Barbad and the Sasanian court

Persian tradition remembers one musician above all others: Barbad, minstrel at the court of the Sasanian king Khosrow II, known as Khosrow Parviz, who reigned from 590 to 628. Almost everything said about him comes from sources written centuries after his death, in Arabic and New Persian, by authors such as Tha’alebi, Ferdowsi and Nezami. Historians therefore treat him as a figure whose existence is likely but whose biography is legend. Both sides deserve telling, and it is worth keeping them apart.

What is known

The Sasanian court supported music on a grand scale. The great rock reliefs at Taq-e Bostan near Kermanshah, carved in the late Sasanian period, show a royal hunt in which women harpists play from boats and other musicians perform on platforms: direct visual evidence of courtly music in action. Middle Persian texts list musicians among the ranks of the court, and the vocabulary of later Islamic-era music preserves Sasanian words. The short-necked lute known as the barbat, ancestor of the Arab oud, was a principal instrument of the period, and the harp, chang, appears in sculpture and on silver vessels.

Lists of compositions attributed to Barbad survive, though in differing versions. Later writers speak of a cycle of seven royal modes, the khosravani, of thirty melodies called lahn or dastan, and of three hundred and sixty songs, one for each day of the Sasanian year. Nezami, in Khosrow and Shirin, names the thirty melodies one by one, and some of the names, such as Ganj-e badavard and Bagh-e Shirin, recur in other sources. Whether they describe real pieces or a literary memory of them cannot now be known.

What is told

Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh tells how Barbad, kept from court by a jealous chief musician, hid in a cypress in the royal garden and sang from its branches as the king feasted, until Khosrow demanded to know who was singing and made him his minstrel. Another story, told in several versions, has the king’s beloved horse Shabdiz die, and no one dare bring him the news, for he had sworn to kill the messenger; Barbad sang a lament from which the king understood, and said aloud, that the horse was dead. In Nezami’s poem, Barbad sings on Khosrow’s behalf and the musician Nakisa answers for Shirin, in a celebrated contest of songs. Ferdowsi closes Barbad’s story with his grief at the king’s death: he cuts off his fingers and burns his instruments.

These scenes became subjects for manuscript painters, and Barbad became a byword in Persian poetry for the perfect musician. His name is still given to ensembles and concert halls. Tajikistan, which counts the Sasanian heritage within its own history, has also honoured him, among other ways in the name of a major concert hall in Dushanbe. Writers in Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia variously place his birth in Merv or in Jahrom in Fars, and the disagreement itself is part of his legend.