Giddens’s ‘Omar’ prompts conversation about slavery, history
In the spring of 2004, soprano Rhiannon Giddens was about to sing the title role in what she thought would be her last opera ever: Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah” in a production at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was a graduate student.
Giddens, who had trained as a classical singer at Ohio’s Oberlin Conservatory, was pulling away from opera for several reasons. One of them was her burgeoning interest in American folk dancing and old-time music; she had recently taken up the banjo and started calling for local contra dances. So when it was time to choreograph the first scene of “Susannah,”, which takes place at a church square dance, Giddens knew she could contribute.
The director didn’t exactly have to press her to get her to share her expertise, she clarified. “I was like ‘Pick me! Pick me!’”, said Giddens in a recent interview at a Boston hotel.
Giddens, who is usually based in Ireland, was in town for a few days to work on Boston Lyric Opera’s upcoming production of her new opera “Omar” (May 4-7), for which she co-composed music with Michael Abels and wrote the libretto solo. Several hours after our interview, she taught the “Omar” cast about square dancing to prepare them for that opera’s own dance scene.
Working on the Boston production, Giddens said, her goal was to convey many things that “aren’t in the sheet music,” such as how the sound of the banjo (on which Giddens wrote much of the music for “Omar”) is represented in the orchestra. Giddens and Abels decided early on not to incorporate unconventional instruments into the orchestra for “Omar,” because they didn’t want to add more challenges to the opera being performed than already existed.
“It’s about a Muslim. It’s about slavery. It’s a majority Black cast. That’s a lot of hill to climb,” Giddens said.
Abels, who is best known for his soundtracks to Jordan Peele’s feature films including “Get Out” and “Nope,” said he didn’t even know about Giddens’s roots in dance calling until the world premiere production was in rehearsals. “The more you know Rhiannon, the more things you discover that she does well!” he said in a Zoom interview.
In the years since leaving conservatory, Giddens has established herself as a roots-music luminary, with a distinct focus on calling attention to forgotten or erased stories in the history of American music. In 2005, Giddens attended the first ever Black Banjo Gathering, a convention devoted to the Black history of old-time music. There, she met Joe Thompson, who was then in his 80s and one of the final surviving tradition keepers of the Black string bands of central North Carolina’s Piedmont region, where Giddens was born and raised. Inspired, Giddens and two fellow musicians formed the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops.
“The Black co-creation of this art form was completely suppressed,” Giddens said. When she has taught past “Omar” casts about square dancing, she said, they usually “have one idea of what it is,” and it doesn’t involve Black people. “Then I talk about Joe Thompson ... then all of a sudden I see it click.”
After the Carolina Chocolate Drops split in 2014, she embarked on a solo career encompassing American roots music and several other styles from around the world. In 2020, she was named artistic director of Cambridgebased, cross-cultural musical greenhouse Silkroad.
Giddens has seldom focused on classical music since leaving conservatory, but she “maintained a toehold in the
‘Whatever critics and audiences think about it ... for me, that’s kind of secondary to the fact that it’s prompting these conversations about, what is the American experience?’
RHIANNON GIDDENS
classical world,” she said. In the mid2010s, longtime Spoleto Festival USA general director Nigel Redden (now retired) and director of artistic planning Nicole Taney (now artistic director of Celebrity Series of Boston) came to her with a proposal: Had she heard of Omar ibn Said, and did she want to write an opera about him?
Giddens had never even heard his name, so she dove into research. Said, who lived from 1770 to 1864, was born to a well-off family in the West African Islamic monarchy of Futa Toro, where he received a comprehensive education as a Muslim scholar. In his 30s, he was captured and sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade, eventually ending up in Giddens’s home state of North Carolina, where he lived into his 90s in slavery and wrote several Islamic manuscripts in Arabic.
Giddens said she thought of Abels as a potential collaborator specifically because of the Swahili chorus featured in his score for “Get Out,” and cold emailed him.
“I was like, you don’t know me, but want to write an opera together?” Giddens recalled.
Abels, for whom writing an opera had been a “lifelong dream,” was on board almost instantly. “We both had a similar, if not the same, idea about what makes a good opera,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s the power of the singing and storytelling that make an opera worthwhile to audiences.”
BLO became a co-commissioner of “Omar” alongside Spoleto, where the world premiere took place, and four other organizations. The debut in Boston is the first “Omar” opening night that Giddens will miss.
“It’s weird! I’m getting to know the cast, and I want to see them do it,” she said. “But this is what I chose. As a composer, I’m more useful here than in the audience.”
She has used that time to (among other things) teach the cast about the opera’s square dance scene, which takes place on a slave plantation. Abels explained: “It begins with your stock square dance, ‘a great big eight.’ But as soon as the enslaver and his buddy are out of the scene, the music stays but the words change. ‘Hold your tongue, watch your look, just one slip and you’ll get shook.’ So don’t think we’re happy just because we’re dancing.”
At this point, the piece speaks for itself.
“Wherever this opera sits in the canon,” Giddens said, “whatever people think about it, whatever critics and audiences think about it ... for me, that’s kind of secondary to the fact that it’s prompting these conversations about, what is the American experience? What has it been? What is the history of slavery? What were people’s lives like?
“So it prompts these conversations, which I think are really important.”