What does it mean to continue creating when loss is no longer an exception, but a constant presence? For Lebanese composer Oussama Rahbani, the past year has unfolded as a quiet test of endurance — one in which grief, memory, and responsibility have converged into a single artistic act.

As he completed Ousafirou Wahdi Malikan (I Travel Alone, As a King), an oratorio composed to mark the centenary of his father, the legendary composer and playwright Mansour Rahbani, Oussama found himself navigating a landscape shaped by personal loss. The passing of close family members — themselves pillars of Lebanese musical heritage — transformed the project from a commemorative work into something far more profound: an act of continuation.

In the Rahbani family, art has never been a refuge from reality. It has been a method of confronting it. For decades, their work emerged amid war, displacement, illness, and political fracture. Theatre went on. Music persisted. Words were written not in denial of pain, but in dialogue with it.

This ethos shapes Ousafirou Wahdi Malikan. Built from selected poetic texts by Mansour Rahbani, the work does not offer nostalgia or easy reverence. Instead, it revisits recurring questions that have long defined the Rahbani universe: exile and belonging, sovereignty and fragility, identity shaped by place and memory. The central voice remains deliberately undefined — at times a man, at times a woman, at times a city — echoing the ambiguity of a nation that has never stopped searching for itself.

Beirut, in particular, emerges not merely as a setting but as a living presence. A witness. A wound. A symbol. Through music and poetry, the city becomes both subject and shadow, reflecting the experience of individuals who exist within history rather than outside it.

For Oussama Rahbani, proceeding with the performance amid mourning was not an act of stoicism, but one of ethical commitment. In this tradition, art is not suspended by grief — it is sharpened by it. Creation becomes responsibility. Performance becomes testimony.

The Rahbani legacy has never been about preservation in the museum sense. It is about movement. Transmission. Work that refuses to freeze in time. In continuing this journey, Oussama Rahbani affirms a truth that defines not only his family’s history, but much of the Arab artistic experience: that culture survives not because loss ends, but because creation insists on going forward.