HAZARABEDIAN - The Nightingale of Armenia

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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.”

This highly gifted and nicely disposed young lady married Dr. Antranig Ayvazian, the year she graduated from high school. Sorrowfully, Lucy succumbed to her death within the first year of her marriage. Her father was the well-known educator-businessman Simon Hazarabedian and her brothers were Vahan, Harutiun and Yervant.

“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.