WHEN OFRA HAZA DIED, on the evening of February 23, she left behind a number of mysteries. The most immediate was the cause of the Israeli pop diva's death, which came after a nearly two-week struggle in the intensive-care unit of Tel Hashomer Hospital. Daily news bulletins told of a complete organ "breakdown," and of a coma she emerged from only once during that period.
When one newspaper finally reported, several days after her funeral, what the others had only hinted at - that Haza had suffered from AIDS - the mystery only deepened, since neither friends nor family have offered confirmation or explanation. The ninth and last child of a Yemenite family in Tel Aviv, who achieved international star status, Haza had slowed down since her marriage in 1997, but she herself told The Report in late 98 that she was devoting part of her energies to becoming a mother. Her friend the lyricist Ehud Manor says that, in fact, she had recorded an entire demo album of Bible-inspired songs in her home studio.
But the mystery of Ofra Haza goes beyond the bizarre drama of her untimely death, at age 42 (even the last point is debatable, as Israeli papers, and friends, reported her year of birth as 1957, 1958 and 1959). The more meaningful mystery is the significance of the career of this silky-voiced performer who could sing anything, and how that career might have evolved had she lived.
About two attributes there is little debate: her voice and her charisma. "A superb singer," says Army Radio host Yoav Kuttner, whose preference for rock over Haza's more middle-of-the-road pop is well known. U.S.-based world music producer Wally Brill, who worked on the singer's hit album "Shadday" in the 1980s, says "It was a gift to hear this woman sing." Hans Zimmer, composer of the music for "Prince of Egypt" - in which Haza supplied the voice and model for Yocheved, Moses' mother - talks of there being "in the whole world, only a handful of artists who really deserve to be megastars. Ofra was one of them - with Whitney Houston, Sting, Elton John, Peter Gabriel."
At the age of 12, Haza was brought in to audition for a singing and theater workshop in the impoverished Hatikvah neighborhood, where she was raised. The same night, the group was to appear on TV, and Haza was immediately slotted into the show with a tiny role. "We told her to come and raise the bride's veil and say the words 'red carpet,' a cue," recalls Yair Aloni, a fellow performer. "When she did, I felt like she pushed the rest of us off the stage. I knew she had been touched by God. I stood before a great star."
Ehud Manor, who wrote lyrics for Haza extensively over the years, says "you can recount the history of Israeli pop music over the past century by way of some 10 female Yemenite singers, from Brakhah Tzfira down through Achinoam Nini. Ofra," he says, "was one of the three greatest," together with Tzfira and Shoshana Damari. "She sang like a bubbling spring. And then there was her beauty," he adds. "Just to look at her I felt healed."
Haza performed with the Hatikvah group until she was 19. When she went solo, her career continued to be managed by Bezalel Aloni, the group's leader (and Yair's brother), who stayed with her for most of the next quarter century. Whereas many other musicians of Eastern descent used their music to protest the marginal position of Sephardi Jews in Israeli society, distributing their records independently, Haza went the conventional route, becoming a full-blown pop star. Three times she was polled as Singer of the Year, and, in 1983, came in a close second in the Eurovision Song Contest. Over the years, 16 of her albums went either gold or platinum in Israel.
ATURNING POINT CAME IN 1985, when she recorded an album of settings of devotional texts by the 17th-century Yemenite Jewish poet Shalom Shabazi. Released internationally as "Fifty Gates of Wisdom," the album led to the contract for "Shadday," which sold a million copies worldwide. Both albums included the traditional numbers "Im Ninalu" and "Galbi," but on the latter she re-recorded them in dance style, an original East-West blend that still startles the ears. Thus was launched her international career, when the category of "world music" was still in diapers.
At home, oddly, Kuttner points out, "she didn't have much influence on other artists. There wasn't a wave of girls who wanted to be Ofra Haza." Journalist Shosh Gabay, co-producer of a documentary series on Mizrahi (Eastern) music in Israel, says Haza disappointed her. "Haza chose to become part of the establishment, a pop star. That's a pity, because she could have become a kind of Mercedes Sosa (the Argentinian folk icon), who combines talent and protest. The standard of a real star is something authentic. But with Haza it was all plastic; she didn't reach the inner pain and joy." Ultimately, she believes, Haza's true creativity was never revealed. "She lived as she died, concealing herself."
Brill concurs in part. "All my artistic desires for her, my weird hybrid ideas, fell by the wayside. She wanted to be viewed as Whitney Houston. But do we really need another Whitney Houston? I think the record industry wasn't ready for what Ofra could have brought us."
Composer Zimmer too says that "the more I worked with her, the more I found out things people had never heard that she could do." The day she died, he notes, "was the day of the Grammy Awards. We were nominated," in the category of best movie soundtrack. "It was her contribution as much as anybody's," he adds, referring to the two songs Haza sang in "Prince of Egypt," including the theme "Deliver Us." After he heard the news of Haza's death, says Zimmer, "I didn't want to watch the ceremony or go. There was a whole hidden treasure (in her) no one ever tapped into. And we'll never get it now."
With reporting by Sheli Teitelbaum in Los Angeles