Page 14 - Omar!

Fey pursed his lips. “Well, no, strictly speaking, I suppose Omar
didn’t, although the circumstances of his demise are not in any extant
record. And your professor has taken offense at only one possible
level of meaning presented in that scene.”
“Really?” Baron squinted at the libretto. “Act Three, Scene Two:
night, outside the tavern. Omar and the girl enter from left. Another
light show is behind them, like in the first act. Omar sings ‘Up from
Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate I rose’, and when he’s
done, the Vine-daughter has vanished. Instead, her father, the Grape-
angel, comes out of the tavern with a cup of wine for Omar. It is
obviously poisoned; Omar knows it, but drinks anyway. And down
comes the curtain.”
“Oh, I don’t think we can fault Musselman for taking a few
liberties with the material for the sake of dramatic interest, can we?”
said Barnaby Fey. “The angel of death and the demigod Bacchus are
in fact implicitly compounded, whether by Omar or FitzGerald, in
the Rubaiyat. And, indeed, it is a common theme in much of our
literature that the temporary oblivion of intoxication bears a strong
resemblance to the final erasure of consciousness; the expression
‘dead drunk’ is far from oxymoronic. Omar’s fatalism is folded quite
effectively into the resonance of wine and blood, burial and rebirth,
clay and cosmos. The opera itself benefits from the subtext of an
aggrieved father serving the lethal dose to the man who wronged his
daughter, but there is no reason to fixate upon that interpretation of
the action.”
“Well, he did. And that brings me to—”
“Wait: don’t you want to know what is really going on here before
Omar takes the hemlock? No? Well, let me tell you, anyway.
Remember, his contemporaries were in the grip of a superstitious
monotheism without the benefit of any ameliorating scientific
knowledge of nature. So, as a scientist himself, Omar had to couch
his argument in deistic terms; he did this centuries before the
Europeans developed their own theology of ‘God the Watchmaker’,
who wound up the universe, set it ticking, and left it to unfold its
destiny according to the laws of physics.”
Baron tried to interrupt. “It doesn’t matter if—”
But Fey went on.
“You see, there are really two kinds of religious determinism: both,
to a believer, ostensibly ‘God’s will.’ The older variety holds that fate

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