The Music That Almost Disappeared

*A retelling for children, based on **Bahá'í Chronicles**, "Mirzá ‘Abd’u’lláh Faráháni, 'The Divine Musician.'"*

1 / 16

In a quiet corner of the city of Tihrán, in a country we now call Iran, there was a small music school. It was nothing grand — just a modest room where a man named Mirzá ‘Abd’u’lláh taught young people to play. But if you had stood outside its door, you might have heard something rare and beautiful: melodies so old that no one alive could say exactly when they began.

2 / 16

Mirzá ‘Abd’u’lláh was one of the most gifted musicians in all the land. He had learned his art from his father and his uncle, and he could play so wonderfully that even the king of Persia welcomed him to his court. He and his brother were remembered long after as fathers of Persian music.

3 / 16

But teaching music in those days was dangerous.

4 / 16

In that time and place, many people believed music was wrong — something to be forbidden, not loved. So crowds would gather and storm the little school. They would burst inside, hurt the students, and smash the instruments to pieces. Imagine working so hard to learn a beautiful song, only to have an angry mob break your instrument in your hands. Most people would have given up. They would have locked the door for good.

5 / 16

Mirzá ‘Abd’u’lláh did not give up. He kept teaching.

6 / 16

There was a deeper reason he could not stop, and it had to do with a secret that was slowly slipping away. In those days, the music of Persia was never written down. There were no sheets of notes, no songbooks. Every melody lived only in the memory of the person who played it. The great old masters kept their songs to themselves and almost never taught them to anyone.

7 / 16

So when one of those masters died, his music often died with him. Whole treasures of song, some of them hundreds and hundreds of years old, had already been lost forever — gone, because no one had found a way to keep them.

8 / 16

Mirzá ‘Abd’u’lláh carried many of those ancient melodies inside his own memory. And he must have understood that one day, unless something changed, they too would vanish.

9 / 16

Then a tablet came to him from 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

10 / 16

'Abdu'l-Bahá honored him with a beautiful name. He called him the "Divine musician." And He gave him loving advice — to keep the old Persian melodies safe by writing them down at last, so they would not be lost. To 'Abdu'l-Bahá, music was not a small thing at all. He wrote that music is a praiseworthy art, and that when it is filled with the spirit, it brings great joy and even life to the listener.

11 / 16

So Mirzá ‘Abd’u’lláh set out to do something almost no one in his country had ever done. Writing music down was a new idea in Persia — the musicians there simply did not know how. So some of his students were encouraged to travel all the way to Europe to learn how written music worked, and how to turn a played melody into marks on a page that could be saved and shared.

12 / 16

It was slow, patient work. When machines that could record sound finally reached Persia, Mirzá ‘Abd’u’lláh was already sixty-five years old — but he sat down and began making recordings of his music anyway. Then came the long task of writing every melody out carefully, note by note, making sure each one was captured exactly right. That writing took seven more years.

13 / 16

He never really stopped. Even when he grew old and sick and could no longer leave his bed, he kept teaching his students from where he lay. He went on giving away his music — the music that had so nearly disappeared — right up until the very end of his life. He was seventy-five years old.

14 / 16

Because one man refused to quit, songs that might have been lost forever were saved. That is the quiet power of faithful, patient work: we may not finish it in a day, or even in a year, but if we keep going and give our gift away instead of hiding it, something beautiful can be passed on long after we are gone.

15 / 16

*This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see ["Mirzá ‘Abd’u’lláh Faráháni, 'The Divine Musician'"](/stories/bc-mirza-abd-u-llah-farahani-the-divine-musician).*

16 / 16