Review – Monir Elweseimy’s The Sea Treasures at Muscat Royal Opera House

The first Arab opera written by an Arab composer, Tar El Bahr, The Sea Treasures, by Egyptian, Monir Elweseimy, will not yet be on any reader’s list of favourites. How could it be? It premiered only last week, at The Royal Opera House, Muscat, Oman, to much local PR razzmatazz. Not even on Spotify. Alexa remains stuhm.

Sadly, having attended the first night, it won’t be on my list of favourites either. It is probably unfair to make any direct comparison with conventional, classical opera, but given that’s the yardstick the composer set himself, using Arab themes and drawing on traditional musical traditions, here goes – with “unfair”.

The plot – about a good fisherman whose integrity is impugned by a bad fisherman – is laughably naïve. The combination of in-line chorus singing, random dance sequences, awkwardly static set piece duets and below par singing, creates an amateur village pantomime atmosphere. If featured in an Archers plot, bossy Lynda Snell would have got hell at The Bull for screwing it up.

The score – which features some sublime moments in the arias – is forever arm-wrestling itself awkwardly between Arab genre and western classical. Here’s the composer’s rationale for deciding on a focused Arab theme: “I discovered that Arab audiences would love and enjoy an opera with a subject that is in harmony with their culture and features songs from universally loved Arab singing traditions”.

I tried to ignore a few illegal arm-holds on Broadway musical orthodoxy, spattered through the dance sequences, as well. And some potentially disqualifying, off the mat, Charles Ives thematic anarchy. Was the allusion to Ives’ cacophonous Country Band March intentional? Perhaps not.

At the end, I refereed the western idiom the victor by two falls and a submission. Mr. Monir was attempting to create a new, distinct genre. He ended up delivering a conflicting mishmash.

I feel terrible. I met Mr. Monir at a pre-performance talk. It was difficult not to. I was one of only a handful of people who turned up. He is a charming gentleman, sought out by Royal Opera House, Muscat for this impossible task, I suspect, because he is uncontroversial. Oman does not do controversial. In his black-tie ensemble he looked every inch the clichéd, slick-haired Egyptian businessman, Joel Cairo, played by Peter Lorre in the 1941 movie, The Maltese Falcon.

At the Q and A session I asked if he was consciously choosing a simple theme, to ensure popular reach, rather than ape western composers, such as Thomas Ades, who use obscurity to court ever more exclusive bands of acolytes. After a to-and-fro translation he pounced on the popularity softball, clocked me as a potential ally, leapt up at the end and grabbed my hand. Unwittingly, I had become his best friend. Maybe his only friend. Judas!

At the interval, from his box, stage left, Mr Monir spotted me in the audience, politely stood and waved. Ratfink that I am, I returned the wave and gave him the thumbs up. He bowed. I wasn’t difficult to spot. I had bought a ticket, assuming guaranteed anonymity, in row R. In Muscat Row R is the front row. Presumably, Rows A to Q had been swept away by a desert Simoom.

I was plumb in the middle of the front row. Ten inches from the conductor’s head. I, and a confused German gentleman with his young son, who he is taking to Bayreuth in the summer, were pretty much alone, basking in prominent isolation. This was not a promising teaser for the lad’s first The Ring of the Nibelung in July. It was far from a sell-out for the first ever Arab opera, either.

The storyline is a tale of fishermen. For Oman, with its 1,000-mile coastline, the sea is a vital economic asset. Fishing contributes 7.3% to GDP. Equally important is fishing’s social impact, spread as the industry is through Oman’s coastal towns and villages. The public fish market in Muscat is a well organised affair. Freshly-caught – the colourful boats are hauled up outside – Tuna is stacked high alongside popular Hammour. Traders have individual, plumbed-in, shining metal stalls and there are central booths where purchases are gutted and filleted to order. This fishy heaven is a meeting point of Oman society, so the choice of operatic theme is defensible.

Here is the plot. Plot? OK, time to be generous. Plot. Ali is the good fisherman, set to marry Salma, daughter of the Sheikh of the Merchants. Rami, a headstrong thug, leads a band of bad, perpetually scowling, black-clad fishermen, who frame Ali for the theft of a jewel from the Sheikh’s home by beating him up, stealing his distinctive clothes and leaving them at the crime scene. Perhaps it is a middle eastern curiosity that all burglars undress at the crime scene. Ali is banged up in jail. Shamefully, the Merchant Sheikh potential father in law and fiancé Salma immediately assume the worst of Ali. Thanks, Dad.

Step up a comical Police Chief, who, after a real investigation – completely unexplained in the action – suddenly discovers the bounder, bad Rami, was to blame. There followed a truly Policeman’s Lot is not a Happy One, Gilbert and Sullivan moment. The Police Chief and his clearly bumbling officers pranced in a chorus, announcing how smart they had been in unveiling Rami as the true thief.

Inexplicably, the image of Dame Cressida Dick, leading a high-kicking chorus of Metropolitan plods in a triumphant chorus of, It Was That Carl Beech Wot Really Dunnit, Guv, once lodged in my head, would not move along.

Ali is released, the villagers crowd round the reunited couple, and even scowling bad Rami – now slightly better Rami – is swept up in a chorus, “Love within them is the treasure they live with, but hatred and injustice have no standing in a place filled with love, welfare and honesty.” Catchy, eh? Wouldn’t even make a decent Tweet.

I think – actually, I am really struggling to hope – that amidst the sugar-coated celebrations the composer is hiding some arrows of sharply perceived truth. Here is a charitable thesis. There is no shortage of scowling Ramis in this part of the Gulf. Look west to Oman’s border with conflicted Yemen, where they are to be found aplenty.

The plot is also true to the tradition of the Islamic Golden Age, making moral points by means of simple, folkloric story telling. The Thousand and One Nights is the example best known in the west.  Mr. Monir is presenting the case for traditional virtue, shorn of the modern extremist message of intolerance. Today, that takes bravery.

On to the venue. When Arline, the aristocrat child stolen by the gypsy, Devilhoof, (stonking name) sang, I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls, in Michael Balfe’s opera, The Bohemian Girl, she might well have had The Royal Opera House, Muscat in mind. Except, she sang in 1843 and Muscat opened its dazzling white leviathan as recently as 2011.

To say it makes a statement would flatter statements. Standing on the outskirts of Muscat, the castellated fort-style building dominates the urban landscape. Massive, marble-floored courtyards, of no practical use whatever, abound. Bizarrely, it is constructed in two halves bisected by a dual carriageway, joined by a bridge. It is a temple to commerce as well as music, housing a glitzy, top-of-the-range mall – completely deserted on the two occasions I visited. Making money it ain’t.

In the 20^th century white was a colour architects deployed either as moral stricture – Corbusier for purity and simplicity; or to impose political dominance – Enrico Del Debbio and Luigi Moretti’s ghastly, gleaming Foro Mussolini, for boss Benito. Some used it as a pointed joke – Marcel Duchamp’s gleaming-white urinal.

Muscat’s opera house was built in 2011 by the late and much-lamented Sultan Qaboos, who commandeered white as his optimistic colour of enlightenment and anti-corruption. The house was the literal icing atop a policy cake of introducing western music to the Arab world, while building native skills in composition and performance. When outreach has a bottomless purse, it is amazing what it can achieve.

I arrived early for the performance pre-talk. Only thirty minutes early. Yet, I was still alone in this white palace. So alone, that when a security guard spotted me looking down from a terrace into the cavernous foyer, he signed to me to leave – in no uncertain terms. I was on the set of 2001, A Space Odyssey. All white corridors, locked doors, eerie silence and the occasional, distant passing figure, flitting from pillar to pillar on business unknown.

At the interval the Goddess of Serendipity dealt me an ace. I crossed the path of a young couple who had been sitting in front of me at the pre-performance talk. Bullseye, Katherine Hennessy PhD, turned out to be an academic at the College of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Kuwait and had written a paper entitled The Inaugural Season of the Royal Opera House, Muscat.

I was home and dry. For anyone interested in a deep, perceptive dive into the wider policy issues that drove the building of the opera house, here is a link to her excellent paper.

Her study, The Impact of Social Stresses between Good and Bad Fishermen in Oman, is yet to find a publisher. Suspect she won’t get a grant for that one. We exchanged raised eyebrows about the show so far.

Here, she gets to the core of the rationale behind building the opera house: “Royal Opera House Muscat also fits neatly within a larger political agenda, which requires portraying Omanis to the world as educated, open-minded, sophisticated, engaged in prestigious artistic and intellectual pursuits. The choice to construct an opera house, in particular, harmonises well with the Sultan’s strategic positioning of his country as a quiet mediator between East and West.” Succinctly put. Thank you, Katherine.

That was also the philosophy which led to the founding of the talented Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra, colourfully populating the pit, men immaculate in white tie, women, including a diminutive, doughty percussionist, in a blaze of traditional Arab dress, brilliant green with scarlet hijab and golden headpieces.

The orchestra was clearly well acquainted with members of the audience. Much reciprocal waving. A trumpeter gave a toot to attract the attention of his mum in the circle. Once down to business, they were highly skilled. This was the first time they had performed an opera and conductor Osama Ali Ahmed, who, like Mr. Monir, hails from Cairo, made a joyful job of it.

What the music lacked in profundity it made up for in skittish passages of glittering harp and piano passages, as it oscillated between western polyphony and Arab monophonic purity of line. Maestro Osama seemed relaxed, in fact phlegmatically underwhelmed, leaning his left arm on the rail behind him as he delivered the beat deftly with his right. I could read the time on his wristwatch. The orchestra paid him attention all of the time. The singers, not so much.

A source of profound irritation was that the singing cast all sported head microphones. I hate amplified opera performances. Probably lack of sufficient vocal oomph across the local cast made this a necessity, but it destroyed the clarity of many of the ululating runs of Arab-style music. Those rely on precise delivery to do them justice and carry their purity of line. They could have been stand out moments. They were muffled.

It was also difficult to distinguish who was singing what to whom. A basic error. Frankly, the work deserves better, unamplified soloists to do it any justice. That said, there were some moving moments. Ali in gaol – and a beautiful summation duet, when Ali and Salma were reconciled, were two moments that stood out.

It was a long way to travel from London to attend a flop. But, despite my reservations, I hadn’t. I think I witnessed more of a start – a groping in the dark to find the voice of a culture that has, until now, not been a protagonist on the opera stage.

Sure, there are plenty of Arabian themes in opera. Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Verdi’s Aida are two obvious examples in a long, thematic list. But these works are of Arabian culture, viewed through the western end of the telescope.

Mr. Monir has to be congratulated on being a pioneer of cultural self-examination. It is probably patronisingly snooty to describe his effort as over-simplistic. At the end of the day, watching this Spring of a new Arabian art form in a stunning opera house built with driven, benevolent purpose, was its own reward. Thumbs up, Mr. Monir. Worth the journey.