What does it mean to create in the face of loss? Or to pay tribute to a rich history when the present moment is coloured by grief?
These are the questions Lebanese composer Oussama Rahbani has been confronting over the past 12 months, as he completes the oratorio Ousafirou Wahdi Malikan (I Travel Alone, As a King), composed as part of centenary celebrations marking the birth of his father, composer, poet and playwright Mansour Rahbani.
It was also a period marked by personal loss, with the death of his cousin, composer Ziad Rahbani, aged 69, in July, followed by the passing of his cousin Hali Rahbani, 68, earlier this month. Ziad and Hali are the sons of renowned Lebanese singer Fairuz and her late husband, composer Assi Rahbani.
Speaking to The National from Beirut after the oratorio’s debut last week, Oussama Rahbani says proceeding with the work as planned became, in itself, a form of tribute. Commissioned by the Abu Dhabi Festival and featuring soloist Hiba Tawaji, alongside the Ukrainian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the NDU Choir, Ousafirou Wahdi Malikan is built from 34 selected poems by Mansour Rahbani.
The Abu Dhabi Festival Award was conferred posthumously on Mansour Rahbani at the show.
“I see what the Rahbani family has lived through as something close to Greek tragedy,” he says. “Loss happens. People leave. But the work continues. Theatre remains. Concerts continue. This is not sentiment. This is how we live art as a profession. We enter art seriously. We deal with it with responsibility. We practise it with conscience and with a particular ethic. So, yes, the show continued amid the sadness and grief.”
That stoicism reflects a family history in which work persisted through upheaval, illness and loss, and it reaches back to the foundations of the Rahbani project itself.
Brothers Mansour and Assi were the architects of a body of work that reshaped Lebanese theatre and music during the country’s civil war in the second half of the 20th century. Together, they developed a distinctly local form of musical theatre that blended poetry, folklore, political allegory and song, much of it written for and performed by Fairuz.
Fairuz’s voice became inseparable from the Rahbani imagination, carrying songs that moved between pastoral longing, civic pride and quiet dissent. Their works, which spoke of belonging, memory and national identity, became rare unifying points and a source of cultural pride at a time when sectarianism threatened to tear the country’s social fabric apart.
Assi Rahbani’s death from a brain haemorrhage in 1986, a condition that also claimed the life of his daughter Layal two years later, did not end that project.
“After Assi’s death in 1986, Mansour continued the journey,” Oussama says. “This is very important. He continued the journey and produced more than 12 theatrical works. Four of them were joint productions that he and I worked on together, and after that there were many works he did alone. He wrote a great deal. He has many books. He wrote poetic prose. A lot of this work was published between 1988 and 1998, during the Lebanese civil war, during the years we lived through in Lebanon, with all the psychological pressure, the philosophical questions, the existential questions.”
Those years shaped Mansour Rahbani’s writing in ways that Oussama now sees as central to its power. He says the poems chosen for Ousafirou Wahdi Malikan return to themes of exile, sovereignty, inner strength and identity, not as slogans but as recurring questions, often carried by a central figure deliberately left undefined.
“There is always a woman in these works,” Oussama says. “Always. There is the idea of non-encounter with this woman, the voice that does not fully appear, the shadow that a human being lives inside events. This shadow is very present. Beirut itself is one of 34 parts. Mansour Rahbani was a great poet and a great writer. This is not something small. He had a deep relationship with poetry, and this was always known.”
He hopes to bring the production to Abu Dhabi Festival at the nearest opportunity but, until then, he views the experience as one that has reaffirmed the values instilled in him by the Rahbani family.
“These are moments where you understand what it means to practise art, not as entertainment, but as a profession,” he says. “This is for all those we have lost.”
