Page 5 - Omar!

“Yes, yes, I’m sure,” broke in Baron. “That group of kooks is just
one of many. Maybe I should go through this thing scene by scene
and show you what enrages the others.”
Fey looked at his watch. “Go right ahead.”
Robert Baron cleared his throat. “Dramatis personae. That’s the
characters, right? Well, we’ve got Omar first, sung by Farley
Usquebaugh. Then a barkeeper and his daughter, plus a bunch of
minor roles: a bird, a potter, assorted potentates, saints and sages, a
crowd of drinkers and marketplace idlers.”
“Not all singing parts,” Fey interjected. “The bird has a sort of
tick-tock trill it chimes in with at strategic points in the action.”
“Hmm. Well, as yet no complaints from animal lovers or the
curator of ornithology at the natural history museum. Might as well
be grateful for that. Okay: the overture plays, the curtain goes up, and
we have Act One; this all takes place in Persia, in Omar’s time,
right?” The director nodded. “In Scene One, it’s dawn, inside and
outside a tavern. The spotlight picks out your hero, who is sleeping
on the ground, after clearly having had too much booze the night
before. According to one of these cranks at your rehearsals, Omar is
snoring loudly.”
“But musically,” rejoined Barnaby Fey.
“And here is where we got another very prissy letter. You use the
backdrop as a projection screen?”
“Oh, yes. Very important for the celestial imagery: Musselman
wanted to establish immediately the themes of fleeting time, and
equate one day with a lifetime, the day’s dawning with an awakening
to truth, the terrestrial microcosm with the sidereal macrocosm.
Astronomy functions both as a backdrop to and a source of human
understanding. That’s why the Grape-angel’s first song, ‘Awake, my
little ones’, contains these lines:

Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.

The audience should get a feeling for the entire opera from this
initial aria: mankind trapped on a cosmic treadmill spinning
precipitately. Omar liked to portray the vault of the heavens as a
bowl; that ties in nicely with his wine-cups, you see.”
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