In 2022, the Spoleto Festival USA, in Charleston, South Carolina, unveiled Omar, an operatic biography by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, based on the authentic 19th-century memoir A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar ibn Said. The following year, the opera was honored with the Pulitzer Prize. As directed by Kaneza Schaal and conducted by John Kennedy, with Jamez McCorkle luminous in the title role, it lingers in memory as a dignified, speculative work of unforced spirituality. These impressions cannot, alas, be tested against a commercially available recording or video, for none exists. All the more reason to welcome Omar to the Lyric Opera stage, in Schaal’s original production, conducted this time by Kazem Abdullah. Issachah Savage, whose bread and butter this summer has been the jubilant tenor solo in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 everywhere from Seattle to London’s Royal Albert Hall and back to Aspen, is onboard for the introspective title role. According to informed estimates, anywhere between 10 and 30 percent of Africans trafficked to America were Muslims, yet no personal testimony other than Omar’s is known to survive. —Matthew Gurewitsch