Gold standard

Aida was the first opera I ever saw, at the old Metropolitan Opera House when I was six. My father was operating on the assumption that Aida would be fun, both the music and the spectacle, and that even a six-year-old would be able to enjoy it. Now, some sixty years later, the Metropolitan Opera celebrated New Year’s Eve at Lincoln Center with a new production of Aida, confident that this opera, though it ends tragically with young lovers expiring in a subterranean tomb, would be fun for the audience – and it was.

In the 1990s the cultural critic Edward Said classified Aida as a work of consummate orientalism, first produced in Cairo in 1871, soon after the opening of the Suez Canal. Said’s perspective is one of several factors that today makes Aida – with its melodramatic plot about the Egyptian princess Amneris and her Ethiopan slave Aida, both in love with the same Egyptian general, Radamès – a complicated opera for companies to stage, for performers to enact and even for audiences to enjoy.

For Said, Aida was emblematic of the self-assumed mastery and imperial pretensions of European civilization over the Middle East and Africa, ignoring the Arabic and Muslim present of nineteenth-century Egypt and concocting a fantasy of the ancient Egyptian past. Yet Verdi (who never set foot in Egypt) was commissioned by Khedive Ismail in Cairo, a Muslim pasha of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The commission came to Verdi via the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, who excavated temples and tombs in Egypt, and sent a trove of antiquities to the Louvre, while also establishing the collection of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The Broadway director Michael Mayer’s new production at the Met frames the story of Aida as an archaeological fantasy, beginning with an archaeologist being lowered into an ancient tomb during the prelude, elegantly conducted by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. This gives a coherent shape to the production, inasmuch as the opera now begins and ends with an Egyptian tomb setting. The intermittent presence on stage of a team of western archaeologists gives the whole thing some of the energy of an Indiana Jones film, while the dazzling gilt brilliance of the sets and costumes suggests the spirit of the “Tut-mania” that still makes Egyptian artefact shows museum blockbusters.

Verdi’s score of 1871 for Aida was his first major work after Don Carlos in 1867, coming just before the Requiem (1874). It is very much a grand opera like Don Carlos, though set to a libretto in Italian for Cairo and La Scala, not for Paris – and, like the Requiem, it returns again and again to liturgical and sacerdotal music, albeit for Egyptian gods and priests rather than Roman Catholicism. In a musical world already transformed by the presence of Richard Wagner, Verdi wrote Aida not as a series of separate arias or numbers, but as complete musical scenes with recurring leitmotifs, so the prelude opens with the lovely five-note rising Aida theme before bringing on the march-like descending theme of the Egyptian priesthood, developed in solemn ecclesiastical counterpoint. If Verdi had turned him down, the Khedive had contemplated approaching Wagner to compose Aida.

At the heart of the Met’s new production is the soprano Angel Blue, whose marvellous voice carries the show from beginning to end: she sings powerfully over the ensembles and modulates her dynamics with exquisite delicacy in more intimate momentssuch as her celebrated third-act aria “O patria mia”, in which she joins with the oboe to express her nostalgia for Ethiopia. Her father, the Ethiopian king Amonasro, sung magnificently by the Hawaiian baritone Quinn Kelsey, seeks to heighten her homesickness, then persuade her to lure Radamès into treason. When she hesitates at first, Amonasro fiercely denounces her: “You are not my daughter! You are the slave of the pharaohs!”

Aida is an opera about an Ethiopian slave created six years after the end of the American Civil War, so it has long been interpreted as an opera about Black slavery. For more than a century sopranos had their faces blackened to sing the role, though the production book that dates back to the 1870s suggests that Verdi imagined Aida and Amonasro with the “olive” skin of the Mediterranean region. In Franco Zeffirelli’s film The Young Toscanini from 1988, you can see Elizabeth Taylor in blackface pretending to sing “O patria mia”. The most famous Aida of the later twentieth century was the African American soprano Leontyne Price, while another African American singer, Latonia Moore, has described being blackened to sing the role in Japan because the Japanese director didn’t think she was dark enough to be Aida. In the summer of 2022, Blue, who is also African American, withdrew from scheduled performances of La traviata at the Arena of Verona to protest against performances there of Aida with Anna Netrebko in blackface. So Aida has been problematic as a work of orientalism and controversial for stereotypical racism in its productions.

Blue, who sang Aida in London in 2023, should be singing it all over the world for the next decade. She and Kelsey together made the Ethiopians into the vocal core of the Met’s new production, with the rest of the cast in uneven voice. The Hungarian mezzo-soprano Judit Kutasi sang the top notes of Amneris’s role with a squally lack of focus, though she acted the jealous princess with melodramatic intensity. The Polish tenor Piotr Beczała was announced as sick-but-still-singing in the role of Radamès, but his voice deteriorated across the four acts until he sounded almost strangulated in the final love duet in the tomb. The conclusion of Aida involves a split stage, conceived by Verdi: the two lovers down below, dying, and Amneris up above in the temple, imploring the Egyptian gods for peace. In the Met production – and this was certainly not suggested by Verdi – Amneris stabs herself to death in the opera’s final moments while the archaeologists look on.

If the opera is to be fun, in spite of its fatal conclusion, the supreme attraction must be the triumphal march. Every operagoer (even a child of six) can whistle the famous trumpet call that signals Egyptian victory, and it sounded brilliant when it rang out in the Metropolitan Opera House. Yet there is a complication here, for Verdi’s sympathies, in spite of this celebratory march, are with the enslaved Ethiopian Aida. The militaristic theocratic pharaonic autocracy, as presented in the opera, was antithetical to his political sentiments. Furthermore, as the historian Paul Robinson has pointed out, partly rebutting Said, the supposedly “imperial-colonial” reading of Aida founders on the fact that the great imperialists of the opera are the Egyptians. Verdi composed the opera on behalf of a Muslim Egyptian ruler (who later went to war against Ethiopia), a full decade before the English occupied Egypt in 1882, and two decades before Italy established a colony in Eritrea in 1890 and came into conflict with Ethiopia.

So is the trumpet glory of the triumphal march intended, in part, ironically, with the composer commenting critically on the militarist Egyptians? Here the Met production really found some fun in the exaggeratedly fierce, bare-chested male ballet, choreographed with athletic gusto but also humour by Oleg Glushkov. The audition call for the dancers had suggested a background in haka – the Māori ceremonial dance made famous by the New Zealand national rugby team. Glushkov’s choreography was a little incongruous with Aida’s musical classicism, but huge fun for the New Year’s Eve audience, who responded with cheers, like rugby fans.

At the climax of the triumphal march, as the trumpets sounded, instead of Egyptians bearing trophies of war there marched across the stage a procession of archaeologists bearing sculptural antiquities, presumably to be packed up and sent home as trophies for the museums of Europe and America. A sculpture of an elephant was particularly entertaining, hinting at past decades when live elephants were brought into outdoor performances of Aida at the Arena of Verona or the Baths of Caracalla.

Having the archaeologists parade their triumphal loot of Egyptian antiquities was a witty gesture, authorizing the public to enjoy themselves at the opera house. This year the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, outside Cairo, will present the antiquities from King Tut’s tomb – discovered in 1922 – in a refurbished curatorial display. Likewise Verdi’s Aida: with a great Aida in Angel Blue, with glittering gold sets and costumes evoking King Tut’s treasure, and with clever rethinking of how a problematic work such as this might play as entertainment, the Met enters 2025 with a new production that will doubtless serve for many performances to come. The opera that Verdi created for the Khedive in Cairo in 1871 remains an indispensable repertory favourite, a masterpiece still culturally problematic, but operatically irresistible.

Larry Wolff is Professor of History at New York University. His most recent book is The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-tale opera and the end of the Habsburg monarchy, 2023

The post Gold standard appeared first on TLS.