Ottoman History Podcast - The Life and Music of Armenian Soprano Zabelle Panosian

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

with Ian Nagoski hosted by Suzie Ferguson | Zabelle Panosian's ethereal music transfixed audiences from Boston to Paris in the early years of the twentieth century. Yet, by the 1960s, her work was all but forgotten. In this episode, we explore Panosian's life story and some of her exceptional music. What did it mean to leave behind an Ottoman homeland, only to watch the destruction of the 1915 Armenian genocide from afar? What was it like to be diva in Europe and an ambitious Armenian woman artist in the United States, only to be siloed into the category of "ethnic music" by major record labels as anti-immigrant sentiment rose? In this epsiode, we listen to many of Zabelle's songs to explore these questions and more with record producer and music researcher Ian Nagoski. Zabelle's story helps us to understand how and why 'serious artists' have been remembered or forgotten in the annals of American music, especially the immigrants among them. « Click for More »

Welcome back to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Susie Ferguson. Today's episode starts with a recording of an old Armenian folk song called Krain, or Grunk. Made in 1917, this is one of the most amazing recordings I've ever heard. The singer, Armenian soprano Zabal Panossian, is the subject of today's episode. But before we learn more about her world and her story, you might just want to stop what you're doing for two minutes, close your eyes, my God. ¶¶ ¶¶ © BF-WATCH TV 2021 is my tune is

my tune is my tune is my tune

is my tune Oh, my love, But you, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me I love you. Sigma Juni Juni Juni Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave The recording you just heard was a song by Armenian singer Zabel Panosian called Grunk or Crane. Here are the lyrics. Crane, where are you coming from? I am a servant of your voice. Crane, don't you have a bit of news from our country? Don't hasten away. You'll arrive at your flock soon enough.

This is actually a song that we featured on a previous episode of Ottoman History Podcast that we recorded with today's guest, music researcher and reissue record producer Ian Nagoski. That episode was called American Music of the Ottoman Diaspora. And I listened to that episode as I was walking down the street where I live, running errands. And I have to tell you that this recording literally stopped me in my tracks in the middle of the road. That high note that Panosian hits in the middle seems like something that shouldn't be possible for a human voice. Like she's being held on a wire, trembling in the grip of something larger than herself. Today, we welcome Ian Nagoski back to the podcast to talk about this song and the woman who recorded it, early 20th century Armenian soprano Zabel Panossian, who's the subject of a new book that

Ian's just published called, again, a line from Grunk, I am a servant of your voice. I'm Susie Ferguson, and this is the Ottoman History Ian, it's great to have you back on the podcast. I've been a huge fan for a long time. That's kind of you. Thank you for having me. Could you just tell us a little bit about that song and what it's about and why it's significant? Well, Gronk is a very famous old folk song. My co-authors, I should say, of the book are Harut Arakalian and Harry Kazelian. Harry found that the earliest transcription of Gronk is very nearly identical to the lyrics that we have now. And that transcription is 400 years old and found in Aleppo, Syria. is 400 years old and found in Aleppo, Syria. It's a song about a crane. It's a song where the singer actually addresses a crane, says, where are you coming from? I am servant of your voice. Crane, don't you have a bit of news from our country? Hasten not to your flock, you'll arrive soon enough. It was a song that was collected end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century by the great patriarch of Armenian music, Gomitas Vardarapet.

The version that Gomitas collected, he collected in the east. I don't remember exactly where. But the singer, Sabel Pinozian, was from a place called Bardizak, which is on the Bay of Izmit, out the Sea of Mamara, about 80 miles east of Constantinople, Istanbul. So her version of the song that she knew growing up is melodically radically different from the version that basically everybody else has sung since Gomitas collected it. It's in a different mode. And she does some interesting things in her arrangement of it. So it's a very special record. I've never heard anything else like it. And it made me want to know everything about her, since there was at the time, nothing available to know. So maybe you could introduce us a little bit to Zabel. You mentioned that she's from a small town

about 80 miles southwest of Istanbul. What was that place? How did she learn to sing? And how did she come to be on this incredible recording? Yeah, she's from this place, which is Bardazag. It was called about 80 miles southeast of Istanbul, which was a almost entirely Armenian speaking town, 90 something percent Armenian speaking, of about 10,000 people, folks who had immigrated there from further east a couple of hundred years earlier, and had stayed rather autonomous as Armenians through a combination of discretion and bribery. And she was born there 1891, was educated on the elementary school in the middle of the street. It was surrounded by mulberry groves. Silk production was the main source of income for the town.

There were two silk mills on either side of the main road. And she began singing in church when she was young. Her mother died when she was 11 years old. The 1890s, when Zabel was growing up in Anatolia, were a fearful time for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Between 1893 and 96, Sultan, Sultan Abdulhamid II pursued what his private secretary would call a policy of severity and terror against the Armenians. Ottoman authorities and ordinary people organized and joined waves of massacres against Christians,

especially Armenian communities, some of whom were calling for reforms and others of whom were building a revolutionary movement in the vulnerable eastern provinces of the empire. Zabel's own life would be shaped by these broader forces. She had an experience when she was eight of having been abducted from her bed at night. Must have been terrifying. But she refers to it just twice. After the First World War, she mentions this experience of having been taken away in the middle of the night and

being ridden off on horseback and made to sing and dance on a table for Turkish military men. And then, when she's about 15, she says there was a second abduction attempt, which prompted her family to send her away. She travels first to Egypt, probably because she only had an internal passport, and then someone there in Egypt was able to get her passage to the U.S., to Boston, to marry another guy from Bardizak, from her town, named Aram Sarkis Panosian, who was about 10, 15 years older than her, and right about that time in his life, began working with the Tickner Brothers postcard company. He was a photo engraver, and they were significant developers in the history of the picture postcard. And he did quite well. And so he was very supportive of her, got her English lessons,

and got her singing lessons. She studied with a couple of people she said she learned practically nothing from. And then with a teacher named Gertrude Duena, something like that. Older lady who was a professional voice teacher to whom Zabel was quite devoted and from whom she said that she learned the delicacies of the art of singing. And so there she is in Boston in the early teens. She had a daughter right before she turned 17 and is entering into Boston society as her husband is beginning to make some money.

And she's attending the brand new Boston Opera. And she gets enamored with that music and with her vocal teacher. And she learns to be a vocal artist in the popular style of the time, the bel canto, coloratura, vocal thing that was really big then, and probably saw Louisa Tetrazzini and Amelita Gallicucci and all of these people. She began her singing career there in Boston, was already fairly popular by 1914, 1915, when she was still in her early 20s, to the extent that actually she had to take out a notice in the Boston newspaper forbidding people from using her name

at events that she wasn't actually appearing at. I suppose that's a sign of some fame, that people are trying to use your name to advertise things you're not at. Yep, seems like. How did it matter for her? I mean, so in some ways, she's, this is already an extraordinary life to come from a small town in Anatolia to Boston to become a vocal artist. How is her early performance and recording career shaped by the fact that she was from a part of the world where maybe people weren't as familiar with singers and musicians from Anatolia as they were from, say, France or Italy or even American-born singers. How did her kind of immigrant status shape her recording career? Well, she was singing for her community. She was

singing for Armenian speakers, of whom there were many, many in the Boston area. As a matter of fact, I first heard Grunk because it was given to me as a record collection that was just given to me by a fellow named Leo Sarkeesian, who when I met him was in his, or 93 years old, I think, and was in the process then of retiring from the Voice of America. And Leo was in the process also of dispensing with some of his possessions, getting rid of his instruments and his paintings and all these things he'd accumulated over the course of a kind of amazing life. And we had met and he knew I was interested in these old records. And so he said, do you want them? And I said, well, yes. So he gave me all of his records,

including all the 78s he bought in New York City in the 1940s and 50s, but also all the 78s his father and his uncle had bought in the Boston area in the teens and 20s. And among them was a cracked, broken copy of Zabel's record of Gronkh. So that's how I first heard it. They were from D'Arbiker, his family, and worked at the shoe factory in Haverhill. So anyway, there were lots of Turkish and Armenian speaking people in and around Boston. And that was her initial audience. She was singing for them in English and French

and Italian, but also in Armenian. So that was the main part of her audience, I believe, for the next five years, 1915 to 1920. Which of course, as our listeners will know, is also the time of the First World War and the Armenian Genocide back at home in Anatolia. So I'm wondering sort of how we might think of her career and also of her music as being sort of in conversation with events that were happening not only in her new homeland, but also in the place she had come from. Oh, well, she was driven, driven to perform in benefit of Armenians and Armenian causes. She raised ultimately millions of dollars for Armenian causes during that period, 1915 to 1920.

Very, very active, doing all kinds of stuff, not just performing, but charity drives and anything she could do. As reports were coming into the country, you know, it was very concerning for her and the people around her. Three of her siblings also arrived, a sister and two brothers, and her father did not. And she learned a little bit later on that her father, in fact, died of starvation. What happened in Bardazakh was that young men were put to work on construction projects as of April 24th, 1915. And then all the guns were taken away from Armenians. And then leaders of the town were taken off and beaten. And then everyone was required to sell off all of their possessions, rugs, furniture,

everything you had in the house, you had to take out onto the street and sell it to people from the neighboring towns. So, you know, Turkish neighbors would come and buy everything you owned for a pittance. And then you had to give that money to the government to pay your fare to be deported. And you take one train to another train to another train, and then ultimately walked into the desert. And this is very likely how Zabel's father died. Of a town of 10,000 people, by 1917, there were several dozen people left. a town of 10,000 people, by 1917, there were several dozen people left. The Melbury Groves were destroyed. Floorboards were ripped up from the houses. The silk mills were destroyed. Everything was gone by the time Zabel begins recording, March of 1917. So, as it was the case for many other Armenians in the U.S., there simply was no home to go back to. The whole world you'd known was gone, and almost everybody you knew was dead, or you didn't know what had happened to them and suspected the worst.

So, the song, Grunk, speaks directly to that place that Armenian Americans were in at the time of being stranded and desperate for information about what had gone on back home. CHOIR SINGS We can only imagine, I think, how important not only the fundraising, but also the sort of musical production of a song like this would have been in that context. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, Zabel was not the only person to record this song, Grunk. You talk in the book about a colleague of hers, Arminag Shah-Muradian, who also made a recording of that song. And I'm wondering if you could, we'll play a little bit of that recording. And then maybe you could tell us a little bit about sort of what's unique or what's kind of special to Zabel's version. Sure. Well, Shah Muradian was hands down the most important voice

for Armenians in the early 20th century in the US. You may know there was a poem about him that William Sarian wrote to the voice of Shah Muradian. Beautiful thing. I don't have it in front of me. voice of Shah Muradian. Beautiful thing. I don't have it in front of me. But Shah Muradian was about 10 years older than her and had studied with Gomitas Vardarpet going back into the 19th century, had been arrested on a couple of occasions for revolutionary activities in Georgia, was saved and released by an Ottoman official. He wound up as a choir director in his hometown for a little while, and then made it to France, where he studied under Vincent Dandy and Pauline Viardot, who taught him for free, incidentally, and then got his big break, which was a starring role at the Paris Grand Opera in Gounod's Faust.

And that makes him. He tours all over Europe and he's rich. Goes from being totally broke to being very rich. And then he goes 1914 to Constantinople, reconnects with Gomitas, and they record a series of records, including a version of Gronkh. And one can hear on this, same lyrics, very different arrangement, very different melody. And this is the one that people generally think of when they think of Grunk. And Gomitas plays piano on this. So we'll listen now to Armanik Shah Muradian's version of Grunk. We could notice how different it sounds from Zabel's. Igu cat

Соліту. Ustigusat. Seraem salim Gros meras carib Abri Chori Chori Chori Chori Back to Ian to learn what happens next. So then the war breaks out and he can't go back to Paris. So December 1914, he comes to the U.S. And sometime early in that year, he meets Zabel. And the two of them begin doing joint concerts, upstate New York, Detroit, doing fundraising.

And it's really based on his name, his reputation, and his artistic skill that those concerts take place. And they sort of have parallel careers where they're meeting up and then going in different directions and then meeting up again for several years as they're both going around doing fundraising for Armenian causes. And they both begin recording right about the same time. As a matter of fact, they both go and make trial recordings for Victor Records, and they're both rejected at separate sessions. Victor Records doesn't want either of them. Can you imagine? And then within a matter of months,

they then go to Victor's chief rival, which is Columbia Records, and begin making records for them. So it sounds like Armin Agshah Muradian really manages to kind of get out of the box of being an Armenian singer or sort of only singing for an ethnic or an immigrant community in his career as an opera star. Does Zabel try to make a similar move at any point? Absolutely. I mean, I think that she was very interested in that kind of career path. I think she really wanted to be Louisa Tetrazzini or Amelita Gallicucci or one of these big opera stars. Opera stars at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century in the US were what Hollywood stars became in the 1930s,

40s, 50s. I mean, that was what everybody wanted to be. That was glamour. And I think that she felt that she had a real ability and had a vision of herself as an artist. She certainly was. I mean, she created something absolutely out of herself on the 11 recordings that we have of hers. So maybe we could play one of those recordings now that's actually a song that it sounds like she did in French, Charmant Oiseau. Could you tell us a little bit about that recording? Ah, yes. So she does two recording sessions. One is March of 1917, and then again, June 1918. 17, and then again June 1918. At the June 1918 sessions, she re-records several of the songs from the earlier session slower. She records a couple of new songs in Armenian, and she records

one song in French. It's from a lyric drama by a guy named Lucien David, a little opera called The Pearl of Brazil. Anyway, this song, Charmant Oiseau, had been recorded a year earlier by Emelita Gallacherchi, had also been recorded by Louisa Tetrazzini, as it happens, and she does her own version of it. It comes out as the flip side of one of our Armenian records, but not on every copy. It only comes out as the flip side on some copies. Other copies have an Armenian song on that side. So it's quite scarce, and it's the only example that we have of hers singing in a language other than Armenian. ¶¶ ¶¶ CHOIR SINGS She was recording at the time for what Columbia Records called their E-series,

which is their general foreign language series of records. E for ethnic. They later changed it to F for foreign. And I think she would have loved to have recorded all of this stuff in French, English, Italian, that she was performing in public, in front of Armenian audiences, in front of larger audiences. Some of these benefits that she was doing at the time, you know, Calvin Coolidge is there, General Atronic is there. At the time, Calvin Coolidge is there. General Atronic is there.

There are big celebrities attending some of these rallies and events surrounding World War I as patriotic things. She sings the Star-Spangled Banner over and over again to thunderous applause. She was trying to be an artist and taken as an artist. an artist and taken as an artist. It's so interesting, because it sounds like she has that kind of broad audience in real time, in the sense that she's performing for not just Armenian audiences, but also, you know, other audiences in the United States. But then what's recorded because of the shape that the record company imagines her audience to take is very specific to her kind of ethnic category. Well, I think she was just beginning to have an audience outside of the Armenian community or outside of the community that was attending events surrounding war efforts, patriotism, stuff like that.

She's only just beginning to make that transition about 1919, early 1920, when she got a role in a big theater production in Boston about Solomon and David. And she plays Abishag, I believe, in this thing that's got 500 dancers and 300 singers or something, a biblical pageant play. and 300 singers or something, a biblical pageant play. That's her first real role as a actor that is not specifically, her first role on stage that's not specifically tied to her Armenian-ness in some way. But then, so in early 1920, she applies her passport

for her and her 11-year-old daughter and says that they're going for several months to Europe to meet family members, to do music stuff. So they visit England briefly and then set up at the Hotel Vernet, right by the Champs-Élysées. I visited there a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact. Nice place. Fancy. She made it.

Five-star hotel with a two-star Michelin restaurant downstairs. Yeah, it's a nice place. So she was set up there for about two years. And she studies and performs. She goes to Milan, studies there, performs at La Scala, wins an award, apparently. It goes to Cairo in Alexandria, potentially to meet with people that she had connected with

on her way to the U.S. And her singing gets better and better. She's quite well received. I mean, by this point, she's nearly 30 years old. So one of the other things that Zabel did while she was in Europe was to meet Gomitas Vardopat, the kind of founder figures of modern Armenian music. Could you tell us a little bit about how that went,

what that was like for her to meet this person whose songs she had been singing. Yes, it was not long after she arrived in Paris that she tracked down Gomitas. Now, Gomitas had been a teacher and friend to Shamaradian, who she'd been close to. And he had been somebody who had been arrested, of course, April 24th, 1915. And from that moment onward, had suffered from mental health problems. And he'd stayed in a psychiatric facility for several years in Constantinople, Istanbul. And then in the late teens, he moved to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life in two psychiatric facilities. So she met him there in 1920, and she published an account of that meeting.

It is the only first-person document that we have of hers. It's the only thing we have in print of her speaking in her own voice. And it's the centerpiece of the book, as far as I'm concerned. Harry Kazelian found it and translated it, and it continues to blow my mind. Her actual description of it and writing of it is very poetic and very beautiful and contains a lot of subtlety that I can't get across exactly. But I'll say that she was told not to go visit Gomitas because he, just the week before, had had a visitor and he'd thrown his shoe at them. But she went, she was insistent, and she brought along with her two friends who were doctors. They were very careful not to say

to Gomitas that they were doctors because he hated doctors. And they approach him and he's sort of out in the yard talking to himself, sort of walking around, muttering or something. And she approaches and he looks at her and says, yes, you know, can I help you? And she says, father, I'm a student of yours from far away. Oh, he says, first he says, you remind me of a student of mine. And she says, I am a student of yours from far away, and we've never met. And he says, well, where are you from? And she says, Boston. And he says, Bostan, which is Turkish for vegetable garden. And he asks, you know,

do they grow a lot of vegetables there? She says, no, and it's a little uncomfortable. And she doesn't say that she's from Bar-Dizak, which she could have said, and he would have known he visited there in the early teens. She doesn't say that. She's flustered. And he says, well, you know, what can I do for you? And she says, well, I want to know the pieces that you've written of choral music. Is it okay to sing those for solo voice? And he says, yeah, of course. Absolutely. You know, if you know the song and you understand the song, sing it however you want. You know, it's yours. Take it. And she takes her leave. It's yours. Take it.

And she takes her leave. She says that she'll visit again. He says, oh, you know, she says, we don't want to tire you out. And he says, yeah, okay, well, you come back sometime and you sing for me and I'll sing for you. And she says, I'll do that. And then she leaves. And she never does. As far as we know, she never went back. But she wrote this article and ended it with, you know, I believe, I hope that the

Vardarpet can be cured and that one day we will all sing together again. And then I think that never happened. That's a big part of Zabel's story, is things that seem like they could happen and then don't. It's part of life. Well, maybe in honor of that meeting, we could play a song called Karun, Spring, that was collected and arranged by Gomitas and sung by Zabo Panossian. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Muzica © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Ah, yes, this is a very famous Gomitas thing.

And it's a song that Shamiradian and Gomitas recorded also in 1914. Shamiradian, incidentally, was very careful not to step on her toes, and they didn't record any songs in common in the U.S. Another point about the Gomitas meeting, about the, yeah, about the Gomitas meeting, is she doesn't mention Shamiradian. She doesn't say that they have this friend in common, this close person in their lives. So I actually don't know what happened to Zabel and Shamiradian's relationship and where that all went. But by the end of their three years of touring together off and on, she was the headliner and he was the opening act. Their positions had switched. And yeah yeah it's not clear

what happened with that Shah Muradian ultimately winds up moving to France and himself dying in a psychiatric facility So I'm basically from like a, you know, jazz, blues, classical, rock and roll kind of background. And I tend to make correlations and analogies among poems cross-culturally that occur to me. And maybe, you know, the jazz standard Spring is Here. Spring is Here, Why Don't the Birds Enchant Me? Something like that. It's about what a bummer it is to be sad and unloved at springtime

when it seems like the world should be full of hope, and it isn't. So Garun's lyrics are very, very short, but they're basically the same thing. It is springtime, snow has fallen, my love has grown cold to me. That's basically it. Yeah, it's a song that's been recorded a million times. And again, this is a, well, this is an instance where among Zabel's very few recordings, several different takes were in fact released. It was very unusual for Columbia Records to record more than two takes of anybody, much less an ethnic foreign

performer. They'd make a recording of it, and they'd make a backup, and that was it. Two takes, period, done. Zabel, being who she was, being this serious artist personality, recorded some of her material over and over and over again. One song she recorded nine times. Grunk she recorded seven times. Karun she recorded, I can't remember if it's four or five times. And at least three different takes of Karun circulate on discs. They look exactly the same. You can't tell the difference until you put the needle on them. And this one is a take that I didn't know existed until Haroud Erekelian came across it at the Armenian Library and Museum in Watertown, Massachusetts.

And it's different because there's no piano for the first minute. It's just the string quartet. And it's very, very effective. I'm particularly fond of this take. They're all good, and they're all rather similar, really. She was able to do the same performance with, apparently, studio musicians over and over again. So again, this speaks to her artistic integrity, that she showed up at the studio with sheet music, instructed the performers, and then got the results she wanted out of them

under rather primitive circumstances. These recordings are made 10 years before the invention of microphones. So this is just horns in the Woolworth building in Manhattan, up on the, I can't remember, 12th floor or something. So she really, yeah, she made it work. Yeah, I'm very fond of her. In 1924, having met Gomitas and sung across Europe, Zabel returned home to the United States. But it seems like she found it a bit different from the place that she had left.

At the end of that journey, three and a half years she's in Europe, while she was in Italy, she begins to use her husband's first name as her surname. Some performances she does as Zabella Ram. Then she comes home, 1924, after having been a celebrity, basically, in Europe for three years. You know, a diva who was performing Rigoletto and the Barber of Seville. She comes back to the US, 1923, during this massive wave of xenophobia, you know, right before the Johnson-Reed Act. The Johnson-Reed Act, also known as the Immigration

Act of 1924, established quotas based on national origin for immigrants into the United States. And she gives a few performances where the Armenian press lists her both as Zabel Panosian and Zabel Aram, but she quickly drops the Panosian and begins to perform just as Zabel Aram, basically for the rest of her career. Some of that I take to be a step back from identification with Armenian-ness and wanting to be taken seriously as an artist, as a performer who is international. She sings songs of various countries in costume for each country and then ends with an Armenian language performance of a few songs at her concerts. So maybe this is a chance to talk about some of the images of her career that you reproduce in

the book. There are a bunch of really wonderful images. We'll reproduce hopefully a couple of them for listeners on the blog, but they were making me think about how hard it might have been for her to kind of break out of this mode of being a kind of ethnic artist, especially in sort of the mid, early to mid 1920s that you were talking about. Could you just tell us a little bit about what you make of these images of her, the posters of her kind of advertising her music and her career? I think it's interesting in a number of levels that we have so many photos of her from the 19-teens and 20s. They tell us a bunch of things. One is that she was appreciated. Her husband took a number of the photos. People liked seeing her face. She was nice to look at.

A important factor among singers, opera singers at the time, that could get you attention and get you noticed. One of the interesting things about her life that I didn't deal much with directly in the book is the business of being a woman on stage, being looked at and judged and evaluated constantly, I think was a serious concern in Zabel's life all the time, having to do with her artistry, her being a woman, and her being an immigrant,

and Armenian in particular. She does get cast when she's finally cast in a role in this biblical pageant play. You know, she's cast as somebody who's wearing kind of Near Eastern garb and sort of quasi-Haram-ish attire. So, yeah, that might have been some concession, I think. But of course, you know, cast in, you know, Christian mold. Yeah. And then when she gets back from Europe in the 20s, you know, Christian mold. Yeah, and then when she gets back from Europe in the 20s, you know, she presents herself very often in the costumes of these significant opera roles that she is inhabiting.

She takes costuming seriously and wears the clothes of different countries. I think that's not insignificant. And does she continue to get those roles throughout the 20s? Or sort of what happens to her career when she comes back from Europe to the United States? She does get to continue to sing and she does perform some of these roles that she knows, but for rather minor companies. Now and then, she gets to show off what she's learned. My sense from the reviews that we have is that by about 1925 or 26, her voice is the best it ever

was. So almost 10 years after her recordings, I think she probably really hit her peak. But even as she's getting better and better as a singer, her audience is dwindling and dwindling. By the time she's in her mid-30s, let's say, the other acts on the bill are like novelty acts a lot of the time. She goes to California and gives concerts for the Armenian community there. But when she does opera in New York, or when she performs on the radio, it's really as a rather minor performer. And do you have a sense of why that is? Is that because the sort of taste has changed? How do we understand sort of this, the fact that her voice is maybe the best that

it's ever been, but then her career starts to kind of dim at the same time. Well, we have one review from a newspaper in Brooklyn who gave her a negative review, said that her voice was thin and reedy, and that she was only suited to singing the quasi-Oriental airs that came at the end of her concert. But he also, having mentioned those, gives a kind of sideways reference to, you know, I'll leave it to the readers to guess her ethnicity or guess her nationality. So I don't know, maybe that's part of it. There could be any number of factors involved. You know, a business in the music career is not easy for anybody. It takes a lot of factors to come together in terms of publicity and meeting the right people and being in the right place and all this stuff. And you just have a short window in which to have those things all come together. It really could have been any number of things. I don't mean to sidestep the question, but I also don't want to project more than I actually know.

I mean, you have this amazing kind of epigraph for the book from a later Armenian singer named Kathy Berberian, where Berberian says, according to your book, there was an Armenian girl who was a big star at one moment, and then she sort of disintegrated into nothing. I mean, no one knows where she ended up. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about where Zabel ended up, and sort of how we might think about the later parts of her life and her career. Yeah, that's interesting. I was amazed when I heard that quote in a radio interview that was archived online, because that was 1972, and Zabel was alive and well in New York City, and lived another 15 years after that. So, she was still around. In fact, she was being written about now and then in the Armenian press,

kind of in the past tense. She was the voice of a particular generation, that wave of Armenians that came. And for later generations, I think several things happened. I think there was a period in Second World War afterward where, and now I'm not Armenian, so this comes from speaking with Armenians and a certain amount of projection, I think, from circumstantial evidence. But I think there was a period where people were tired of talking about it. They didn't want to think about the worst of it, which is kind of what some of her music represented, you know, that darkness. some of her music represented, you know, that darkness. And I think there was a certain fatigue that set in. Certainly the massive success of fundraising during the teens and early 20s

for Near East Relief drilled into the heads of every American that the word Armenian would always be preceded with the word starving. If there was one factor that I would guess led to Zabel changing her surname from Panosian to Aram, it's to get away from being a starving Armenian. That, as an artist, has to be such a drag after a while to constantly be labeled like that. So it's in some ways the very history and the tradition that launched her career are also then what she, you know,

may end up wanting to move away from. Yeah, I think she saw herself as an artist in a larger sense and, you know, managed to achieve some of that. She went to Europe for the, you know, three and a half years. She came back. She toured. Did not record again, unfortunately. Shame, because the microphone, you know, this invented in 1926, right at the time when her voice is at its best, it

seems. Then she goes back to Europe in the late 30s, and she's doing shows there. Her daughter has taken on her own career as a dancer. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about her daughter, and on her own career as a dancer? Yeah, I wanted to ask you about her daughter and sort of how we might see some of Zabel's legacy also as generational in the sense that her daughter also had a major career as an entertainer in a very different mode. Yeah, it turned out to be such a huge part of the story

and huge part of the book that, you know, Zabel was quite young when she had her daughter and her daughter was 11 years old when they went on tour together for three and a half years, living overseas, in an environment of artists, you know, growing up in, you know, backstage and on stage and in taxi cabs and hotels and around artists, and, you know, traveling all over Europe. And her daughter, and, you know, traveling all over Europe. And her daughter, right about in her early mid-twenties, breaks off and forms her own career. She had been studying, seriously, Spanish dance,

was very into flamenco, and by 1934, changes her surname to Otero and represents herself for the rest of her life as being Spanish, as being from Seville or Madrid, tells the press that her father was Spanish and that her mother is an American opera star. Now and then she'll say an Armenian opera star, but always an opera star and usually American. She really pulls back on all of this Armenian identity stuff completely during the 1930s, 40s, 50s, during the big period of her career. And she spends basically the second half of the 30s into the early 40s, until 1941, in Europe, in Spain, France, and Germany, performing constantly. Okay, I'll tell you a little story that someone just told me that's not in the book, and it may not be true, but it's a story that's circulating now that's kind of interesting. It would have been in the 1930s that in Paris at a nightclub,

Calouste Gulbenkian, I expect you know who that is. He was an oil baron, an art collector. There's a big museum of his work in Portugal, of his collection, his art collection, and a big patron. So he was in a nightclub in Paris in the 30s, and he's talking to the owner of the nightclub, and he sees sees this dancer and he says, I will bet you that that dancer is Armenian. And the owner says, well, dude, she's Spanish. You know, she's doing Spanish dance. I'll bet. Go ask her. So they call her over and ask her, you know, are you Armenian? And she says, yes. And he says, knew it. Come over, have dinner with us. So she winds up meeting Kallus Gulbenkian that way.

But that was her life. Very few people would have recognized her as Armenian. And she intentionally presented herself as other than Armenian. So in the book, you pose this question of sort of how and why serious artists are remembered or forgotten in the United States, and particularly the immigrants among them. So I'm wondering how the story of Zabal Panossian and perhaps also her daughter kind of speaks to this question, or how you're thinking about that question, having written this book. My project on dealing with these early 20th century recordings of dealing with these early 20th century recordings of immigrants to the United States has largely been to describe and include stories of significant performers who had careers in the early 20th

century and performed in languages other than English, because I am myself a fully melting pot at American. I have no identity outside of having been from Delaware, you know. And it seems to me that there's so many recordings, hundreds of thousands of recordings of immigrants to the U.S. from, let's say, 1900 to 1940, and so many good ones and interesting stories and amazing individuals that no one looked at for most of a century while we were building the idea of such a thing as Americana that grew up out of, you know, the post-Civil War era and then flourished post-war in the forms of Bob Dylan and Charlie Parker and, I don't know, Billie Holiday and Jackson Pollock and whatever it was we decided America was good at.

All of it had to be in the English language, it seemed. It turns out that when you go looking, even if you only read and speak English like me, you can find out stories and some traces of memories. If you ask the people who speak the languages, that seemed like they ought to fit into the idea of America and what we do and what we've accomplished. But that was systemically written out and neglected as other, you know,

which just seems to me to be selling ourselves short. Like we're so much better than we say we are, if you actually go looking. And there's all this incredible music that, you know, go looking. And there's all this incredible music that, you know, we can rediscover as part of a kind of more expansive American musical history. Yeah, if you're just looking for good experiences, because that's what I was after when I started all this, was just like, get a box of records and just go through them and put the needle on them and see what they would do to me emotionally. and just go through them and put the needle on them and see what they would do to me emotionally. You know, like, is this good? Is it exciting? I just wanted those experiences. If that's all you want, then go, you know, listen to this stuff that's laying around. It's just garbage that

people are just throwing away all the time, you know, I figure. So, and that's what happened when I first put the needle down on Gronk, was it just held me riveted in space. It just, you know, completely stopped me in my tracks. When she hits that note, I mean, it's not like other notes. It's very special. David Harrington from the Kronos Quartet once said that Zabel Pinozian sang one of the most beautiful notes he'd ever heard in his life. Zabel Pinozian sang one of the most beautiful notes he'd ever heard in his life. And when he writes his novel, the main character in that book will be Zabel Pinozian's note. I mean, it contains so much inside of it. And to be able to do that as a 25-year-old immigrant woman from Boston,

From Boston. It's special. It's, yeah, not everybody can do that. That's an inner world of strength and experience and creativity and resourcefulness that is special and important, I think. So maybe we could close by playing just one more of the tracks that come along with this book. And you had mentioned this song, Kavar Al-Yem, I Am Darkened, as one of the ones that had really stuck with you. Maybe you could just read us the lyrics and tell us a little bit about the song, and then we'll play the recording. Sure. So my collaborator on this project, there are two collaborators, Harut Arakelian and Harry Kazelian, both of whom read Armenian to some extent. Harry reads very well and knows Turkish and is extremely knowledgeable in the history of Armenian music over the past 150 years or so. Extraordinary person, and I'm very lucky that we came in contact and that we've kind of shared

all of these stories back and forth and ideas. Harry contributed several really important things to the book, one of which were translations of all the lyrics. So his translation of Kavar Olyem goes this way. It says, I am darkened like the night, on all sides of me a storm. I have no love for you. I have no love for you. I am in love with the homeland. Over there are miserable, unfortunate mothers, parents who have lost children, countless sisters bereft of brothers. They are spilling copious tears. For best in care In church, For best in care

You will keep it Oh, I can't say. Oh, I can't say. Now, it sounds like a genocide song, but was composed about 1864 by a guy whose name I will mispronounce because I only read and speak English, Sumbat Shahaziz. And, you know, Isabel had a gift for knowing these songs and remembering them and being able to arrange them and present them in a way that was highly refined and deeply emotionally affecting. MUSIC PLAYS I am.

Ian, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you today about this incredible artist, Zabel Panossian. Thank you so much for having me, Susie. I really appreciate it. And where can people get the book? Oh, well, for the time being, canary-records.bandcamp.com is where I produce and distribute a lot of stuff. The book is for sale there. produce and distribute a lot of stuff. The book is for sale there. It's also at the Armenian Museum in Watertown. It's at Abril Books in California, and will be more widely available, hopefully, by the time that this comes out. Fantastic. Well, we look forward to it. And thank you and your co-authors so much for all of the work that you've done to bring us some of this amazing music and these stories. Thanks for letting me share it. Appreciate it.

For those who want to find out more, we'll post a short bibliography, some images, and a list of related episodes on our website, www.adamandhistorypodcast.com. Thanks, as always, for listening, and until next time, take care.