Mutal Burhonov

Mutavakkil (Mutal) Burhonov was born in Bukhara on 5 May 1916. His father taught mathematics at a madrasa; his uncles Mazhar and Mukammil Burhonov were prominent Jadid reformers who held posts in the government of the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic, and his sister Fotima was the wife of the writer Abdurauf Fitrat. Fitrat, Cho'lpon and well-known Bukharan musicians were guests in the family home. At eight Mutal was given a tanbur by his uncle Mukammil, who became his first teacher; he later studied the instrument with the celebrated tanbur player Ota G'iyos Abdug'aniyev. By the age of ten he had lost both parents, and his uncles took him to Samarkand.

From 1928 to 1932 he studied at the Uzbek Institute of Music and Choreography, opened in Samarkand. In 1934 he went to Moscow, and a year later he was admitted to the Uzbek opera studio attached to the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied composition with Sergei Vasilenko and conducting with Grigory Stolyarov. In 1936–1937 he interrupted his studies to work as chorus master of the newly founded Uzbek State Philharmonic, preparing its choir for the 1937 festival of Uzbek literature and art in Moscow. After completing the studio course in 1939, he went on to the conservatory's composition faculty.

The purges of 1937–1938 struck his family: his Jadid uncles and a brother perished. When war broke out in 1941, Burhonov volunteered for the Moscow people's militia, and by the end of that year he was back in Tashkent. In 1946 he won the competition for a republican anthem, and in 1947 his music was adopted as the anthem of the Uzbek SSR with words by Turob To'la and Temur Fattoh. He returned to the conservatory after the war and graduated in 1949.

Back in Tashkent, he was artistic director of Uzbek Radio in the early 1950s and chaired the board of the Union of Composers of Uzbekistan from 1955 to 1960. Romances, unaccompanied choruses and vocal-symphonic works are at the centre of his output. His six a cappella choruses on folk tunes (1952) are regarded as among the first examples of Uzbek polyphonic choral writing, and he also arranged Tajik, Karakalpak, Uyghur and Iranian songs for choir. He wrote scores for films such as Avicenna (1956), Enchanted by You (1958) and The Planes Did Not Land (1963), and incidental music for the stage, including the drama Alisher Navoi by Uyg'un and Izzat Sulton. He received the Order of Lenin in 1959, the title of Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR and the Berdakh State Prize of the Karakalpak ASSR in 1964, the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1970, and the title of People's Artist of the Uzbek SSR in 1976.

The figure of Alisher Navoi drew him back again and again. In 1968 he wrote a Qasida to Alisher Navoi on verses by Abdulla Aripov for reciter, soloists, choir and orchestra, and in 1979 the romance-poem I Do Not Know Her Name (Namedonam chi nom dorad), a setting of a ghazal by Hafez for voice and orchestra. His opera Alisher Navoi, to a libretto by Izzat Sulton, was completed in 1986 and staged in 1990 at the Alisher Navoi Bolshoi Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Tashkent.

When independent Uzbekistan adopted its State Anthem on 10 December 1992, it kept Burhonov's 1947 melody and gave it new words by Abdulla Aripov. In 1996 the composer wrote the requiem Eternal Memory on verses by Fitrat, Cho'lpon and Usmon Nosir, poets who perished in the purges, together with lines of his own. In the years of independence he was awarded the Shuhrat medal (1994), the Order of Outstanding Merit (1998) and the El-yurt hurmati order (2001), and was made an honorary professor of the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan. In 1997 he moved back to Bukhara, where he spent his last years and wrote a memoir, Ko'ngil xazinasi (Burhonnoma), in 1998. He never married.

Mutal Burhonov died in Bukhara on 15 June 2002, at the age of 86. In 2016 the centenary of his birth was marked across Uzbekistan, and the national agency Uzbekkino made a documentary about him, Mutal Burhonov: I Still Live in Melodies. In 2018 the Bukhara house where he spent his final years opened as the Mutal Burhonov House Museum, a branch of the Bukhara State Architectural and Art Museum-Reserve.