When the jury for the Pulitzer Prize for music justified their choice of Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’ co-composed “Omar” as worthy of the 2023 competition, they cited how the piece “expanded the language of the operatic form while conveying the humanity of those condemned to bondage.”
That’s all true, as anyone who attended the opening of this often moving, richly sung 2022 opera could attest; “Omar” was seen for the first time in Chicago on Friday night at the Lyric Opera House and is already making its exit by Wednesday. Exploded might have been the better term.
“Omar” offers its audience a vast and seductive soundscape inextricably entwined in the sin of chattel slavery, reaching its apotheosis when the company of more than 60 potent performers in director Kaneza Schaal’s emotive, heart-centered production expands into the opera house itself.
Over the course of two acts, you absorb from Giddens and Abels’ work the sounds of nasheeds, the Qur’anic recitations of the mosque, bluegrass, folk, a cappella hymnody and spirituals. The music, conducted at Lyric with zest and dignity by Kazem Abdullah, is also frequently lush and cinematic, at once recognizably operatic in form and richness but also accessible in the manner, say, of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” Hans Zimmer’s movie scores or Jason Robert Brown’s plaintive score for “Parade,” another work set in the American South with a real-life referent.
The real-life subject here is Omar ibn Said, originally of what is now known as Senegal, and sung with authority and gravitas here by the arresting tenor Issachah Savage.
Enslavers were perfectly happy to catch Muslim Arabic scholars in their nets when circumstances allowed, and that is how Omar, a relatively wealthy and highly educated man with a complex understanding of theology, astronomy and science, ended up in a Charleston, South Carolina, slave market after having been captured at age 37 in 1807 and transported on a slave ship through the Middle Passage. So, when the Spoleto Festival premiered this opera in 2022 in Charleston, following vexing COVID-era postponements, one might reasonably say it was locally focused programming, albeit of a time many in that historic city would prefer forgotten.
Omar’s story was in some ways no different from that of other captured Africans, as he recounted in his brief autobiography, newly translated and now preserved in the Library of Congress. It involved being sold first to a cruel master named Johnson (Omar calls him “a small, weak, and wicked man”), then running away and being recaptured in North Carolina and becoming enslaved again on a different plantation. All the while, missing and praying for his lost mother, Fatima (the authoritative mezzo Zoie Reams).
But in other ways it was very distinctive. Omar’s theological and literary prowess surprised the slave owners and Act 2 of this opera is largely about the attempts of one of them, Owen, richly sung by the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, to convert Omar to Christianity — specifically by giving him a Bible written in Arabic. Ketelsen, who also sings as the cruel slaveowner Johnson, has in many ways two thankless roles, but at least he avoids the tropes of the melodramatic villain, vocally painting one man (Owen) whose intellectual curiosity and faith clashed with his own slavish obedience to the heinous business of slavery, thus never seeing the internal conflicts of his own quest.
In many ways, Savage’s clear and revealing tenor picks up on an aspect of Giddens’ libretto that casts Omar as something of a moral cypher in a sea of cruelty, a man assured of himself and possessive of an enviable spiritual peace, but also someone uniquely positioned to watch and note inhumanity as he is buoyed in his survivorship by his fellow slave and friend, Julie (Kearstin Piper Brown, a soprano of considerable emotional depth).
Throughout the opera, the music plays up that contrast especially between Omar and Owen, affirming through its notes that plantations enslaved diverse individuals, some with wealth and learning and all with their own identities and histories, ripped asunder by those who went to church on Sunday. Schaal’s company remains on stage for the whole production, sometimes in accompaniment, sometimes in witness. On one occasion, the intentionally disturbing percussive element is the cracking of a whip.
But the overtly expressionistic design from Amy Rubin is rather gorgeous in how it seems to weave the stories of enslaved individuals into the symbolic landscape, be they jail cells or trees, an idea continued in the kinetic original costume designs from Micheline Russell-Brown and April M. Hickman (Charlese Antoinette Jones is co-credited for this Chicago stand), especially those worn by three dancers choreographed with ebullience by Kayla Farrish, who performs herself.
Whether or not Omar’s conversion to Christianity was achieved in any way remains disputed historical territory but not disputed operatic territory, at least not in this hagiography, this being an artwork far more interested in what Omar represented than in his growing interest in Christianity. Indeed, some opera-goers may be surprised to hear that the first 10 or 15 minutes of the libretto are made up of prayers to Allah, centering the opera’s theological point of view before its dramatic narrative. “Omar” fuses Christianity with slavery and removes Islam from that institution.
A different case could be made in terms of slavery in Muslim countries, of course, although perhaps not easily in the politically charged years when this opera was being developed. Still, this worldview is fair enough to my mind; Giddens is telling one, not the only, story of Omar. The source autobiography is somewhat skeletal; Giddens has filled it out as she chooses, as is her right. The famed librettists produced for decades on this stage did exactly the same thing.
The more salient observation here is that Omar expressed himself (even on the walls of his jail cell) in Arabic and, given that slaveowners couldn’t read Arabic, that must have made it harder for them to influence its content and production, or even know for sure that he was writing about his own experience. His memoir, which provided the basis for a work that wants to give voice to hundreds of thousands through one remarkable slave’s story, has a unique relationship with veracity.
And now, most beautifully, with opera.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
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Review: “Omar” (4 stars)
When: Through Oct. 28
Where: Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Tickets: $91-$406 at 312-827-5600 and lyricopera.org