The works

Two operas, one symphony, four or five symphonic suites, a string quartet, an oratorio, five cantatas, eight vocal-choreographic suites, music for theatre and film, more than three hundred songs and fourteen romances.

The songs are the reason he was known, and the symphonies are the reason he is placed where he is. He wrote in both directions at once for most of his working life.

What to know before reading the list

The catalogue below is assembled from the Foundation’s own pages of about 2004, the Music Encyclopedia article by Z. Tadzhikova, Elena Orlova’s monograph of 1986 and her essay of 1990, and the Russian and Tajik encyclopedia entries that follow them. These sources do not always agree on dates. Buzruk is 1972 in one and 1976 in another. Gulomon is 1978, 1979 or 1980 depending on where you look. The staging of Komde and Madan is 1960 in Russian sources and 1961 in Tajik ones — his daughter, in her last interview in July 2026, said 1960 in Dushanbe and Samarkand after it, with the full score published in Moscow in 1982. Where a date is contested, the entry says so.

One title, an opera called Zebuniso, appears in a recent AI-written compendium and in no encyclopedia we have checked. It is not listed here.

Two things worth listening for

Komde and Madan (1960) is the first Tajik national opera, made from a poem by Bedil, the Persian-language poet of seventeenth-century India: a dancer and a singer kept apart by the court. It does not behave like a European opera. The Foundation’s own note is the best description of why — “the characters are not so distinct. The theme of Madan sometimes appears in Komde’s features as she accompanies Madan’s arias” — and its recurring theme, Ushshoqi Samarkand, is the Beloved of Samarkand.

The Symphony of Maqams (1977) sets a single unharmonised Tajik line against sonoristic orchestral colour, written-out aleatory and ostinato complexes. The old monody is not softened to fit and the modernist apparatus is not decorative. That collision is the piece.