An Aida you won't believe

The title of Aida is enough to immediately evoke images of great spectacularity. It is synonymous with the power of melodrama: monumental, heroic, sumptuous . Aida is equivalent to what today could be the inaugural show of a great Olympic ceremony, for example, and it is no coincidence that this title was commissioned to Verdi precisely on the occasion of the celebrations for the inauguration of the Suez Canal, together with the construction of the Cairo Opera House which was then inaugurated in the same years with another opera, again by Verdi.

Opera was the best instrument to celebrate great occasions because its nature is to be able to make a narrative epic.

The director of the recent film Emilia Pérez, nominated for 13 Oscars, said that at first he had thought of writing an opera libretto because he wanted an epic story. Then, not finding the right musician, he transformed the story into a screenplay, without giving up a melodramatic tone that the film actually contains. This also justifies certain passages of the film that make realistic credibility creak, because the story proceeds decisively on an imaginative tone capable of using the musical code to make the characters and the story sail off predictable and canonical tracks.

Stories told with music have this quality: they do not ask to be believed and credible. On the contrary, they want to be in-credible, that is to say extraordinary, wonderful, capable of giving amazement, mocking logic and realism. In stories told with music, that kind of amazement happens that can give the sensation of stopping time for a moment and immersing you in an extra-temporal dimension. Opera arias do this: often nothing happens, the action stops and you remain balanced on a moment of emotion that is sometimes capable of giving a little vertigo.

This is exactly what happens in Aida. It is an opera that works like an accordion: it widens and narrows. Like a zoom. A lens capable of changing focal length and expanding to an enormous wide angle capable of embracing an enormous and festive crowd among the palm trees and canopies of the city of Thebes, where ministers, priests and captains march chanting a resounding triumph. A moment later the lens is able to tighten the objective until it reaches a precise and intimate detail, whispered secretly by the two protagonists, Radames and Aida, who are afraid of being heard because their love must not be known by anyone, it must be kept apart, in parentheses. The charm of this story, and the challenge in rendering it adequately on stage, lies in capturing this change of focal length.

Aida is a small love story within a great war story. The classic impossible encounter where the lovers are from two opposing factions and where the fathers (obsessively present in Verdi's operas) end up imposing themselves on their children's choices: fathers in Verdi always cause a lot of trouble. Here Amonasro blackmails his daughter, Aida, and demands that she betray the man she is in love with: he wants his daughter to extort information from her lover to be able to discover which path the enemy army will take. Aida refuses, she does not want to betray Radames and so her father disowns her: you have become the daughter of the pharaohs, go away! This is the passage that will precipitate the whole story. Aida in fact gives in to her father's will, deceives Radames who is arrested and sentenced to death. She will join him in the tomb and they will die together. Aida decides to die, just as Gilda, Rigoletto's daughter, decides to die. He has it in his head to kill the man she is in love with. And the list is long and varied: fathers who think they can solve problems by replacing their children and imposing their will, bending them to their choices, blackmailing them, creating feelings of guilt that end up destroying the psychology of these young men and women. In La Traviata, the young Alfredo is desperate because his father has forced the woman he loves to leave him. She, La Traviata, goes along with her father's decision and in this way condemns herself to unhappiness. Even in another lesser-known opera, where it seems that things could really go differently, there always comes a father who falls for it again. This is the example of Stiffelio, where the protagonist suffers from the pain of being betrayed, but does not react impulsively and violently, rather he manages to welcome this pain and make it his own, hold it in the palm of his hand and observe it until he recognizes the complexity of a relationship, reaching the point of maturing the capacity for forgiveness. Stiffelio experiences his marital crisis with his wife Lina. They confront each other with an absolutely modern dialectic and talk about divorce (we are in 1850, while divorce in Italy is introduced into the legal system 120 years later...).

In short, it is a couple that does not blame each other, that does not use threats to communicate, it seems that for once they can really arrive at the miracle of a humanity free from judgment and violence... And instead no. In the story of Stiffelio there is a father, this time it is her father, Stankar, an old colonel who thinks it is a good idea to settle the score by killing his daughter's lover. A murder that is completely useless for the purposes of the story and to which no character seems to give any value, relegating Stankar to an almost anachronistic frame compared to the modernity of the other characters.

Analyzing Aida we realize how the paternal will bends history but its action is always illusory and vain. The paternal imposition modifies the banks of a river that then must flow inexorably to its sea, because life works this way and Aida will go to Radames as Juliet will go to Romeo even if her parents do not want it. Even if it is not rational, if it is not logical.

It is absurd, says reason, it is reckless, says prudence, but it is what it is, says Love: verses that summarize this unstoppable and illogical need to feel authentic, to feel alive, to feel the wind on your face and the cold in your bones but not to give up the emotion of existence. To stay like Romeo, in the cold under a balcony waiting for Juliet to look out, if she will look out, or to go down, like Aida, into a cold and deadly dungeon to embrace the man you have chosen and with him try to save yourself from the mediocrity of a stagnant prudence that reduces you to always being someone's daughter and never yourself.

If youth knew and old age could. But youth does not know and old age cannot.

Despite everything. Love stories, in life and therefore in literature, defy all adversative conjunctions. We love each other despite, although, although, despite, although… Because it is the obstacle that creates desire, that keeps it burning.

So in melodrama the obstacles are always insurmountable. And that makes operas so incredible and powerful in their contemplation of the absurdity of life.

There is a passage in Aida that gives me a great sense of tenderness and fragility, while it is usually seen as a frankly virile and assertive moment. It is the famous aria “Celeste Aida”, a real test for all tenors because it arrives a few minutes before the curtain opens and it places itself there looking at you with a challenging attitude as if to say: now let's see if you can do it…

It is an aria in which Radames declares his love for Aida, but there is nothing triumphant in this declaration. It is a young soldier who has a dream and says it: “If my dream were to come true”… What is this dream? The same as Romeo’s. To win Juliet’s love.

In fact, Radames speaks throughout the aria using conditional verbs: if I could make my dream come true then “I would like to bring you back the breezes of my homeland”, that is, I would like to bring you home or make you feel at home. Because Aida is a foreigner, she is from another country. Just as Juliet is a Capulet and Romeo is a Montague. Two different houses, two different countries. Radames would like to build a place where they can be together.

Exactly the same condition that two other lovers, Tony and Maria, protagonists of Leonard Bernstein's musical West side story, live: "somewhere there's a place for us". The dream of a place where they can feel safe, where they can feel protected. A new place and time but that they still don't know how, when and where it is.

So Radames dreams the impossible, because what else do you want to dream if not the impossible? He dreams that his country is no longer in conflict with Aida's while in reality all around there is only "war", "death" and "extermination": the three words sung by the Chorus.

Throughout the opera Aida and Radames speak very little to each other: only twice.

The first time they talk to each other they decide that the best thing to do is to leave there… somewhere… they don't know where, but the desire is to go away:

“Yes, let’s flee these walls, let’s flee to the desert together.” A mysterious desert is better than those inhospitable walls. It will be wonderful to sleep on a mattress in a studio apartment on the outskirts, but to be together! And at this point the usual question comes: how would the story have gone if… if Aida’s father had not blackmailed his daughter, had not made her feel wrong and despised (by himself and also by her mother who is dead). The theater needs conflict. Aida gives in to her father, extorts the secret from Radames who is arrested and condemned.

And this brings our two protagonists to meet for the second and last time in the whole story. The first time they were about to leave towards a new horizon and a new light, while now they find themselves in a place where every horizon is erased. They are underground, there is no more light, they are in total darkness and they go back to using the same word with which Radames began the opera: “goodbye dream of joy that in pain vanished”. That dream that Radames had has vanished.

We had a dream, it was a joyful dream, a dream of happiness. We had a dream, to find the “embalmed forests” and imagine a different world. And instead this dream has turned into pain. It seems like the synthesis of their two unique moments together: in the first moment there is the horizon of a promised land. In the second the darkness of condemnation. Radames must be forgotten, obscured, as happens to political dissidents. He must be made to disappear.

Aida and Radames are the emblem of conflicts between different peoples who do not find harmony, do not find peace. Aida and Radames could tell the story of Palestine and Israel, the martyrdom of a promised land, the dream of a place where to find a new way of living and a way to be able to forgive: “Somewhere we'll find a new way of living, We'll find a way of forgiving”.

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