For how long had life been preparing the meeting of this melody, this poem, and that throat, that they might interlace and melt into one, and so become the song — the sweet, beautiful song that looks out upon our country in the radiance of its renaissance, to be part of that renaissance?!
Was nature dreaming of this trinity in her fitful drowsing, in which she closes her eyes upon a dead tune, and starts up in alarm at the din of some singer, and wrinkles her face in disgust at words they called poetry and set to music in the name of a song?
It was no mere coincidence, the meeting of these three units in one complete unity.
It is life, watchful over its own developing, self-renewing continuance. Answering its call, at its inspiration, two young men set out climbing a path where the thorns flourish and put out leaves, and where the fingers of harm have grown strong; and on the first summit there was someone waiting — waiting for them. And in the sanctity of summits, and the grandeur of attaining them, life loosed from the mouth of one of them poetry, from the string of the other a melody, and from the throat of the third a warbling; and so there was the song, complete and new, bearing in the folds of letter, melody, and tune three names: Fairouz, Assi, Mansour.
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This piece has no occasion in itself, but the subject as a whole has an occasion of which the least that can be said is that it is a victory the two Rahbanis
and Fairouz have achieved, for themselves and for their country. They have returned from Egypt, after entering it neither begging the delivery of a song nor the composing of a melody. For this beautiful song, which has perfumed the air of our country with the new, the fresh, and the noble, captivated the greatest of Egypt's artists — hence the journey; and they returned leaving in the souls of the Egyptians a longing for more. Hence the promise to return to Egypt next year, after leaving there forty-eight songs which the Egyptian broadcasting station folded onto tape, to send out to the millions over the ether, carrying the perfume of our country and its colors, its renaissance and its taking flight, sung by the green Valley.
They sang for Egypt:
Do you remember, I wonder, our green wall where the birds would come for shade; in those days our love, in our quarter, was the story of the rose, the confiding of the flowers!
The trio: Fairouz, Assi, Mansour
The Rahbani boys and girls gathered around their mother! Elias (at the right), the d'Artagnan of the future!