He worked as a bricklayer in order to support his family, and it so happened that the manager of a theatrical troupe, the Syrian Attalah Brothers, overheard him singing for his fellows and hired him on the spot.

In spite of the cleverness of his compositions, he wasn't to find public acclaim, disadvantaged by his mediocre stage presence in comparison with such stars of his time as Sâlih 'Abd al-Hayy or Zakî Murâd.

[2] After too many failures in singing cafés, in 1918 he decided to follow the path of Shaykh Salama Hegazy, the pioneer of Arabic lyric theater and launched into an operatic career.

The apparition of social matters and the allusions to the political situation of colonial Egypt (the 1919 "revolution") were to boost the success of the trio's operettas, such as "al-'Ashara al-Tayyiba" (The Ten of Diamonds, 1920) a nationalistic adaptation of 'Blubeard".

Most of his operetta tunes use musical modes compatible with the piano, even if some vocal sections use other intervals, and the singing techniques employed in those compositions reveal a fascination for Italian opera, naively imitated in a cascade of oriental melismas.

Such songs as "Salma ya Salama", "Zorouni kol sana marra" or EI helwa di amet te'gen" are known by all Middle-Easterners and have been sung by modern singers, such as Fairuz and Sabah Fakhri, in re-orchestrated versions.

Aside from this light production, Sayed Darwish didn't neglect the learned repertoire, he composed about twenty muwashshahat, often played by modern conservatories and sung by Fairuz.

[5] Whereas in the traditional aesthetics defined in the second part of the 19th century, the dor was built as a semi-composition, a canvas upon which a creative interpreter had to develop a personal rendition, Darwish was the first Egyptian composer to reduce drastically the extemporizing task left to the singer and the instrumental cast.

His works, blending Western instruments and harmony with classical Arab forms and Egyptian folklore, gained immense popularity due to their social and patriotic subjects.

[citation needed] Besides composing 260 songs, he wrote 26 operettas, replacing the slow, repetitive, and ornamented old style of classical Arab music with a new light and expressive flair.

There are many accounts of the cause of his death, including that he died of an overdose of drugs, but his grandchildren have denied that story based on a letter in his handwriting in which he tells his friend that he stopped going out and staying up late with everything that accompanied that, with a tone of warning.

[citation needed] Journalist and historian Samir Kassir credited Darwish specifically with having "brought in completely new orchestration" to Arab music, thereby modernizing the genre.