Born in Tehran in 1941, Sheida Gharachedaghi studied at the Vienna Music Academy in Austria and in 1971 established the Music Department at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran.
Shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran Gharachedaghi moved to Germany and later settled in Canada.
In 1989 Sheida Gharachedaghi wrote an opera based on the English translation of Ahmad Shamlu's The Fairies. The opera premiered at Metropolitan Convention Centre in Toronto in 1989. The CD of 1989 - live performance of this opera released in Europe in July 2020, on the 20th anniversary of Shamlu's death.
The opera had not been published in Iran due to the ban of solo-women singing. The Fairies is the first Persian (Iranian) opera with an English libretto. The British journal "Opera" cited it as a "distinctly pre-modernist piece..." which "has so little to do with the tradition of Persian music."
Simin Ghanem
