“And then I saw a man with the ocean in his eyes,” the British baritone Ross Ramgobin is singing against a backdrop of mournful strings. “A man whose hands were on fire, and when he touched the wadi burned, and was ash in the blinking of an eye.”
The Syrian composer Zaid Jabri is showing me workshop footage from Cities of Salt, the opera he is writing with two New York-based librettists, Yvette Christiansë and Rosalind Morris.
Based on the novel of the same name by the Saudi writer Abdulrahman Munif, the opera tracks the effects of the oil industry on a small, fictional oasis community in the Arabian Peninsula from the 1930s onwards. One of a five-book series, Munif’s dense and sprawling novel was critically acclaimed but banned in his home country. In adapting his story for opera, Christiansë and Morris chose to focus on three love stories: Miteb and his wife Wadha, the people of the oasis for their home, and the emir’s love of money and power.
The first public preview performance will take place at London’s Royal Opera House on July 22. Ramgobin plays Miteb, a sceptical Bedouin who realises that his way of life will be threatened by this new source of wealth. Once we finish watching the arioso, Jabri sums up its mood: “You can feel that something is, sooner or later, going to explode.”
In a later scene, the emir is showing his prized falcon to a gaggle of western visitors in his opulent palace. First the bird of prey is released, and then a flock of pigeons. A lighting effect gives the sense of a fluttering battle in the air as Jabri’s highly contemporary, unpredictable score shivers and creaks, with dissonant layers of sound capturing the uneasy atmosphere.
At other moments in the scene, the music is laced with irony, folding in classic Hollywood-style strings one minute, and cartoonish snake charmer-style Orientalism the next. “The western women who come to the emir say, ‘So handsome, so Rudolph Valentino!’” Jabri explains. “You hear the music inside their heads.”
Jabri is the son of TV director Ghassan Jabri and visual artist Asma Fayoumi; he was raised in Damascus, where his parents still live and work, and grew up listening to his father’s classical records and learning the violin. In 1995 he moved to Poland to begin formally studying music at the Music Academy of Krakow; later he completed an MA and PhD there. Until 2009, he travelled back to Syria a couple of times a year for concerts and festivals, and he hopes to have future compositions performed again at the Damascus Opera House, which he describes as a beautiful place.
“For sure it will return to its activities one day. It’s a case of time. Nothing can change people like culture, nothing.”
During the past two decades, Jabri has won several prizes and fellowships for his starkly original orchestral music, which has been performed all over the world, including in Dubai. But he had never attempted opera when he was first approached in 2012 by Christiansë and Morris, both writers and scholars at Columbia University in New York.
They had already written the libretto version of Munif’s novel and were looking for a composer familiar with eastern and western music, whom they could trust to stay clear of sentimentality, nostalgia, and a tendency, as they wrote to Jabri in an email, to demand that “‘Middle Eastern music’ perform itself as a tradition”.
A crucial first step of the process, Jabri says, was deciding what types of creative decision they would forbid themselves to make: “This one is a very easy solution, and this one is too similar to something … No folklore, no open-air museum, no romanticism, no avant-garde. When you put in those ‘no’s’ you start to search, you don’t take it easy. You’re really creating something from scratch.”
He shows me a video of a traditional Saudi Arabian dance. As the men stamp their feet, Jabri explains that melody could never be played on a piano, because it includes quarter tones: sounds that fall between the notes on the western chromatic scale.
“I think this is a beautiful thing itself,” he says, “and we are not allowed to abuse it or modernise. Just leave it as it is, because it’s natural, it has developed.” Borrowing this melody, he says, would be “like bringing a beautiful tree from the forest and putting it in my flat”.
Instead, he took inspiration from those quarter-tones, adding “strange sharps and flats” to some of the score for the bassoons and horns, and incorporating traces of the vocals into the double bass part. The result is a score that sounds entirely contemporary but also conjures a sense that “you are somehow in this atmosphere, you feel that something from this region is going on”.
Working with Jabri, librettists Christiansë and Morris tell me, is “intense and inspiring”. They have been video conferencing almost daily, discussing everything from the time of day in a certain scene to the latest news from the Arabian Peninsula.
The entire opera, which is intended to be three hours long and performed by a full symphony orchestra, is not yet complete – the trio are hoping for a patron to “adopt” the project so that they have the resources to finish it – but the results of a workshop in New York were impressive enough to gain a slot at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre, where four scenes and an intermezzo will be showcased as part of Shubbak, London’s biennial festival of Arab culture.
The festival is an important one, Jabri says, “because people in the West look at this region in a specific way. Especially now. And music and art make you feel that people from other cultures are similar to you, you understand them better, you feel that they are human beings like you and have feelings”.
The transformative power of art is a theme that Jabri brings up more than once: it’s a lack of cultural and social life, he suggests, that can contribute to religious extremism. “Good art,” he says, “forces you to think,” which is why the opera is such a satisfying medium. “You force the eyes and the ears of the audience to work. You force them to imagine something.”
Among those who will be performing extracts from Cities of Salt in London is Talar Dekrmanjian, a Syrian-Armenian soprano, who was cast after Jabri tracked her down via YouTube; she first sang his songs more than a decade ago, after he won a composing competition in his adopted homeland. Hearing Dekrmanjian, who grew up in Aleppo, perform in Polish, he says, was a reminder that "the world of art has no borders".
He felt the same way when he saw a Chinese production of Puccini's Turandot. "The connection between the audience and the singers and the music," he says, "the kind of energy you feel, it's a powerful way to understand people. You see that this is a language of the world."
• Cities of Salt is being performed at the Royal Opera House Linbury Studio Theatre on July 22, 2015. Tickets are sold out online. For information about the performance and for day tickets and returns, visit www.roh.org.uk and www.shubbak.co.uk.
Jess Holland is a regular contributor to The National.