Lyric Opera of Chicago will present the company premiere of Omar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, on October 23, 25, and 28, 2026. A Lyric co-commission, Omar is inspired by the memoir of West African Islamic scholar Omar ibn Said - a Muslim whose writings preserve a firsthand account of the experiences of enslaved people in the New World - and tells a fundamentally American story of survival, faith, and identity. The score draws together hymns, spirituals, gospel, and bluegrass with African percussion instruments, setting the musical inheritance of the American South against the sounds of the West African homeland Omar was forced to leave behind.
Tenor Issachah Savage returns to Lyric in the title role alongside soprano Kearstin Piper Brown as Julie, Lyric favorite mezzo-soprano Zoie Reams as Fatima, and bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen as the two Masters, Johnson and Owen. Mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter makes her Lyric debut as Katie Ellen and The Caller. The cast includes three members of Lyric's renowned artist-development program, The Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center: tenor Daniel Luis Espinal sings the Auctioneer and Taylor, mezzo-soprano Camille Robles is Eliza, and bass-baritone Matthew Dexter sings Abdul and Abe. Conductor Kazem Abdullah, who led Lyric's world premiere of Proximity in the 2022/23 Season, returns to the podium to lead the Lyric Opera Orchestra. Director Kaneza Schaal, who helmed the opera's world premiere, creates a new theatrical presentation exclusively for Lyric in her company debut.
As a co-commissioner of Omar, Lyric has been part of this landmark work's journey from its very inception. The opera received its world premiere at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina in 2022 and won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Its subsequent productions across the country have earned rapturous critical and audience response, and Chicago will be the latest American city to experience a work already establishing itself as a cornerstone of the American operatic canon.
Where memory is preserved, legacy endures. Omar ibn Said was born a free man in Futa Toro, in present-day Senegal, in 1770. An Islamic scholar and teacher fluent in Arabic, he was immersed in a life of intellectual and spiritual fulfillment. In 1807, he was captured and enslaved, transported across the Atlantic in the horrific conditions of the Middle Passage, and sold at auction in South Carolina. Despite losing everything - his homeland, his freedom, his family - he never lost his faith, his intellect, or his will to bear witness. In captivity, he wrote his autobiography in Arabic, the only known slave narrative written in that language. That document - his act of defiance, his prayer, his legacy - is the foundation on which Giddens and Abels have built their work.
The opera follows Omar from his peaceful village to the Charleston slave market to the plantations of North Carolina, where he encounters Julie, an enslaved woman who becomes his protector and friend; Fatima, the spirit of his mother who watches over him; and Katie Ellen and The Caller, figures who embody the communities around him. The white plantation owners attempt to erase his identity by forcing him to convert to Christianity - a conversion the opera treats with deep ambiguity, emphasizing his continued inner devotion to Islam as a powerful symbol of resistance and resilience. Omar's faith, his literacy, and his determination to tell his own story prove inextinguishable. He writes. He remembers. He endures. And his words reach us still.
Faith, memory, and the music that survived the Middle Passage. At the heart of Omar is a collision of languages - spoken, sung, written, and musical - that mirrors the collision at the center of Omar's life. Arabic text and musical motifs weave through the score, evoking his Islamic faith and scholarly background, while hymns, spirituals, gospel, and bluegrass rise up around them, gathered into a symphonic tapestry that honors them as what they are: American classical music, unapologetic and uncompromised. The orchestration is rich and distinctive, setting African percussion instruments - among them the kidi, the sogo, and the frame drum - alongside the standard symphony orchestra, conjuring a sound world at once ancient and urgently contemporary. Every tradition in the score carries roots in the culture Omar and those enslaved alongside him brought across the Atlantic - and refused to surrender. These are not borrowings. They are inheritances. In Omar, Giddens and Abels restore them to their rightful place in the American story.
