FINDING THE MUSIC IN OMAR’S LIFE

At the end of the opera, Omar begins to write his autobiography in Arabic, praising the beauty of the world around him in Allah’s name.

Representing the origins of its own source material, the opera envisions the power of writing down the story of one’s life. By taking the contents of Omar Ibn Said’s Life as both inspiration and operatic source material, Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels join a number of recent creators who have turned to artifacts of the archive and the intimately personal narratives of diaries and memoirs as the foundations for new opera; one prominent example is Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’ Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the first opera by a Black composer and Black librettist staged at the Met. Fire opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021-2022 season in a historic milestone for American opera, and it is based on a memoir of the same name by New York Times columnist and author Charles M. Blow. Navigating the blurry relationship between dramatic life events, historical fact, and theatrical representations, these operas based on autobiographical writings open opportunities to explore what sometimes is absent or difficult to discern from the page: the nuance of human experience.

Of course, real life doesn’t lend itself to operatic adaptation easily. When a memoir is transformed into an opera, the operatic version often takes its own form; not everything can be staged exactly as it was written in the memoir. Memoirs are often written in an episodic narrative arc, making each one a unique challenge to narrativize on the opera stage: when events are presented as episodes within a chronological timeline, there may not be a clear narrative arc for an opera to follow. Episodes can read as vivid vignettes rather than a time bound drama with a climax and resolution.

To fit the operatic stage, composers and librettists may need to edit, condense, expand, or even exaggerate specific moments. We can see the result of this expanded imagination in the Act I Middle Passage scene. Omar only briefly mentions the Middle Passage in his autobiographical account. He notes that the journey was a month and a half long, but gives no detail about the difficulties or the suffering he and his fellow captives endured. For the operatic retelling of Omar’s story, Giddens and Abels expand the journey into an entire scene to better situate the audience in the experience of capture and displacement. Additionally, Omar navigates issues of translation that make the opera accessible to American audiences. While the original memoir was written in Arabic, we experience both Arabic and English in the opera, illustrating the ways in which Omar was asked to navigate living in a world in which he did not speak the primary language.

At the same time, one of the many strengths of opera is its ability to convey the drama of its characters’ emotional journeys. A memoir is a particularly rich kind of source material for opera because of the access it affords to the author’s interiority and emotional reflections. Readers of memoirs can learn about the author’s intimate thoughts and feelings of a particular moment in time; a memoir is necessarily an incomplete document of someone’s life, told from a singular perspective. We might think of an opera based on a memoir as a three-dimensional rendering of a previously two-dimensional medium, musicalizing the emotional depth of the written document. The composers are tasked with animating the silent world of text through sound. Whereas in Omar’s

Lost In Translation.

In Omar, translation plays many roles. The opera is based on an autobiography that was first written in Arabic and later translated into English, and while the opera is primarily in English, it features both languages. On another level , the opera asks us to think about what happens when translation is impossible. In one of the opera’s most moving scenes, Omar faces the horrors of the Middle Passage while crammed alongside fellow captives. They attempt to speak to each other, but communication is futile. As they have been taken from different villages, they do not share a language. “I cannot understand you,” one man cries with despair. Once ashore, Omar will struggle to navigate the English-speaking world he has been forced into. In light of all that he has lost, he holds onto language as a key source of identity, finding solace in the Arabic speech and script that connects him to his home and family.

Life, we were able to read Omar’s sole authorial voice in the text, in the opera, we also now hear the musical authorial voices of Giddens and Abels.

The music of Omar ranges from swirling lyrical hymns that accompany introspective moments to stinging brass, driving the terror and violence of the raid on Omar’s village. We also can hear specific musical genres that illustrate the social status and background of each character. For example, at the Charleston Slave Market in Act I scene 3, the orchestra reinforces the white auctioneer’s European roots and higher class life with music written in the style of a recitative. Recitative is the musical term for language that is sung in an operatic dialogue; often the orchestra has to follow the singer closely, playing mostly sustained background chords, and it only interjects the singer’s words with a few notes. In Omar, the auctioneer showcases his authority and social power by leading the orchestra through this recitative before breaking into a waltz (listen for the characteristic oompah-pah rhythms!), illustrating his gleeful excitement at the proceedings of the Charleston Slave Market.

Another compositional element commonly used in opera is the chorus. In many operas, the ensemble, or all of the other singers on stage who do not perform a named role, showcases the communities that surround the protagonists, and the ensemble often tells us more about the chronological moment the opera depicts. In the operatic retelling of Omar’s life, the audience also witnesses fleeting moments in other enslaved people’s lives. Portraying the various communities of which Omar is a member, the ensemble expands the scope of the opera. As we go on the journey of Omar’s life, we also experience the ways in which communities come together to express their emotions, at times singing only on open syllables “ah” to illustrate a sense of collective grief.

But as composers and musicians whose past compositions have not typically been in the world of opera, Giddens and Abels invite us to listen to an array of musical styles that expand the traditional musical parameters of the genre. In addition to the more standard operatic musical techniques mentioned above, we also can hear the distinctive influence of spirituals, sung by the enslaved people on the Johnson Plantation in Act I scene 4, and the hoedown music in Act II scene 2 on the Owen plantation, illustrating the Black origins of the American folk musics. In this way, Giddens and Abels bring their perspectives and musical expertise into dialogue with Omar’s words, interpreting the source material to reimagine his story for twenty-first-century audiences.

Omar Ibn Said’s memoir is a monumental document to inspire an opera, not only because of what we can learn from Omar’s words, but also because of what we might further imagine of the early nineteenth century. When so little remains from the enslaved people in the United States, this memoir is vital to our ability to understand those who were systemically oppressed and silenced. In the opera, Omar is urged to “Tell your story,” a directive that is amplified through their operatic setting by Giddens and Abels. Blending musical styles and traversing the full range of the voice, Giddens and Abels interpret Omar’s words into a new work of art. To watch the opera then is to take a journey back through time and to listen to not just one voice, but rather a chorus of voices, sounding our shared American histories.

DISCUSS:

What other creative forms can memoirs serve as the source material for? How does the medium change your experience of the narrative or the characters? What artistic medium would you use to tell your story and why?

If you were to adapt a memoir to an opera, what memoir would you choose, and how would you re-imagine it for the stage?