يا مسهرني

The song begins as a reproach, and it was one in life as well as art: Ahmed Rami is said to have written the text as a gentle rebuke after Umm Kulthum went days without asking after him. It was the last lyric he wrote for her — the final link in a partnership that had begun in the 1920s and produced more of her songs than any other poet's pen.

"Msaharni" is nearly untranslatable: the one who keeps you up at night, addressed as a title of honor. The word had a private echo for the composer — Sayed Mekawy was beloved for "El-Mesahharati," his Ramadan songs in the voice of the man who wakes the sleeping — and here the waker of the neighborhood becomes the sleepless one's tormentor. He sets the line in maqam Rast, the most classical and upright of the modes.

A dialogue between the singer and her own heart, handled with chamber intimacy. This was Mekawy's first and only composition for Umm Kulthum, and accounts of the collaboration say the blind sheikh set conditions: the electric organ and guitar of her late-sixties orchestra were to step back, restoring the takht's Eastern core. After a decade of monumental modernism, "Ya Msaharni" sounds like a homecoming.

The calendar of neglect: tomorrow passes, then the day after, with "not a word, not a messenger." Rami compresses the whole machinery of waiting into two lines of street Arabic — no image, no metaphor, just days falling unanswered.

"How many days does a lifetime hold?" In 1972 the question was not rhetorical. Umm Kulthum was past seventy and visibly ill; within a year her performing life would end, and within three she was gone. Audiences at the premiere heard a love complaint; listeners ever since have heard a woman counting her own remaining evenings.

The turn: reproach melts into invitation, and the night that tormented her in the opening line is re-imagined as a messenger, its breeze drifting "on the wing of longing." Mekawy opens the melody outward here, and in the concert recordings from the Qasr al-Nil cinema theatre the audience answers the line like a congregation.

Three clauses, three clocks running down: estrangement long, patience short, life's days sprinting. It is the argument of the whole song in one breath — and, sung in the last full season of her career, it stands as one of the final great lines she ever premiered.