Omar

About This Event

This is a strange, rewarding pairing for an opera house: Omar is co-composed by Rhiannon Giddens — a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient better known for old-time Americana and bluegrass than opera — and Michael Abels, the film composer behind Get Out and Us. Their score runs hymns, spirituals, and bluegrass through an orchestral opera frame instead of the usual Verdi-adjacent palette.

The story isn't invented. It's drawn from the actual 1831 memoir of Omar ibn Said, a West African Islamic scholar who was captured and enslaved, and who wrote his own account of the Atlantic crossing and his life in bondage in South Carolina — one of the only surviving American slave narratives written in Arabic. The opera follows his capture, the crossing, and the ways he held onto and wrestled with his faith once enslaved.

It premiered at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston in 2022 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year. Lyric's Chicago run, directed by Kaneza Schaal, is just three performances — Oct 23, 25, and 28 — sung in English with projected titles, running about two hours and forty minutes with one intermission.