Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 7 - Aida

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 26 of them had been autonomous kingdoms before that. The usual purpose was profit. In many cases, the subjugated people worked the land, extracting produce or minerals that were then sent back to Europe. In other cases, the work was done by slaves imported from elsewhere. Always subjugated, sometimes the people of a colony were literally enslaved as well. Seen in this framework, Aida would be the story of an enslaved person rounded up and sold as property to the Egyptians– standing, in the story, for a European power. This power has conquered Ethiopia and enslaved its inhabitants, not as prisoners of war, but as possessions. This reading simply does not fit the libretto we have. First of all, the era is wrong. The libretto is based on the Aethiopika of Heliodorus of Emesa (200- 300 CE), set in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, whose usual dates are 2700-2200 BCE— thus predating by some 3,500 years the era of colonial slavery. Nor is ancient Egypt a European power; it is an African kingdom. This is not decisive, however, since Verdi could have introduced issues belonging to his own time into the remote ancient setting. But in examining the libretto, we are presented not with a great power oppressing a weak subjugated people, but rather with two roughly equal great kingdoms who have been making aggressive and retributive war against one another, back and forth, again and again. In the opera’s very first sentence, Ramfis says: “Yes, reports say that the Ethiopians dare to try once again (“ ancora ”), and to menace the valley of the Nile and Thebes.” The invaders are said to have burned crops and laid waste to the fields, and the Egyptians fear death and captivity for their own people. Later Amonasro tells Aida that the Egyptians have done the very same thing: “they have desecrated our houses, our temples, our altars, carried our maidens off in chains, slain mothers, the aged, the young.” The only reason the Ethiopians have not done the same this time is that their invasion is not successful. The motive for these reciprocal wars is primarily, on both sides, vengeance for Teresa Stolz,Verdi’s preferred soprano,in costume as Aida.