Mohammad-Reza Shajarian
Mohammad-Reza Shajarian was the singer of Persian classical music for half a century. Born in Mashhad in 1940 to a family of Qur'an reciters, he trained in the radif, the repertoire of the tradition, and sang on Iranian radio from 1959. After the revolution his recorded prayer Rabbana opened the evening fast on state broadcasting every Ramadan, until 2009, when he said his voice belonged to the protesters the president had called dust and dirt, and state broadcasting dropped him. He died in Tehran on 8 October 2020 and was buried beside the tomb of Ferdowsi in Tus.
His father taught him to recite the Qur'an from the age of five and did not want him to sing; he learned the radif anyway, from Ahmad Ebadi, Esmaeil Mehrtash, Abdollah Davami and Nour-Ali Boroumand, and by the 1960s had the voice the tradition is now measured by. He was one of the few singers allowed to perform after 1979. In 2016 he said he had been living with kidney cancer for fifteen years. On the night he died in Tehran's Jam hospital the crowd outside sang Morghe Sahar, the piece he had closed his concerts with, and riot police were sent to disperse them.