Today in History – 10 July

An everlasting passion

İsmet İnönü had an insatiable interest in classical music. His first encounter with it was by mere coincidence. While serving as a young major in Yemen, the gramophone and records French railway engineers fleeing the war had left behind opened him the doors of an unfamiliar world. İnönü relates those days as follows in his Memoirs:

We had a profound need for music in Yemen. The gramophone came as godsend. In the afternoons, when we came home from the headquarters, we would all run to the gramophone. We would listen to different records. Symphonies, operas, serenades…

Unable to stand the noise of these pieces we had never heard of or known before, we would leave the gramophone alone. The same experiment would continue the next night. This sufferance of listening to some truly heavy music lasted for many days. Eventually, though, it became a habit. I was thus trained in classical music when I was in Yemen.

Young İsmet watched a live opera performance for the first time in Berlin with Kâzım Karabekir; however, exhausted by the long acts of the opera, he practically ran from the opera house, as he notes in his Memoirs.

İsmet İnönü realized that although it was a challenge, the more he listened to it, the more he liked classical music. Years later, he would say to his close circle of friends:

If you do not listen to it persistently, you cannot like it. Once you like it, you can never shy away from it.