Aida

Summary

Giuseppe Verdi’s “Egyptian” opera, synonymous with “grand opera” of the uniquely high nineteenth-century type, which Edward Said reads contrapuntally as a hybrid, radically impure work that is not so much about but of imperial domination (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.139, p.141 / printed p.112, p.114).

Details

• As a visual, musical and theatrical spectacle, Aida confirms the Orient as an essentially exotic, distant and antique place in which Europeans can mount certain shows of force; concurrently, European “universal” expositions routinely contained models of colonial villages, towns and courts, exhibiting subaltern cultures before Westerners as microcosms of the larger imperial domain (PDF p.139 / printed p.112).
• Herbert Lindenberger in Opera: The Extravagant Art ties Aida, Boris Godunov and Götterdämmerung as operas of 1870 respectively to archaeology, nationalist historiography and philology; Wieland Wagner, who produced Aida at Berlin in 1962, treats it as “an African mystery” with an irreducible conflict between Ethos and Bios (PDF p.139 / printed p.112).
• Joseph Kerman in Opera as Drama finds an almost constant disparity between the glib simplicity of the libretto and the alarming complexity of the musical expression, and “a curious falsity about Aida” which Said says Kerman is correct about but cannot quite explain (PDF p.140 / printed p.113).
• The circumstances of its first production, and the setting in which Verdi worked between early 1870 and late 1871 — Italy, imperial Europe and viceregal Egypt, technically within the Ottoman Empire but gradually being established as a dependent and subsidiary part of Europe — require a contrapuntal interpretation of its peculiarities (PDF p.141 / printed p.114).
• Verdi accepted Khedive Ismail’s offer for 150,000 francs in gold, ahead of Wagner and Gounod, and for Auguste Mariette’s story, insisting in his letters that he was the work’s “only one creator”; the opera embodies the authority of Europe’s version of Egypt, is an aesthetic of separation — an imperial article de luxe purchased by credit for a tiny clientele — and its Egyptian-Ethiopian story acquires resonance against Anglo-Egyptian rivalry in East Africa and Ismail’s reign (1863-1879), which led ineluctably to the British occupation of 1882 (PDF p.142-144, p.152-157 / printed p.115-117, p.125-130; the article de luxe wording is Said’s, given without quotation marks here).
• Act II, scene 2, the Triumphal scene, is the biggest thing Verdi wrote for the stage, yet Aida is self-limiting and atypically held in, a blend of masterly competence and affective neutrality (PDF p.141 / printed p.114).

Related pages

Culture and Imperialism, Giuseppe Verdi, Contrapuntalism, Imperialism