Ate the Opera: ROHM’s production of Sindbad delivered on its promise of grandeur and Arab artistry

The Royal Opera House Muscat opened its 2025–26 season with Sindbad: The Omani Sailor, a work of unprecedented scale and ambition — the first grand Arabic-language opera conceived through an Omani lens.
Composed and conducted by the Egyptian maestro Hisham Gabr, with a libretto by Nader Salah El Din, the production marks a cultural milestone, merging Arabic narrative traditions with the architecture of Western opera.
I attended the premiere on Friday, October 3. Barely 20 minutes into the performance, it was briefly halted due to some technical glitches. Taking an unscheduled 20 minute break, the audience’s goodwill never wavered. Such is the weight of anticipation surrounding this homegrown triumph; few seemed to mind a reset when the scale of the work was so immense.

In this version of Sindbad, when the governor’s youngest daughter mysteriously vanished, the sailor Sindbad was commanded to search for her before he could wed his beloved, Fairouz. Secretly joined by Fairouz and betrayed by a scheming minister allied with a sorceress, Sindbad’s ship is destroyed in a supernatural storm. Stranded on a cursed island, he joins forces with a pirate whose magical flute can dispel evil. Together, they defeat the sorceress, rescue Fairouz and recover the mystical “fragrance of life”, a cure that restores the lost princess. Sindbad returns home triumphant, his journey becoming one of courage, love and rediscovered faith.
If Sindbad is remembered for anything, it will be for its visual bravura. The creative team led by director Csaba Káel, set designer Éva Szendrényi, lighting designer Vilmos Schön and costume designer Rita Velich has delivered a production of rare spectacle. The stage becomes a living painting — a place where sea, sand and spirit converge.
Velich’s costumes deserve particular praise. They evoke Oman’s regional tapestries — from Dhofari embroidery to the chromatic vibrancy of the Suri — with an authenticity that elevates rather than romanticises. The palette alone tells its own story: burnished golds, sea-greens and desert reds reflecting both myth and memory.

Szendrényi’s set design achieves moments of genuine astonishment, none more so than the storm sequence that strands Sindbad and his crew on a deserted island. Through a masterful combination of projection, mist and physical mechanics, the sea itself seems to rise and collapse in rhythm with the orchestra — a testament to her architectural precision and to Schön’s intuitive lighting, which gives each scene a sculptural depth. It is a triumph of design intelligence that transforms the Royal Opera House stage into something vast, cinematic and deeply Omani.
Gabr’s score, performed by the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra with the Oriental Ensemble, oscillates between late-Romantic lushness and the tonal modes of Arabic maqam. The music, while steeped in symphonic grandeur, never loses the contour of its linguistic rhythm. The Arabic libretto, shaped with care by Salah El Din, rides the orchestration with clarity and warmth — a feat given opera’s usual challenge of rendering Arabic both lyrical and intelligible in sung form.
The integration of Omani motifs — rhythmic echoes of the sea, the pulse of the oud, the sway of folk cadence — brings a sense of rooted identity to the score. The oud interludes, performed by Nibras al Mullahi, received thunderous applause on both his appearances and rightly so. His playing lent the work its most immediate emotional register, bridging the world of folklore and the operatic stage.

As the titular sailor, Ragaa Eldin shoulders the opera’s emotional and vocal burden. His tenor, bright yet weighty, gives Sindbad both heroic stature and human fragility. There are moments when his presence commands the stage entirely, though at times the libretto affords him too little agency. The hero, curiously, often reacts more than he leads — a structural flaw rather than a fault of performance.
Opposite him, Dima Bawab’s Fairouz sang with luminous clarity and emotional restraint, her phrasing delicate and assured. Yet it was Gala El Hadidi, as the Sorceress, who seized the evening’s dramatic heart. Her mezzo-soprano, dark and burnished, filled the hall with authority. Whether the villain simply had the better music or whether El Hadidi is just that magnetically persuasive is open to debate, but her scenes left the deepest impression — she made darkness irresistible.
Supporting performances were uniformly strong. Ashraf Sewailam lent Samaan a menacing gravitas, while Hany El Shafei’s Pirate injected warmth and vitality into a role that, musically, eclipses Sindbad’s own climax. If this imbalance points to a dramaturgical issue — the opera’s emotional resolution belonging to someone other than its hero — it nonetheless made for arresting theatre.

For all its visual splendour and musical coherence, Sindbad occasionally struggles to sustain narrative momentum. The opera sets in motion a constellation of compelling threads — the vanished sister, the treacherous minister, the disguised lover — yet their resolution does not fully circle back to Sindbad himself. At times, the sailor feels more like a witness to events than their driving force. The moral and emotional centre briefly shifts towards the pirate and his enchanted flute, whose triumph over evil restores harmony. It is musically captivating, though dramatically diffused — one leaves entranced, if not entirely moved.
This gentle imbalance forms the work’s central paradox: Sindbad is an opera of great ambition and heart, yet its hero’s inner journey feels understated. The storytelling excels in atmosphere and allegory rather than transformation. The recurring “fragrance of life” motif — subtly diffused into the auditorium through Amouage’s scent collaboration — lends the production a poetic unity, evoking renewal and hope, even if the emotion it inspires remains more contemplative than cathartic.

Despite these narrative shortcomings, Sindbad: The Omani Sailor remains a monumental artistic gesture — an opera that dares to imagine the Arabic language as the vessel for a form long dominated by European tradition. It proves that Arabic lyricism can sing, that Omani heritage can occupy a stage of global stature without translation or compromise.
It's also worth noting that a particularly inspired touch came through Amouage’s collaboration, which introduced a bespoke fragrance diffused at key moments during the performance. Far from a gimmick, the scent — created exclusively for Sindbad: The Omani Sailor — deepened the sensory experience, allowing the audience to quite literally breathe in the emotion of the scene. It was a reminder that when collaboration is executed with thought and restraint, it can heighten an artwork’s impact. This union of music and perfumery transcended novelty; it became one of those rare instances where two worlds fused so seamlessly that it formed a lasting memory for everyone present.
The opening-night hiccups, if anything, humanised the grandeur: an audience eager to witness history was also willing to forgive its imperfections. For in the shimmer of its costumes, the surge of its music and the unmistakable pride that rippled through the hall, one sensed something profound — the beginning of an operatic tradition born from Omani soil, still finding its compass, but already sailing towards greatness.