HAZARABEDIAN, Lucy

In most probability, the first Armenian woman composer writing for the piano is Lusaper (Lucy) Hazarabedian, born in 1863 in Scutari, a district of Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire. She was home schooled which she finished in 1880. While a student, sixteen-year-old Lucy composed a delicately attractive polka which she called “The Nightingale of Armenia.”

“The Nightingale of Armenia,” originally composed in 1879, was published for the first time in the 1913 issue of Teotig, the Armenian language almanac. It was discovered by the Armenian musicologist Haig Avakian of Cairo, Egypt and was graciously passed on to me on this occasion.