Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Contextual note: Every three months my wife Ariele and I host an opera night for our friends at our house and via Discord, and while she does all the hard work of streaming and of updating the website where people vote for the shows, I contribute with an informal newsletter, sharing some history and other fun facts about the shows we watch. The newsletter is supposed to be accessible for an opera naif, while being generally informative. Since I spent the last week working on this one and did not write much of anything else, I thought I might share the substance of the report here on my blog. Back in February we watched Verdi’s Falstaff, and next weekend we will be convening for another Verdi classic, Aida.

Verdi and “The Orient”

We return this month to the work of Giuseppe Verdi, whose final opera (Falstaff) premiered when he was 80 years old. Aida, by contrast, had its premiere when the composer was a mere 58, very much at the height of his fame. A great many of Verdi’s operas remain part of the standard opera canon today, but Aida in particular is renowned for its epic scale and maximal aesthetic. Traditionally staged with elaborate and exotic backgrounds and costumes, it exemplifies the “grandeur” of grand opera, and consequently the whole concept of opera in the popular mind. It has been re-imagined many times, most famously as a musical by Elton John and Tim Rice, although that adaptation does not use any of Verdi’s music.

Aida is a historical fantasy, set in a vaguely defined era of the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt. However, its origins are tied to more recent history, having been commissioned by the Ottoman Empire’s viceroy (or khedive) in Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, on the occasion of the opening of a European-style opera house in Cairo. The composition of this opera can therefore be seen as an episode in the larger saga of nationalism and empire in the Mediterranean world, as Egypt drifted from the Ottoman sphere of influence toward the “modernizing” influence of the French and British Empires.

The story was proposed by a prominent French Egyptologist called Auguste Mariette, though apparently not from any specific incident in history. Verdi apparently declined the first invitation to compose Aida, but eventually agreed for the price of 150,000 francs (from what I can tell through exhaustive conversion research, this would get you as much as about $1.1 million today—inflation has been rough these last few years). The show premiered in Cairo in 1871 to great acclaim, with similar approval at its performance in Milan the following year. It has remained consistently popular ever since, and remains a prime example of the tendency in opera to excite its audience by transporting them to exotic times and places.

However, this tendency is not uncontroversial in modern times. Aida, similarly to Verdi’s other opera Otello (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Othello), features characters who are explicitly African and who have historically been performed by white singers wearing dark make-up, known in the American theatrical tradition as “blackface.” The New York Metropolitan Opera did not ban the use of blackface in its productions until 2015, while in Verdi’s homeland of Italy, there is debate over the extent to which darkening a performer’s skin is only problematic in the American context. To some, the lack of Jim Crow-style American minstrel shows in historical Italian theaters means that skin darkening does not carry the same historical baggage, and it is therefore acceptable.

This raises the question of what historical baggage does exist in Italy, and Europe more broadly. Aida is part of a larger tradition in European literature, arts, and academics that depicts “eastern” cultures through the “western” perspective, known as orientalism. Traditionally, orientalists were either informed experts on various eastern cultures (often divided as the near east, or Turkey, Egypt, and North Africa; the middle east, or Arabia and Persia; and the far east, or India and China), or amateurs who based their depictions and descriptions largely on their own imaginations. Although such places as Turkey, India, and China obviously have very different cultural traditions, orientalist thought in Europe produced tropes and stereotypes that could be applied to all of them. The identification of “western civilization” with the heritage of ancient Greece during the Renaissance provided the foundations for many of these tropes, particularly in how the Greeks saw themselves in comparison with the Egyptians or Persians. Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism was an important document in addressing these tropes within a critical, post-colonial context.

In orientalist thinking, the East was an exotic, mysterious realm that contrasted culturally with the mundane, quotidian West, often in ways that were greatly oversimplified or contradictory. Where the West was modern and rational, the East was ancient (or at least pre-modern) and mystical. Where the West was straightforwardly masculine, the East was sly, subtle, and feminine. Where the West was materialistic and realistic, the East was spiritual, or even superstitious. Where the West was adaptive and democratic, the East was deeply traditional and prone to despotism. Where Western justice was enlightened and humane, Eastern justice was legalistic and draconian.

The East was regarded as an intoxicating source of sensual delights, represented by everything from fine textiles, jewels, drugs, and spices, to lusty but submissive women kept in the harems of powerful men. As the European powers began to establish worldwide empires in the Early Modern period and beyond, the control of the East’s wealth and resources was a primary goal. Furthermore, the location of Jerusalem, “the Holy Land,” and the other geographies of the Bible within the boundaries of the East created a tension between the West’s modernizing present and its sense of its own spiritual heritage and history. To the extent that colonialism and imperialism were justified as necessary missions to civilize the world, the East’s inhabitants were regarded as their obvious beneficiaries, even as the people of the West laid claim to their land and treasure.

This was the background which informed the creation of Aida, along with virtually every representation of Eastern cultures (or fictional cultures patterned on the East) by Westerners up to the present day. Particularly in the context of fiction, the line between accurately reporting on a society and reproducing unwarranted stereotypes can be fuzzy, and often as much a matter of framing as what is directly represented. For example, Verdi employs a special design of trumpet in the score for Aida, based on research into authentic instruments of the Old Kingdom. At the same time, the Egypt that these trumpets are used to evoke is essentially an idealized European vision of a culture that had long since evolved under a succession of empires and religious revolutions—in other words, Europeans picking and choosing the elements of Egyptian culture that they considered the most “authentic,” blending real scholarship with what are ultimately flights of fancy.

In addition to being a fable of an Eastern culture, Aida is also a product of Italian culture during that country’s period of unification, and much of its content would have been seen by its audience and composer as being a commentary on their own politics and imperial ambitions, in which orientalist tropes were incidentally employed. Aida is also a classic love story and tragedy, and can be experienced simply as that. The themes and emotions of grand opera resonate through history because they are as nearly universally human as anything can be, and the music of Verdi endures because of the skill he employed in arranging melody and harmony, rather than in leaning on harmful stereotypes. As with all artifacts of cultural history, an opera is a product of its time, but it stands or falls on its ability to capture what is timeless.

For a deeper exploration of orientalist themes in Aida and ethnic representations in Italian opera, check out the essay at http://www.operaroma.it/en/calibano/pelle-bianca-maschere-nere-laida-e-la-questione-del-blackface/

The Opera Houses of Cairo

As Egypt’s ties with the European powers grew stronger in the later half of the 19^th century, European opera found a home in Cairo. The building where Aida was first performed in 1871 had actually opened two years earlier, and its inaugural show was in fact another Verdi opera, Rigoletto. That building, known today as the Khedivial Opera House (having been constructed under the Khedive Isma’il Pasha, as previously noted), was a major cultural landmark in Cairo until it was completely destroyed by a fire in October 1971, about two months shy of the hundredth anniversary of Aida’s debut.

The Khedivial Opera House was fairly modest in size, with an audience capacity of about 850. By comparison, most of the high-profile venues around the world, such as Milan’s La Scala or the Sydney Opera House, can seat between 1000 or 2000 people, and the Metropolitan Opera can seat nearly 4000. The KOH’s size reflects its historical circumstances; it was built very quickly, in order to coincide with the opening of the Suez Canal, and its early audience skewed more toward the Egyptian elite, along with Cairo’s foreign population of diplomats and business people, rather than the ordinary citizens of the city. It was also a destination for European royalty for many decades, and stood through two world wars and a number of other violent conflicts until it was ultimately defeated by that most merciless of enemies: faulty electrical wiring.

But another opera house and cultural center now rises over the Nile, and with a larger capacity of about 1200 in its main hall. The new Cairo Opera House was opened in 1988, having been financed in large part by the Japanese government as part of a warm phase of cultural diplomacy between Egypt and Japan. As part of its inauguration, the COH hosted the first performance of a kabuki theater production in the Middle East. This cultural partnership is apparently still going strong—according to the COH’s website, the Japanese embassy in Cairo sponsored a concert at the COH on May 2^nd of this year, featuring music from both countries as well as from classic European operas.

Today, the Cairo Opera House has a busy calendar, hosting performances of classical, traditional, religious, and other music with regularity. Flipping through the next two months I don’t see any actual operas scheduled at the moment, but if you happen to be in Egypt on the 14^th of this month you can catch the Cairo Opera Orchestra and the Egyptian Modern Dance Theatre Company performing Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Ravel’s Boléro.

A Certain Historical Irony

Last month, the Metropolitan Opera announced that a recent deal to fund the company with $200 million over eight years had been canceled by the government of Saudi Arabia. The primary cause for the Saudis’ change of heart seems to be the economic impact of the current war in Iran; in any case, the Met has a rather large budget shortfall this year and is going to need to find a way to plug that hole quickly. Among other things, this will mean fewer and less ambitious shows, and selling off many of its significant assets.

Considering all that we have learned today about the intersection of Orientalism, opera, and cultural imperialism, it seems a little ironic to me that in the twenty first century the financial health of one of the most important Western opera companies is so notably affected by the shifting priorities of a fabulously wealthy Eastern monarchy. That the Saudis were until recently willing to bankroll expensive performances of mostly European music by a group from New York City speaks to some very different economic fundamentals than what prevailed in the 1860s and 70s, along with different assumptions about the direction in which cultural influence travels.

In my own considered opinion, some small fraction of the money that the U.S. government uses to nourish a bloated military-industrial complex and wage insane, wasteful, and destructive wars ought to be used instead for subsidizing organizations like the Metropolitan Opera, which both preserve and advance the cultural heritage of our country and should not have to beg for charity from abroad to survive. But considering the exaggerated philistinism of the present administration and the general indifference of contemporary Americans to any cultural output that isn’t in the form of a vertical video, this is a policy change that might need a few years to be enacted.

The Met may be diminished by this news, but it is unlikely to be destroyed by it. Smaller companies need support even more, and they have far fewer opportunities to receive it from billionaires, foreign or domestic. It remains true that opera is not at the forefront of American musical culture, but regardless of what you may have heard from certain Hollywood actors (whose fortunes depend on an industry with its own financial struggles), it is not the case that nobody cares about opera. Hopefully, the opera houses in this and other countries will find a way to remain open until better times.