Author : Jos Hermans
Of all nineteenth-century operas, Aida is one of the pieces that suffers most from slavish submission to the composer's original stage directions. Conventional productions then easily derail into an Oberammergau on the Nile. Drenched in the noble kitsch of a pseudo-historical folklore, an Aida production can really hurt one's eyes. Aida was a commissioned work to mark the opening of the Suez Canal, and you can understand Verdi when he initially refused to produce the notes for the occasion. Verdi's music is thoroughly Italian, and in the completed score, screenwriter Auguste Mariette's Egypt is ultimately rather irrelevant. Ditching these Egypt fantasies is almost a mandatory exercise in any attempt to revive the work.
But the aspect of war is indeed manifestly present. "The play leaves open what the exact reasons and goals of the war are, the background is not explained," Lydia Steier says in the program booklet. For those looking for clues to today's world, that is a capital phrase. We have experience with conflicts that are not explained. It opens the doors wide to the most frenzied, misleading propaganda.
Steier's Egypt is a weakened theocracy whose elites seem entrenched in a dingy bunker (set: Katharina Schlipf) with white-tiled walls and tall doors. Art deco wall lamps recall better times. The Egyptians are no strangers to violence. A torture chamber in the center hides behind closed doors. Later on, it will also serve to try Radamès. Ethiopian maids with black page wigs wear their pink dresses with white aprons like a uniform. They scrub the blood off the walls. A body bag is dragged. Radamès, a naive pool boy, worries about covering the pool. This could also have been the opening scene of Elektra.
The gigantic magnifying glass Verdi focuses on the triumphal march is crucial in Verdi's thinking. It serves only one purpose: to expose the revolting weight of the collusion between politics and religion. It is the priests who are the driving force behind the fate of the unfortunate lovers. It is not the king who is the true wielder of power but the high priest Ramfis. Officially, he keeps the war machinery going but privately he struggles with intense problems of conscience. "He is a torn figure who is not completely numb, but constantly realizes his own brutality and reflects on it." Steier, who has gone into fantasy here, makes Ramfis the central character. It is fascinating to watch her try to find access to the piece along a side road. But it also somewhat dilutes the role of the religious authority so hated by Verdi.
During the overture, he will reach for his pillbox with trembling hands and show his devastation in every possible way. At other times, he acts entirely in accordance with the logic of the machinery of war. He then controls his nerves with a cigarette. The ballet music has to manage without dancers. This is a loss, but it also saves us from a possibly dreadful choreography. The dance of the priestesses ("Immenso Fthà") zooms in on Ramfis' despair. The priests' voices rack his head. Two extras with bird heads and bloody beaks persuade him to keep believing in the delusion of war. A little boy in an officer's uniform is sacrificed.
The people are absent, only the elite show up for the war council. They are all invalids and decorated elderly, some in wheelchairs, others walking on crutches, the funniest with an old-fashioned hearing aid but they sing like the best, for example when it is time to chant the martial "Guerra! Guerra!" Steier is quick to make a caricature of Egyptian patriotism. With war there is no honor, she seems to be saying : old men invent wars for young men to die in. "Again, we are dealing with a very topical situation: Young people who are told they can be sent to military exercises or become heroes for their country or a certain ideology suddenly find themselves in the middle of a merciless war." Was she thinking of the quietly ending story of the senseless meat grinder of America's proxy war in Ukraine?
Occasionally, the director allows a parallel reality to break into the play. For example, Aida will sing "Ritorno vincitor" in the glow of a spotlight while the surroundings freeze in a bright green neon light. The women's chorus of the second act takes us to Amneris' wig studio. Steier has imbued Amneris with a sadistic nature which she illustrates with the gratuitous stabbing of one of her maidservants. To me it seemed far-fetched and exaggerated. The triumph scene is preceded by a minute-long soundscape reverberating from the speakers with bruitage sounds of the battlefield, the eternal "sanitary napkin of history" as W.F. Hermans once aptly put it. One hopes this does not become a tradition in recycling nineteenth-century operas. Aida is not Die Soldaten. The chorus, men and women, now wear party hats and are in very good spirits. Radamès returns, traumatized by the war experience, despite victory. A jab in his arm helps him recover. The ballet passage of the second act is used to humiliate the Ethiopians. Did I mention that the chorus led by Tilman Michael performs excellently across the board?
The third and fourth acts hardly deviate from the text. Guanqun Yu as Aida grows during the performance. If "Ritorni vincitor" is still somewhat tentative, her romance on the banks of the Nile ("Oh, Patria mia"), atmospheric due to the light reflections from the pool on the walls, is quasi-perfect with beautiful crescendi. The vibrato is well controlled and there are no faltering register transitions. She is also the shining beacon of Verdi's love utopia in the final duet. High tension follows with the duet with father Amonasro thanks to Nicholas Brownlee's firmly projecting bass baritone. The duet with Radamès, meant to elicit from him the military secret, is a well-directed, irresistible attempt at seduction.
Claudia Mahnke sings the entire part with a wavering vibrato. It is painful to witness. The loyalty toward this longtime ensemble member must be great since Opera Frankfurt is still willing to cast her in a major role like this. An extreme reversal in her aggressive behavior occurs when she embraces Amonasro's corpse during her grand monologue. Suddenly a curious obsession with peace awakens in her. The final scene does nothing to contemplate Verdi's utopia. We see Radames chained to the wall of the torture chamber. Amneris receives a redeeming injection from Ramfis who himself doubts whether he should hold a revolver to his temple. It is a famous theocracy that Steier shows us here, whose elite sees the solution to problems in a syringe and is not man enough to bear its own responsibility. In the end, the overhauled Ramfis is not a truly credible figure. But it is Andreas Bauer Kanabas who fills the role with his splendid bass. Stefano La Colla's intonation is not always pure but he is a true spinto tenor and he shows it at every opportunity he gets. He rounds off his opening aria "Celeste Aida" with a beautiful surging "vicino al sol."
From the start, the Frankfurt Opern- und Museumsorchester under Erik Nielsen regularly sounded rather routinelike. But the solo moments and the atmospheric pages were all enchanting. The spectacular finale of the third act was well under control. The Aida trumpets were on stage, separated into two parts, and to be enjoyed in stereo, as it were, perfectly executed and therefore also one of the musical highlights.