The story of Mahassen and Abdulkader

A love story that spanned across time, Mahassen Mattar describes her life with advertising, design, and painting legend Abdulkader Arnaout, and how their love boosted both her music career and his various activities, without ever getting in the way or weighing down the other.Prelude

A little girl walking home from school in the late 1961 sees a poster inviting her to join Solhi al-Wadi’s Arab Institute of Music. It is one of many the famed musician released to all the schools in Damascus, but something about the poster grabs her attention, speaks to her, and she cannot shake off the desire to enroll.

Many years later, talented musician Mahassen Mattar will insist it was because of that poster that she joined the institute. The man who drew the poster, famed painter and Syrian advertising marvel Abdulkader Arnaout, would visit the institute approximately a year later, guided by its director, Solhi. When asked much later who his best friends were, Abdulkader would say that there were only two people he couldn’t do without, and Solhi was one of them. Wadi would reply that if he ever forgot anyone else, it would not be Abdulkader. These two dear friends were walking the halls of the institute together, when they happened upon a room where a little girl was playing the violin at the front of the class. Pleased and charmed by what they heard, Solhi proudly introduced the person who could play so well after only one year in the institute to Abdulkader as “one of my star pupils, Mahassen Mattar.”

Crescendo

Their influence on each other felt many years before, it was not till Abdulkader returned from studying inParis, after the October War of 1973, that they officially met at a party for artists and musicians. Mahassen was still studying for her degree in physics and mathematics, with an emphasis in math, but had kept up the violin, and was the only female player from her initial class still playing. “Violin is the hardest instrument to use, it needs dedication to be the best, but it also needs heart and emotion, so essentially the heart and brain must work in tandem,” says Mahassen, in her current home in Beirut.

“That’s why I could keep going; it needs a little intellectual prowess to some degree, which is proved by my love of math.” Being the only woman in the Syrian Chamber Orchestra that Solhi created in 1964 was a position that presented a lot of challenges. Rehearsals would last till the late hours of the night, and at that time, Damascus was not well lit after dark, so coming home was a bit daunting. Also an annoyance was the lack of women to share the trials and trivialities of her day at work. “When we went to Lebanon to record the soundtrack for the movie ‘Truck Driver,’ released in 1967, I was still the only woman in the orchestra, despite having merged with local musicians there,” says Mahassen. “Abdulkader, some years before we were married, was also involved in the advertising for the movie. When everyone would leave for the after parties after recording, they would keep me in the hotel for my safety, and go off and have a good time without me. I was too young and a woman to boot, so they left me behind.”

They continued to meet each other at these parties, and Mahassen couldn’t help but notice him, as he tended to take command of the conversation at these parties. Though he had a stutter, Abdulkader was also famed for his sense of humor, and not only knew every joke in the book about stuttering, he was the first to tell them and make them known.

Their continued meeting and admiration for each other helped their affection grow, and inevitably, they decided to marry. Many were jealous of Mahassen for having caught this confirmed bachelor, and tried to discourage and taint the marriage. “What do you see in him, anyway?” they would ask. “He’s old, and he stutters.” She laughed at that, and told them, “he doesn’t stutter, he only tells jokes about it.” At this point, her guests didn’t know where to look. After a little thought, Mahassen thought it best to bring this up with Abdulkader himself. He laughed at her gently, and told her another joke, “a man well known for his stuttering walked up to some friends and started speaking clearly and eloquently.

His friends, surprised, asked about this strange change in him. ‘Nothing strange about it,’ he said. ‘I’m simply imitating those who don’t stutter!’” That was how Mahassen learned that Abdulkader did indeed have a stutter.

Duet

Married life was very much a balancing act for this artistically inclined couple, but it was one that Mahassen handled with much brio. She was famed far and wide for her time management skills, and an average day would include: scheduled classes at the institute, after she had taken over the violin class there as the first female violin player at the institute; her private violin students, and occasionally private math students; being fully in charge of the household, from its upkeep, the cooking, and the childrearing; and whatever evening rehearsals or concerts she was committed to.

Her schedule was penciled in so tight, that one misstep could ruin a whole day, but that rarely happened, and she always made sure she could keep her personal and professional life on track. “Sabah Qabani, [first director and presenter on Syrian National Television, and former ambassador to the US] always consulted me, because he said I represented the perfect housewife, who would wear an apron in the afternoon and a party dress in the evening,” she recalls, bashfully. “He used to tell me, ‘the way you switch roles, you are truly someone we can call Cinderella’.”

Abdulkader, for his part, was very supportive in ways that were unusual for a man in that time. Far from resenting her career, or begrudging her time outside of the house, he always appreciated that his wife was doing something special, and would brag about it to his friends, “My wife is a violin player.” This was especially powerful, as for many years, not only was she the only female violin player in the orchestra for around eight years, she was the only female musician in orchestras across the Middle East, an honor and a burden that was not lost on either of them.

“When I was at the orchestra, he took care of the kids, and was very attentive and supportive of us all,” explains Mahassen. “It helped that he worked from home except when he was teaching at the university, as he was chairman of the visual communications department of the fine arts faculty of Damascus University. The whole house practically became a studio, so if clients wanted to see his artwork, we called it the studio, and if the family wanted to sleep, we called it a home. It really depended on the purpose of the house at the time.”

Married life began to show its effects on Abdulkader’s work. A very patient man, he would paint around his intruding family, who couldn’t help but interfere sometimes, and appear in the room where he was working. One of the most characteristic aspects of his painting was his incorporation of Arabic calligraphy. He always used nonsense words, however, to emphasize the beauty of the written word without having people get lost in the actual meaning of the word. Only one painting has been an exception, where he used the name of his wife Mahassen in the work. Simultaneously applauded and inciting great envy towards his wife, he only ever confided the true reason for using her name to her: “I wrote your name to get rid of you!”

Coda

God, it seems, has a deep sense of poesy, and he chose for Abdulkader, a man who with his family had a deep appreciation for the artistic, an ending as beautiful as it was shocking and tragic. Staying at a friend’s farm outside of Damascus, a Spanish friend related that the Japanese believed the full moon was its most beautiful in August. So, on August 13, 1992, He, Mahassen, and their two children,

Maria and Sami, sat to admire the moon. As they gazed at the sky, he just passed away. “His heart attack was so sudden, he was never ill, we had no warning, and it was over in a matter of seconds,” says Mahassen. “It took the doctor and his aid ten minutes to get him out of the armchair he was in, and by that time, there was nothing to do but declare him dead.”

Finale

Mahassen continued to teach at the institute till the year 2000, when she decided to end a teaching career that spanned nearly 28 years, and where she had taken full classes of students from their earliest stages till the point when they would sometimes join her in the orchestra, first at the chamber level, then in 1993, when it transformed into the Syrian Symphonic Orchestra. “For a long time, if you would ask all the people who studied under Mahassen Mattar to stand, at least 12 musicians would,” she recalls, in a voice mixed with melancholy and pride. She continued to play with the Orchestra till she married her second husband, Imad Shbarro. She met him in Baghdad, and was surprised to  learn that he was, in fact, her mother’s first cousin. In 2004, after finishing a tour across Los Angeles, Germany, the Arab world including Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordon, finally performing in Italy, and in a concert in Lebanon, Missak Bagboudrian announced that Mahassen was leaving the orchestra to marry again.

“I’ve played the violin now for over 45 continuous years, first in the Syrian orchestras, and now with the Lebanese National Orchestra,” she says. “I’ve been truly blessed.” Still, she reflects fondly on her first marriage, married to a Syrian great. “What was special about us was that we were two people with our own careers, and throughout our lives together,” she says, “we were still aware and supportive of the other, without ever becoming an obstacle or a burden.”