Shah of Persia

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Naser al-Din Shah Qajar was the fourth monarch of the Qajar dynasty of Iran, or Persia, ruling from 1848 until his assassination in 1896. He was a modernizer whose visits to Europe in 1873, 1878, and 1889 impressed him with the technological and military achievements of western nations. He was also a man of artistic sensibility who practiced poetry, painting, pen and ink drawing, and photography.

It is probably advisable, then, to take the reports of his response to symphonic music with a grain of salt. In a JJON article, Harald Beck quotes from the Reverend James Vaughan's Sermons to Children Preached in Christ Church, Brighton in 1878, 1879, 1880, and 1881 (1881): "I am told when the Shah of Persia was in England, and was attending one of the great concerts in London, in the Albert Hall, he was asked what part he liked the best, and he said 'he liked best all that tuning of the instruments before the concert began’." Beck also quotes from the March 1885 issue of St. Nicholas; An Illustrated Magazine for Young People: "Once, so the story goes, the Shah of Persia was in London, and went to a concert in the famous Crystal palace at Sydenham. While the orchestra was tuning up and making all manner of queer noises, his royal highness was immensely pleased and entertained, but as soon as the concert really did begin, the Shah said he could not see much beauty in it, and he soon went out."

This is how the story went, but the king's own diary of his 1873 trip, which was translated into several European languages,  indicates only that he took pleasure in musical concerts, and Beck cites other English reports suggesting that the anecdote of preferring the tuning was an invidious stereotype about eastern potentates in general. In an 1816 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, a correspondent wrote, "We may perhaps be accused on having a Turkish taste in music (after the pattern of that Sultan's, who was chiefly fascinated with the jarring process of tuning the instruments, a thing abhorred by 'gods and men')."

As for Bloom, who thinks, "Tuning up. Shah of Persia liked that best. Remind him of home sweet home," he responds quite sympathetically: "That's music too. Not as bad as it sounds. Tootling. Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses helpless, gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile music hath jaws. Woodwind like Goodwin's name." There is indeed pleasurable anticipation to be had in listening to all the various instruments running through their parts in their own timbres, not yet blended into a wall of sound. In his characteristic way Bloom accepts a scornful stereotype and then tries to enter the human reality behind it.

The same is true of his response to the story that the Shah "Wiped his nose in curtain too. Custom his country perhaps." Harald Beck cites a report featured in the Review of Reviews in 1895: "Her Majesty, with a salutary dread of the consequences of lodging oriental princes in royal palaces––the Shah, it will be remembered, used to wipe his nose upon the costly curtains of Buckingham Palace––farmed out her guest at Dorchester House." Bloom's "Custom his country perhaps" is less than scornful. Later in Sirens he allows himself a small fart in the street to relive his intestinal discomfort and thinks, "Now if I did that at a banquet. Just a question of custom shah of Persia."