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In the late 1920s, Abdel Wahab composed traditional melodies, well suited to Shawky's texts. But as the European rule replaced the Ottoman rule, the Western influences affected local music. In particular, stage musicals in Arabic incorporated Western elements. In 1926, it fell to Abdel Wahab to complete a musical left unfinished by the late Sayed Darwish, a great composer of the previous generation. The musical centered on Antony and Cleopatra, and Abdel Wahab himself played Antony. After visiting Paris and familiarizing himself with French music, Abdel Wahab invented the Arabic film musical. To a popular culture in which romantic love was commonly associated with suffering, Abdel Wahab introduced a romantic hero of light-hearted wit and urban sophistication. His films portrayed a Westernized social elite and featured music that broke away from tradition. Fellow composers noted that the music was simplistic compared with Abdel Wahab's previous work, and Abdel Wahab used lip-synching rather than the improvisation on which Arabic music had traditionally relied; but audiences loved it. The film "The White Rose" was a phenomenon, breaking box office records. Abdel Wahab enjoyed introducing new female singers to the public through his movies; many became stars, including the great Layla Mourad, who would go on to produce her own films. Musically, his films continued controversial, as he began to feature large orchestras with admixtures of Western instruments. Into his art, he hybridized Western song forms such as the tango, samba, and rhumba. In the 1950s, Abdel Wahab gave up acting and concentrated on his last recordings as a singer, assuming a new and more serious musical style. In the 1960s, he stopped singing, but he continued composing for other singers. It was in 1964 that after years of rivalry at the top of their profession Umm Kulthoum released a record of his "Enta Omry" or (You are my lifetime) written for her to a text by the poet Ahmad Shafik Kamel. Perhaps partly because of its timing-- coinciding with the flowering of Nasserism-- the recording became Egypt's all-time best-seller. It was the song the young generation thought of when they thought of Umm Kulthoum, though it was certainly AbdelWahab, not Umm Kulthoum, who spiced up the orchestration with an electric guitar. For many years, Abdel Wahab appeared very little in public, but his popularity never faded. In 1988, at the age of 81, he made a surprise return to the studio, singing a new composition, and despite lyrics that seemed unacceptably iconoclastic to some radicals, the disk sold two million copies.
His works
Songs He was the first musician in the Arab third worlds to obtain the Platinum Disc. He died on May 4, 1991.
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Mohammed Abdel Wahab was the most prolific Arab composer of his time, responsible for more than a thousand songs. He personally sang hundreds. For his orchestration of the Egyptian national anthem, late president Anwar El-Sadat awarded him the rank of general. Abdel Wahab was born in 1907 in Cairo. He made his first recording at the age of 13. In 1924, he was sponsored by Ahmed Shawky, then known as the Prince of Poets. Shawky saw to the furthering of Abdel Wahab's musical and literary education. When Shawky was the Prince of Poets, Abdel Wahab was known as the Singer of princes and kings.