Omar by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels (San Francisco Opera)

 

I will admit it: I have a weakness for female fiddle players. I’m a huge Hilary Hahn fanboy (her performance of the Sibelius concerto with the LA Phil last month was phenomenal), I will go see Alison Krauss whenever she is in town, and I have become a big fan of Rhiannon Giddens. 

 

I unfortunately was unable to get to a performance of Omar when it came to Los Angeles, and thought I had missed my chance, for a while at least. But then, a friend (and former BSO colleague) who had moved to San Francisco told me that it would be there this November. 

 

There was only one date of the limited run that I could attend, and it was nearly sold out. But I got a set of three tickets for me, my friend, and my wife, and we made it happen. I had to sandwich it in between performing with the BSO the night before, and a court case on Monday morning, but you take the chance when you get it. 

 

So what is Omar? 

 

Well, it is a Pulitzer Prize-winning opera written by Rhiannon Giddens (libretto and songs) and Michael Abels (orchestration and composition.) It is also a true story, about a forgotten part of the history of the United States. Or perhaps “forgotten” is the wrong word for stories that have been intentionally forgotten an suppressed. (See: Florida and Texas removing books by and about African Americans from school libraries.)

 Omar ibn Said - yes, there is this one photo of him as an old man. 

Sadly, he passed before the end of the Civil War, and never experienced freedom.

Omar ibn Said was a scholar from what is now Senegal, a devout Muslim with deep knowledge of the Koran. His town was overrun by enslavers in 1807, and he was kidnapped and transported to the United States on what was likely one of the last of the legal Atlantic Slave Trade ships. 

 

He was sold to a cruel master, from whom he escaped, fleeing 200 miles to Fayetteville, before being captured. While in jail, he wrote in Arabic on the walls, drawing the attention of James Owen, who purchased him and attempted to convert him to Christianity. Omar was given the means of writing, and he wrote over a dozen works, some of which are parts of the Koran from memory, an Arabic translation of the Bible, and letters to various people. 

 

But the gem of the collection is his autobiography. 

 

Omar was only one of tens of thousands of Muslims who were enslaved in the United States. The memory of this has largely been suppressed, in part because “conversion” of the enslaved was part of the justification for slavery in the first place. That these “conversions” were mostly of necessity, like the similar “conversions” of Jewish people in Europe was ignored. 

 

Also intentionally forgotten is that many of the enslaved were far from the “savages” that white enslavers wanted to believe they were. Many were educated, literate, and thoughtful, but were not given any chance to show their skills. Omar ibn Said is an exception, as he had the chance to tell his story. As Giddens and Abels put it in an interview about the opera, Omar’s story is a necessary and important part of American history, and our telling of that history is incomplete without the story of Omar and those like him. It needs to be told. 

 

Let me say at the outset that I really loved Omar. This is not going to be a critique of the details, but more of a discussion of what I felt was effective about the work, because I think it accomplishes a difficult goal: that of communicating a story that makes white people uncomfortable, but without becoming a polemic. It is, above all else, a story - and humans are creatures of story of course. To create a story that resonates is perhaps the highest form of art. 

 

First, I want to talk a bit about the score. I love full orchestra productions - I really wish they were more common these days, but I understand the cost. We got a full orchestra (plus extended percussion) for the opera, and a wonderfully lush score. 

 

The music combines so many different elements, which are carefully fitted to the setting and the story. There is the West African Kora, related to Arabic music, which serves as a leitmotif for Omar’s Islamic faith, and his experiences in his home country. This music also underscores Omar’s memories of his mother - who appears to him in dreams throughout the opera, encouraging him to keep the faith and tell his story. 

 

Once the scene moves to the United States, we experience bluegrass, gospel, and jazz. Giddens is a phenomenal multi-instrument musician, singer, and songwriter, and all of these genres (and more!) appear in her albums. (Seriously, you should listen to her.) 

 

For me at least, the music was the strongest part of the opera, just because it was so delicious, and so well matched to the storytelling. 

 

A few things particularly were memorable for me. First, the opera begins and ends with a solo by the viola. The viola! (That’s seriously awesome.) After hearing it, the choice seems obvious for that Islamic devotional music which follows - the opera opens with Omar singing a prayer of devotion from the Koran, and ends with the same. The viola approximates Omar’s voice. 

 

The second one was during the Middle Passage scene, there were descending glissandos in the strings that represented the cries of anguish over the hardship and death that were inseparable from the brutality of enslavement. Brilliant writing. 

 

In fact, the biggest challenge for me (as it is with any opera) is that I have a tendency to just immerse myself in the music, forgetting to follow the plot. Yeah, musician problems. So the score, to me, was so wonderful that I could have just listened to that and gotten my money’s worth. Sadly, there does not yet appear to be a soundtrack or other recording, or I would definitely add it to my collection. Only 30 seconds on YouTube so far.

 

But of course, there was a lot more to this opera. The staging was incredibly creative and the sort of thing a theater nerd like me definitely appreciated. At the beginning and end, the stage and hanging draperies are progressively covered in Arabic writing - the actual handwriting of Omar himself. 

 Publicity photo

These aren’t the only historical images used. For the Middle Passage scene (where various characters tell of their history - and in many cases how they died enroute), the “ship” is projected with the infamous drawing of how to sandwich humans into the hold like cargo. Fliers advertising human beings for sale were used during the auction scene. But man, that use of the writing was just powerful in itself. Combine it with music, and you have real magic. 

 

I also loved the way that trees were made of rope and draped fabric. There sure was a lot of fabric involved in the sets, which made them easy to move and change, but also worked with the storytelling - when you own nothing but your soul (that’s a line in the opera), everything else is ephemeral. 

 Publicity photo

Also strong was the storytelling. We had an extensive discussion afterward, over dinner at Dumpling Home - it really is great to see stuff like this with people who care about theater and storytelling and music and ideas. 

 

One thing we noticed was that, while Omar deals with some really heavy themes, and a life filled with tragedy, the story is told in a way that avoids being heavy handed. The focus is on Omar, and draws from his own writings. It is therefore filled with his own hope and human spirit, his devotion to Allah, his belief in the power of transcendence. Giddens and Abels also pace the story well, with the intense scenes broken up by lighter moments - the folk dance, dream episodes, and so on. It really is skilled storytelling. 

 

I should mention what may have been the most hilarious moment in the opera. Omar arrives in Charleston with zero knowledge of English, which means that he is unable to communicate with Julie, the enslaved woman who tries to help him understand what is happening. (He remembers Fayetteville, which she encourages him to make is destination if he escapes.) When Johnson, the cruel enslaver who first purchases him, yells at him to try to make him understand what Johnson wants from him, the supertitles (the words are projected throughout) renders Johnson’s words phonetically, with a translation into standard English below. 

 

This is completely flipping the convention of using “dialect” for lower-status characters. Instead, the Southern aristocratic dialect (and it too is indeed a dialect) is given the “exotic savage” treatment. It was a brilliant moment. 

 

I am sure I am missing something that I intended to mention, but this gives a pretty good summary of what I loved. 

 

The one thing that I did find slightly (and only slightly) disappointing was that there were a few moments in the libretto that felt unpoetic and clunky. This is complicated, though. As a classical musician, I am used to opera being in Italian, or sometimes German or French. All of those languages have more natural rhymes than modern English. Italian in particular has so many easy rhymes, which means that it “sounds” poetic in a way that English does not. (See: Divine Comedy.) 

 

The problem for English is that rendering natural dialogue into music will never sound truly “poetic” at all times. If you try to force it into poetry, it comes out sounding either stilted (at worst) or like Shakespeare (at best) - and neither sounds “natural” to our modern ears. 

 

I think this is ultimately what seemed clunky - people having conversations in normal English. Which, well, seems a bit nit-picky when said out loud. I can’t even recall a particular moment, just the feeling that shoehorning conversations into operatic music wasn’t entirely seamless. Obviously, in the context of the wonderful music and excellent storytelling, this is a minor quibble, and more about me and my biases than the merits of the opera. 

 

I think perhaps the final thing I wanted to talk about is the religious aspect to the story. 

 

Those of us raised in Evangelicalism were taught that Islam was a “false and evil religion” and completely opposite to Christianity (or Judaism for that matter.) This was reinforced by the unrest in the Middle East (which is more complicated than we were told) and terrorism by Jihadists. 

 

This was a highly inaccurate picture, of course. The three Abrahamic religions have a heck of a lot in common. The prayers that form the opening and closing of the opera have so many words, phrases, and ideas in common with the language of worship that I learned as a child. 

 

Perhaps the most powerful religious statement in the opera is the aria in which Omar recites the 23rd Psalm, but reinterprets it from the point of view of an enslaved Muslim. This is truly badass songwriting, and an incredible look at the strong parallels between the two religions. This moment was so emotionally heartrending yet hopeful that I would say it was my favorite moment in the opera. 

 

There is nothing here that isn’t obvious, of course. Multiculturalism in general is a forced response to the raw fact that technology and urbanization have led to people of different ethnicities and cultures living in close contact in a way that didn’t happen for most of history. Likewise, believing that your religion has a monopoly on truth is only possible if you can avoid experiencing other religions, their ideas and their adherents. If you let yourself look, you can see just how much is universal. 

 

Perhaps, one might even say, the human drive to find transcendence - the Divine if you will - is universal (or nearly so), and the way humans express that drive tends to look quite similar despite the differences in culture, language, geographic and era differences, and so on. Much like, say, human emotions or human thought. Sure, there are differences. But the similarities are more striking. 

 

I purchased a copy of the Koran last year, but haven’t yet gotten around to reading it. I think this opera may be a good excuse to do so. I did read the Tao Te Ching previously, and, in part due to discussions with friends who had read it, came to realize that the idea of the “Tao” is not that different from the idea of the “Logos” found in the Gospel of John. And that is just one of so many fascinating parallel ideas. Remember, this is between Eastern and Western - Islam and Christianity have a lot more in common than that. 

 

[Note: Fundies will of course be horrified - how could I open my mind to demons by reading holy books from other religions. This is one reason why I think Fundies are so utterly full of shit. The authors of the Bible were clearly well read in other traditions, and the great thinkers of our own religious tradition took care to explore other ideas as well.] 

 

Let me wrap this up with the real-life synthesis that went on for Omar. It was claimed for many years that he “converted to Christianity,” but the evidence is far more ambiguous. The question as to whether an enslaved person can ever truly convert is tied up with whether involuntary conversion is a conversion at all. (And, for me, I think “conversion” is entirely the wrong concept anyway.) 

 

The actual evidence, however, is that Omar annotated his copy of the Bible with quotes from the Koran, and littered his autobiography with references that would have gone over the heads of his white audience while being perfectly intelligible to an Islamic reader. His veneration of Christ was no different than it is for any Muslim. So what is more likely is that Omar, as a brilliant scholar and thoughtful man, retained his original faith, but added to it what was good of the Christian tradition. The opera, particularly in that amazing Psalm 23 aria, draws this out. 

 

In the end, just like I did with Gitanjali, I felt a true kinship with Omar in his sincere longing for the Divine, for that connection to something greater than himself and his circumstances. I may say “God” in English rather than in Arabic (“Allah” is just “God” in Arabic after all), but what we seek is the same. 

 

Perhaps we might better spend our time following the best of human religious expression rather than fighting over the cultural details. 

 

The story was inspiring and fascinating, the music wonderful, and the storytelling compelling. Go see Omar if you can. You won’t be disappointed.