It's the one where Aida and Radames love each other but Aida's a captured Ethiopian princess in Egypt's royal palace and Radames is a general whom the Egyptian king sends to defeat an invasion by Aida's father King Amonasro and Aida's mistress Princess Amneris loves Radames too and Radames achieves a big victory and captures Amonasro and the King makes Radames get engaged to Amneris and Amonasro pressures Aida into pressuring Radames into revealing which route the Egyptian army is taking and Radames agrees to desert and elope with Aida and unintentionally reveals the military secret and Amneris catches him and the priests convict Radames of treason and sentence him to be buried alive and Aida hides in his tomb and they face death together and Amneris prays to her gods to grant her peace.
It's one of Verdi's late works, composed a few years after the Risorgimento, and with its critical view of nationalism surely reflects the master's mixed feelings about Italian unification. (Sure, Verdi's name became an acronym for "Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy," but his own sympathies were republican.) I keep wondering if the Egyptian priests are symbols of the Catholic Church, but maybe I'm reading too much subtext into it.
It has one of the great opera finales: Amneris praying for peace sometimes gets me teary-eyed. One thing I like about Verdi's dramatic sense is the way he'll take an unsympathetic character like Amneris and give him or her a moment of grace, in a rather Catholic way. Other examples are Germont singing "Di Provenza il Mar il Suol" in LA TRAVIATA, di Luna's "Il Balen di Suo Soriso" in IL TROVATORE, and Macbeth's "Pieta, Rispetto, Amore" (all baritone songs I've been learning to sing).
No comments:
Post a Comment