Al Hakawati co-commissioned by Cabrillo Festival, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln & Orchestre National de France

A new work for soprano and orchestra Al Hakawati, co-commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln & Orchestre National de France will premiere next season, with Canadian soprano Miriam Khalil and conductor by Cristian Măcelaru. The work will receive its premiere at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music on August 2nd. A second performance with WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln is scheduled for September 21, with a following performance in Paris, TBA.

Al Hakawati (The Storyteller) presents fragments from an opera-in-progress entitled The Book of Tales. The opera is inspired by a recent discovery about a beloved story collection, the so-called “Arabian Nights.” The exact provenance of these medieval Arabic tales, properly known as Alf Laylah wa-Laylah [One Thousand and One Nights], has always been something of a mystery. That all changed in 1993 when a forgotten 18th century Arabic manuscript was found in the Vatican library. It was a travel memoir written by a 75-year-old Syrian storyteller named Hanna Diyab. In 1707, the young Diyab had embarked on an extraordinary, years-long journey to Europe. His incredible adventures culminated in a meeting with the Sun King, King Louis XIV, in the halls of Versailles. Diyab told his entrancing stories to everyone he met in his travels, including to Antoine Galland, a translator and archaeologist in Paris. It was Galland who, in 1710, first introduced Western readers to the stories of Ali Baba and Aladdin in Les Mille et une Nuits—though Galland makes no mention of the storyteller. Diyab returned to Syria in 1709 and eventually became a successful cloth merchant in Aleppo. He seems to have had no idea how far his captivating stories had travelled.

Antoine Galland’s journal, where he mentions “Hanna from Aleppo”

The opera connects stories and storytellers across time and place: from the present day, to the Ancien Régime of France, to the imaginary world of Scheherazade. And, though the “frame story” is Diyab’s, the most significant characters in the story are women. The fragments in Al Hakawati comprise four “scenes” that feature the opera’s three principal female characters.

1. I shiver, I tremble
The famed storyteller Scheherazade contemplates her precarious circumstances: each night she tells stories to the murderous Shahryar to postpone her execution.

2. He sleeps, this one
Shahryar is finally asleep. Consumed with fury, Scheherazade prepares to set his bed alight.

3. Dance of the seven swords (orchestra)
Murjana dances for her husband, Ali Baba, and a visiting merchant. She alone has discerned their guest’s true intent: he plans to kill her witless husband, who has foolishly stolen treasure from a band of thieves. At the dance’s climax she dispatches the villain.

4. For all I know
Tarina Safar*, a modern-day scholar of medieval Arabic, has discovered Hanna Diyab’s manuscript in the Vatican library. She marvels at the power of stories and of storytellers.

* Safar’s character is fictional, but she is inspired by the American scholar of Islam, Nabia Abbott (1897–1981), the first female professor at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Abbott discovered some of the earliest known fragments from the Thousand and One Nights.