10 Triumphal Facts about Verdi’s Aida

The very first music you hear in Verdi’s 1871 opera Aida, music defining the passionate title character, is a pyramid. Literally. If you look at it in the score and outline the notes, it is shaped like a pyramid. Verdi repeats this idea throughout the opera in multiple ways, most memorably when Amonasro, Aida’s father, sings to her in the third act, the “Nile” scene, “Pensa d’un popolo, vinto, straziato!” (“Think of your people, conquered and suffering”), which then extends most memorably in Aida’s response, “Oh patria, oh patria, quanto mi costi!” (Oh my country, what you have cost me!). The musical pyramid idea returns in the opera’s sumptuous final moments in the tomb scene, with Aida and Radames saying farewell to the earth. 

Aida is everyone’s idea of a grand opera, befitting its commission to celebrate the opening an imperial opera house—that of the Khedive of Egypt in 1871, which was then part of the vast Ottoman Empire. Aida has been a theater-opener in Houston as well—both Jones Hall and the Wortham Theater Center opened with productions of Aida, the latter in a beautiful production by Pier Luigi Pizzi, designed to match the rich earth-red color of the interior of the Wortham’s Brown Theater.  

It was Auguste Mariette, a French Egyptologist in the employ of the Khedive of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, who suggested Aida’s scenario to Verdi, who found the story conventional, but the Egyptian setting compelling. The Khedive was building an opera house to coincide with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which had opened with Verdi’s Rigoletto. Verdi’s Aida premiered in Cairo, two years later, in 1871, and then in early 1872 Verdi was finally able to hear Aida himself at its first performance at La Scala in Milan. 

The Egypt of Aida is obviously an imaginary one, and set in a past so distant as to be unknowable. In Kaneza Schaal’s new production for Houston Grand Opera, we will experience an Aida that harkens back to Verdi’s deepest impulses: the oppressive eye of the state watching over the characters, the royal status of the title character as she is locked in a political struggle, and the profoundly rich colors of centuries of history within the Nile Delta.  

Verdi’s librettist for Aida, Antonio Ghislanzoni, based the story on the scenario suggested by Auguste Mariette, as well as a discarded libretto from the Italian librettist Temistocle Solera, who wrote libretti for five Verdi operas at the beginning of his career. Conversations about Aida have always centered on its authenticity—but to what should Aida be authentic? Think of the Egyptian obelisk that stands in the middle of the vast St. Peter’s Square in Rome, shipped to the Italian peninsula on the orders of the Emperor Caligula in 40 A.D. It has been in Italy for nearly 2,000 years—is it still authentically Egyptian, or is it now Italian? Is it just a timeless stateless object? Aida asks the same kinds of questions of us. 

Verdi’s extraordinary Requiem is closely aligned with Aida. The Requiem had its origins in Rossini’s death, which inspired a requiem mass with movements composed by 13 different Italian composers, to which Verdi contributed the finale, “Libera me.” After the Mass for Rossini, Verdi conceived a full-scale Requiem of his own, incorporating his “Libera me” as a tribute to the man Verdi considered the greatest Italian of his generation, Alessandro Manzoni, whose novel I promessi sposi Verdi considered the single greatest work of Italian art. The soprano soloist of the Manzoni Requiem, which we now simply call the Verdi Requiem, was one of Verdi’s favorites—a woman with whom he was likely in love, Teresa Stolz, and she had sung the Italian premiere of Aida. The Requiem and Aida were thought by Verdi—and certainly by his fans—to be his last works. But thankfully, Otello and Falstaff were to follow, both of them written in secret in case he didn’t live to finish them.  

Verdi suffered tremendous personal loss at the busiest time of his early career. His two children, Virginia and Icilio, did not live to see second birthdays, and their mother, Verdi’s beloved first wife Margherita, died of encephalitis at age 26. Even late in his life, remembering them, his voice would crack. Verdi made a tiny fortune in his life, including on Aida, and he spent his final decades endowing nearly every charity in his native Parma, and also a retirement home for musicians in Milan, the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, which is still in use. Verdi died in the same week as Britain’s Queen Victoria, each of them icons of their eras. Verdi’s funeral in Milan was immense, the largest in Italy’s history to this day, with 300,000 lining the streets, singing “Va, pensiero,” the chorus of Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco.  

Aida has always been popular, so much so that it had several remakes, including a delightfully risible 1952 musical, My Darlin’ Aida—which had a distinguished team, conducted by Franz Allers as well as the legendary choral director Robert Shaw. My Darlin’ Aida set the opera in the American South, hoping to capitalize on the popularity of Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1943 hit Carmen Jones, which did the same thing to Bizet’s Carmen. But, despite Verdi’s legendary tunes, My Darlin’ Aida was one of Broadway’s most notorious flops. More recently, the successful Elton John/Tim Rice re-telling of the story, based on the children’s book authored by Leontyne Price, has brought a new generation to the story. Elton John’s “Written in the Stars” from Aida became a popular music hit. 

Verdi’s music has a nobility that few composers could match. Aida was the first truly grand opera that does not have a single extra note, and as such, it has no traditional musical cuts. Every scene of Aida is a musical marvel, but for sheer sonic boldness, it is hard to match a moment near the end of the “Triumphal Scene” of Aida’s second act, in which Verdi stacks three beautiful musical themes on top of each other, each sounding simultaneously but distinctly. It is a moment for which musicians wait, because it is so ingeniously composed and so thrilling to hear. 

The amphitheater in Verona, Italy, the oldest part of which is more than 2,000 years old, has hosted summer opera seasons since 1913, the most famous of which have been performances of Verdi’s Aida in Franco Zeffirelli’s immense production with a cast of hundreds of people—and yes, elephants. Live animals have actually appeared in very few historic productions of the opera, but they have been so memorable that lore imagines they must always be there.