American composers Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels win the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music for their opera “Omar”.
American composers Rhiannon Giddens (Greensboro, North Carolina, 1977) and Michael Abels (Phoenix, Arizona, 1962) have won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music for their opera Omar, premiered on 27 May last year at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. Giddens, famous as a singer (winner of two Grammys, the first in 2011 for Best Traditional Folk Album for Genuine Negro Jig, released with her band Carolina Chocolate Drops, and the second in 2022 for Best Solo Folk Album for They’re Calling Me Home) has made her debut as an opera composer with Omar, a commission from the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina (the American offshoot born in 1977 of the original Spoleto Festival in Italy, known as Festival dei Due Mondi) performed in 2017, and which was scheduled to premiere at the 2020 edition of the celebrated event. The pandemic then derailed the premiere, which was delayed for two years until it took place on the opening day of the festival.
The opera is based on the life and autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a scholarly Islamic writer (1770-1864), who was born in what is now Senegal and was kidnapped at the age of 37 and taken as a slave to North Carolina in the United States, where he died at the age of 93, a year before slavery was abolished. For its production, Giddens – who is also the author of the libretto – was assisted by Michael Abels, who is more knowledgeable in the world of orchestration – he is known for being the author of the soundtracks of the horror films directed by Jordan Peele Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) -.
The prestigious Pulitzer Prizes were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher, who left money to Columbia University upon his death in 1911. A portion of his bequest was used to found the School of Journalism in 1912 and establish the Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917.