Abels

Grammy-winning singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens was taking a walk after having dinner with her children and saw a tweet. She had won the Pulitzer Prize for music. “It was literally a total shock,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter from Ireland, where she currently lives. The work that won her the prestigious prize alongside composer Michael Abels is Omar, the opera about Muslim American slave Omar ibn Said. It is based on his autobiography A Muslim American Slave: The Life…

Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar from Senegal, wrote an autobiography in 1831 about how he was captured and sold into slavery for decades in the Carolinas. His memoir, written in Arabic, brims with quotations from the Quran; his “Christian” owners stood over his shoulder as he wrote. Yet Said captured the true story of who he was between the lines.“You realize that he’s telling you far more with his choices of Quranic verses,” says musician Rhiannon Giddens. “What he chooses to quote, when, and in response to what — that’s…