The struggle and fruitful life and creative destiny of Khurshid Gajar, who made an unparalleled contribution to the development of Azerbaijani musical culture in the first decades of the 20th century, seems to belong to a not so distant period. However, this part of the story, the sources of which seem to be recent, is unfortunately little known today either in the scientific community or among the general public.
The first reason Khurshid Ghajar's name is less known to the public today is, of course, that times have changed. At late 20th century, the oldest representatives of the young generation of Khurshid Gajar, who saw and heard her and knew directly about her selfless work, also died. With the passing generation, if what they say has not been written down, or if they have not turned what they remember into a legacy of memories to be remembered tomorrow, it will inevitably be gradually forgotten. Science, on the other hand, can prevent this disappearance, shorten bridges of time that sometimes have a great impact, and easily transfer important figures of the past and their unforgettable merits into the future. From this point of view, it is necessary on the basis of historical documents to restore the true and complete image of Khurshid Gajar, a representative of this generation of Azerbaijani musical culture and education, who made an exceptional contribution to the history of the Azerbaijani intelligentsia as a whole. There are good reasons for this too. The first reliable sources are biographical documents, letters, correspondence, photographs and other materials compiled by Khurshid Gajar, which are now stored in the Nizami Ganjavi National Museum of Azerbaijani Literature, and the second are writings published in the Azerbaijani press in the first decades of the 20th century.
Thousands of names are carved on indelible plaques on the path with ups and down of our opera founded in 1908, a relatively young event in Azerbaijani culture. We should always remember with gratitude those founders who worked hard and sacrificed themselves, especially at the difficult beginning of this path.
Today there is a need to perpetuate the memory, to recognize and present a person who was mentioned in posters and programs of the first two decades of the twentieth century, and sometimes even performed in one spectacle. Khurshid Ghajar was not an ordinary opera singer. She occupied a special place in the cultural life of Azerbaijan of the 1920s and 1940s and therefore should be studied more widely and thoroughly than her many other contemporaries. After all, Khurshid Gajar not only used to sing. She also headed the first opera studio in Baku and was the director of the newly established music publishing house. And most importantly, she was one of the first and most active in those times when Azerbaijani women were still rarely seen on stage. She was one of the first women in Azerbaijan who received higher musical education abroad.
Khurshid Ghajar had a strong inclination for innovation in all spheres of social and political reality in the 1920s and 30s, when she was on the stage, in the flow of cultural life. However, what distinguished the innovation, which was essentially a progressive phenomenon, in Azerbaijan and in the Soviet environment in general, and in some cases distorted it, was that culture was directly influenced by Soviet ideology. Although the state took care of culture, on the one hand, it tried to keep it under its influence, on the other.
A number of speeches by Khurshid Gajar about this period are included in scientific circulation for the first time in this article. These texts testify to the courage and adherence to principles of Khurshid Gajar as well as her will to speak the truth in a complicated and politically turbulent period. It is these everyday thoughts that clearly demonstrate the atmosphere in which Khurshid Ghajar and his contemporaries lived. At the same time, a detailed disclosure of the truth about the creative biography of Khurshid Gajar allows us to understand what progress was made on the path of renewal in Azerbaijan at early 20th century and what obstacles hindered further development.