The exotic (and lucrative!) history of Verdi's Aida

It’s true! Giuseppe Verdi was asked to write an anthem to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, but he declined the invitation of Isma’il Pasha, Qadivah of Egypt, in 1860.

When the great Italian composer was then presented with the compelling subject of Aida and the remuneration (150,000 francs!) he could get from the production of the opera, then the bitter refusal changed to great enthusiasm!

In fact, Camille du Locle, director of the Opéra-Comique in Paris, submitted to Verdi the subject prepared by Egyptologist Auguste Mariette. The man in charge of Egyptian excavations had already set to work when in 1860 the Chedivé of Egypt had floated the idea of entrusting a great Italian composer with an opera for the inauguration of the forthcoming cutting of the Suez Canal.

Contrary to popular belief, the great composer did not inaugurate the Cairo Opera House, celerely built in just six months, with his Aida, but rather with his Rigoletto on Nov. 1, 1869.

In fact, the reluctant composer, famous throughout Europe, did not finally allow himself to be persuaded to work on the new opera until the spring of 1870, when, it is said, he found out that a final refusal on his part would have seen commissions pass to rival Richard Wagner.

Work on composing the music started in August 1870, but the plan to stage Aida that same winter faded because of the Franco-Prussian War and the siege of Paris, which prevented the costumes made in the Opéra’s tailors from being sent out.

Aida was therefore staged in a Gala evening at the Cairo Opera House on December 24, 1871, thus missing coinciding with both the cutting of the Suez Canal and the inauguration of the Theater.

Verdi did not direct the performance, but entrusted his faithful Giovanni Bottesini with the direction, immediately devoting himself to preparing the European premiere, which was held at La Scala Theater in Milan on February 8, 1872.

The composer actually considered the La Scala premiere, the true premiere of the opera, which, though successful, had been offered in December 1871 to an audience of critics, diplomats and dignitaries, but not, as he would have liked, to an audience of connoisseurs and opera lovers.

The libretto of Aida was the result of a highly collaborative effort with the poet and writer Antonio Ghislanzoni, close to Lombard Scapigliatura and Mazzini circles, who edited the versification of the prose version drafted in French by Camille Du Locle under Verdi’s supervision, based on the subject prepared by Mariette.

The commission for the work from the Chedivè of Egypt had been clear: he wanted a historical Egyptian opera that would hold up the historical descriptions and bas-reliefs of Upper Egypt as an inspiration for the setting.

Epistolary correspondence confirms how publisher Giulio Ricordi had provided Verdi with documentary material for the faithful reconstruction of ancient Egypt on the Cairo stage, but the composer does not seem to have taken much notice of it.

The plot and characters come from an imaginary vision with an exquisitely romantic flavor of an Egypt out of time and space, magical, vague rather than known. An iconographic and semantic world in which Westerners recognized their fundamental prejudices rather than the scientific foundations of archaeological and historical study.

Aida is thus tinged with the romantic, sometimes symbolic exoticism that allows the great composer to speak much about his present.

How can one not compare Aida’s weeping as she recalls the misfortune that befell her homeland to the lament of patriots subjected to foreign oppression.

The romantic exoticism of Verdi’s Aida found its greatest expression in the first staging of the opera that Zeffirelli created for La Scala in 1963, captured in the scenes of the film Il Giovane Toscanini.

Zeffirelli entrusted Lila de Nobili’s ingenious and expert hands with the costumes and sets, which the painter rendered with nostalgic allusions and references to fin de siècle painting and Liebig figurines: “I asked Lila de Nobili, an absolute genius of painting in the performing arts (perhaps the greatest of the 20th century), to design for me the scenes and costumes of Aida, inspired by the grandiose and refined Egypt of the first production staged in Cairo, on the occasion of the celebrations for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1868. An exquisite Orientalist fantasy, very close to the opulent visions of Gustave Moreau.”

The result is a historical staging that has been revived several times in other theaters.

Busseto’s Aidina, staged by Franco Zeffirelli on the tiny stage of Verdi’s hometown theater in 2001, was paradoxically a success: “Everything was seen as through a magnifying glass on that tiny stage: not a blink or a gesture escaped. The emotional impact of the delicate, poignant love story finally ended up triumphing. The most coveted triumph for me.”

If the intimate dimension of the characters and the passions of the protagonists find their proper and more human place in the small theater, the staging that followed at the Arena di Verona in 2002 brought to the immense stage of the Roman amphitheater the monumentality and grandeur of Egyptian civilization.