline of the History of Western Armenian Theater, Volume 2 (Yerevan, 1969); and Haig Avakian, Dzidzernag, April-July issue (Egypt, 2006).