Edward Said- The Imperial Spectacle

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The Imperial SpectacleAuthor(s): Edward W. SaidSource: Grand Street, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 1987), pp. 82-104Published by: Ben SonnenbergStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25006961.

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THE IMPERIAL SPECTACLE

Edward W. Said

A idameans Grand Opera of a uniquely high nineteenthcentury type. It has survived for over a century as

both an immensely popular work and one forwhich musicians, critics and musicologists have a healthy respect.Yet Aida's grandeur and eminence-evident to all witheyes to see and ears to hear-are surprisingly complexmatters. They have engendered all sorts of theories,mostof which connect Aida to its historical and cultural moment in theWest. InOpera: The Extravagant Art, HerbertLindenberger puts the imaginative theory thatAida, BorisGudonov and Die Gotterdammerung, all operas of 1870,are tied respectively to archaeology, nationalist historiography and philology. Wieland Wagner, who producedAida atBerlin in 1962, sees in thework a prefiguration ofhis grandfather's Tristan with an irreducible conflict between Ethos and Bios at its core. In his scheme, Amnerisis the central figure dominated by a "Riesenphallus"whichhangs over her like a mighty club; according to Opera,"Aidawas mostly seen prostrate or cowering in the background."

Wieland Wagner treats the opera as "anAfrican mystery,"but there has been no shortage of directors forwhomas spectacle, display andmelodrama Aida isunparalleledin the Italian repertory.Still, even if we overlook the vulgarity to which the second scene of Act II often lendsitself, there is something to the fact thatAida climaxes thedevelopment in style and vision that brought Verdi fromNabucco and I Lombardi in the 1840s throughRigoletto,Trovatore, Traviata, Simon Boccanegra and Un Ballo in

Maschera in the 1850s, to the problematic Forza del Destino and Don Carlos in the 1860s.During three decadesVerdi had become thepreeminent Italian composer of hisday, his career accompanying and seeming to comment onthe Risorgimento. Aida was the last public and politicalopera he wrote before he turned to the essentially domestic, albeit intense, pair of operaswith which he ended his

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life as a composer, Otello and Falstaff. All the majorVerdi scholars-Julian Budden, Frank Walker, WilliamWeaver, Andrew Porter, JosephWechsberg-note thatAida not only reuses traditional musical forms like thecabaletta and concertato but adds to them a new chromaticism, subtlety of orchestration and dramatic streamliningrarely found in the works of other composers of the timeexceptWagner. Joseph Kenman's demurral in Opera andDrama is interesting at thispoint for howmuch it acknowledges about Aida's singularity:

The result in Aida is, inmy opinion, an almost constantdisparity between the particular glib simplicity of thelibretto and the alarming complexity of the musical expression-for of courseVerdi's techniquehad never beenso rich. Only Amneris comes to life; Aida is thoroughlyconfused; Rhadames seems like a throwback, if not to

Metastasio, at least to Rossini. It goes without saying thatsome pages, numbers, and scenes are beyond praise, reason enough for this opera's great popularity. Nevertheless,there is a curious falsity about Aida which is quite unlikeVerdi, and which recallsMeyerbeer more disturbinglythan the grand-opera apparatus of triumphs, consecrations, and brass bands.

Kerman's observations are persuasive as far as they go.In assessing them,we should remember first of all that

Verdi's previous work had attracted attention preciselybecause it involved and drew in its audience directly. Notonly did hismusic-dramas portray often incorrigibly redblooded heroes and heroines in the full splendor of contests (often incestuous) over power, fame and honor,butas Paul Robinson has convincingly argued inOpera andIdeas-Verdi set out almost always towrite political operas, replete with rhetorical stridency, martial music andunbuttoned emotions. "Perhaps themost obvious component ofVerdi's rhetoricalstyle-to put thematter bluntlyis sheer loudness. He is,with Beethoven, among the noisiest of all major composers. . . Like a political orator,Verdi can't remain still for long. Drop the needle at random on a recording of aVerdi opera, and you will usuallybe rewardedwith a substantial racket."Robinson goes onto say, however, thatVerdi's splendid noisiness is both

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effective and harnessed to such occasions as "parades, rallies and speeches,"which in the context of the Risorgimento were seen as Verdi's amplifications of real lifeoccurrences. Aida is certainly no exception. Early in ActOne, for example, there is a tremendous ensemble piece,"Su del nilo," involving several soloists and a massedchorus. It is now a commonplace that tunes fromVerdi'searlier operas (Nabucco, I Lombardi and Attila in particular) stimulated his audiences to frenzies of participation, so immediate was the impact of Verdi's operas, theclarity of their contemporary reference and the sheer skillat whipping everyone into enormously urgent, "big" theatrical climaxes.

However, Verdi's earlier operas, despite often exotic oroutre subject matter, seemed always addressed to Italyand Italians,whereas Aida was concerned with only theEgypt and Egyptians of early antiquity, a farmore remotephenomenon thanVerdi had ever treated.Not thatAidawants for political noisiness, for surely Act II, Scene II(the so-called triumphal scene) is the biggest thing that

Verdi ever wrote for the stage, a virtual jamboree ofeverything an opera house can collect and parade. Ratherthe opera is self-limiting and held-in in quite an atypical

way, and there seems tobe no record of any participatoryenthusiasm connected with it, even though at theMetropolitan Opera, for instance, it has been performed moretimes than any other work. Verdi's other works had occasionally dealt with remote or alien cultures, a fact thatdidn't inhibit his audiences from identifying with themanyway.And like his earlier operas,Aida is about a tenorand a sopranowho want tomake love but are preventedby a baritone and a mezzo. What are the differences inAida?Why has the habitual Verdian mix inhis "Egyptian"opera produced so unusual a blend of masterly competence and affective neutrality?A sa way of providing an answer we should recognizethat the circumstancesof Aida's firstproduction-thecircumstances inwhich the opera came tobe written-areunique in Verdi's career.Moreover the political and certainly the cultural setting inwhich Verdi worked betweenearly 1870 and late 1871 included not only Italy but im

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perial Europe and viceregal Egypt, an Egypt technicallywithin the Ottoman Empire but gradually being established as a dependent and subsidiary part of Europe. Iwant to try to show how Aida's peculiarities-its subjectmatter and setting, itsmonumental grandeur, its strangelyunaffecting visual and musical effects, its overdevelopedmusic and constricted domestic situation, its eccentricplace inVerdi's career-do require a sort of jigsaw puzzleinterpretation, an interpretation assimilable neither to thestandard view of Italian opera nor more generally to prevailing views of the great masterpieces of nineteenthcentury European civilization.Aida, like the opera form itself, is a hybrid, radicallyimpurework thatbelongs equally to the history of cultureand to the historical experience of overseas Europeandomination. Itmust therefore be regarded as a compositework, built around disparities and discrepancies whichhave been either ignored or unexplored, but which can berecalled and mapped descriptively not just because theyare interesting in and of themselvesbut because theymakemore sense of Aida's unevenness, its anomalous character,its restrictions and silences, than analyses that focus on

Verdi, Italy and European culture exclusively.In what follows I shall not try to explain the whole

opera. Rather I shall put before the readermatelial thatparadoxically cannot be overlooked but has systematicallybeen overlooked, mostly because the embarrassment ofAida is finally that it is a work not somuch about but ofimperial domination, that is, that stretches across European boundaries intoAfrica and the Orient. If one readsor interpretsAida from that perspective, with some consciousness of the fact that the opera was written for andfirstproduced in a countrywith which Verdi had no connection, a number of thingswill stand out.

The first thing to be mentioned is that Verdi himselfsays something to this effect in the letter that inaugurateshis connection, as yet almost completely latent,with an

Egyptian opera.Writing Camille Du Locle, a close friendwho had justreturned froma voyage enOrient, Verdi sayson February 19, 1868: "Whenwe see each other, youmustdescribe all the events of your voyage, thewonders youhave seen, and the beauty and ugliness of a countrywhich

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once had greatness and a civilization I had never beenable to admire."On November 1, 1869, the inauguration of the CairoOpera House was a brilliant event during celebrations forthe opening of the Suez Canal; Rigoletto was the operaperformed. A few weeks before, Verdi had turned down

Khedive Ismail's request towrite a hymn for the occasion,and inDecember 1869 hewrote Du Locle a long letter onthe dangers of "patchwork"operas: "Iwant art in any ofitsmanifestations, ot thearrangement,he artifice, ndthe system that you prefer," he told Du Locle, arguingthat for his part he wanted "unified"works, inwhich "theidea is ONE, and everything must converge to form this

ONE." Although Verdi's assertionswere made in responsetoDu Locle's suggestion that he should write an opera forParis, they turn up enough times in the course of his workon Aida to become an important theme. On January 5,1871, he writes Nicola De Giosa that "today operas arewritten with somany different dramatic and musical intentions that it is almost impossible to interpret them; andit seems tome that no one can take offense if the author,

when one of his productions is given for the first time,sends a person who has carefully studied thework underthe direction of the author himself." To Tito Ricordi hewrites on April 11, 1871, that he permitted "only onecreator" for his work, himself; "Idon't concede the rightto 'create' to singers and conductors," he continues, "because, as I said before, it is a principle that leads into theabyss."Why then did Verdi finally accept Khedive Ismail'soffer towrite a special opera forCairo?Money certainlywas a reason: hewas given 150,000 francs in gold.He wasalso flattered, since after all he was choice number one,ranked ahead ofWagner and Gounod. Probably just asimportant was the story offered him by Du Locle, whohad received a sketch for a possible operatic treatmentfromAuguste Mariette, a renowned French Egyptologist.On May 26, 1870, Verdi indicated in a letter to Du Loclethat he had read "theEgyptian outline," that itwas welldone, and that "it offers a splendid mise-en-sce'ne."Henotes also that the work shows "avery expert hand in it,one accustomed towriting and onewho knows the theatre

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very well." By early June he began work on Aida, immediately expressing his impatience toRicordi at how slowlythingswere progressing, even as he requested the servicesof Antonio Ghislanzoni as librettist. "This thing should bedone very fast," he says at this point. In the simple andintense and above all authentically "Egyptian" scenarioby Mariette, Verdi perceived a unitary intention, the imprint or traceof amasterly and expert will which inmusiche hoped tomatch. At a timewhen his career had provided him with far toomany disappointments, toomanyintentions, toomany unsatisfying collaborationswith impresarios, ticket-sellers, singers-the Paris premiere ofDonCarloswas a recent, still smarting instance-Verdi saw theopportunity to create awork whose every detail he couldsupervise, from beginning sketch to opening night. Inaddition he was to be supported in this enterprise byroyalty, and, indeed,Du Locle not only suggested that theviceroy desperately wanted the piece for himself, but thathe had helped Mariette in writing it. Thus Verdi couldassume that awealthy Oriental potentate togetherwith agenuinely brilliant and single-minded archaeologist hadcombined to provide him with an occasion to be as commanding and undistracted an artistic presence as possible.The story's alienating Egyptian provenance and settingseemed to have stimulated his sense of technicalmastery.S o far as I have been able to ascertain, and in contrast

with his fairly developed notions about Italy, Franceand Germany, Verdi felt absolutely nothing about modemEgypt, even though during those two years he worked onthe opera he kept getting assurances that he was doingsomething forEgypt on a national level.Draneht Bey (nePavlos Pavlidis), theCairo Opera manager, told him this,and Mariette who came to Paris to get costumes andscenery ready in the summer of 1870 (and was subsequently caught there during the Franco-PrussianWar)frequently remindedhim thatno expense was being sparedtomount a truly spectacular show. Verdi was intent ongetting words and music absolutely right, making certainthat the perfect "theatricalword" was found by Ghislanzoni, overseeing performance details with unflagging attention. In the immensely complicated negotiations for

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casting the firstAmneris, Verdi's contribution to the imbroglio earned him the title of "the world's foremostJesuit."Egypt's submissive or at least indifferent presencein his life allowed him to pursue his artistic intentions

with what appeared to be an uncompromising intensity.But I believe Verdi confused his complex and, in the

final analysis, collaborative capacity to bring to life apure,even distant operatic fable, with theRomantic ideal of anorganically integrated, seamlesswork of art, informedonlyby a single aesthetic intention. Thus an imperial notion ofthe artist dovetailed conveniently with an imperial notionof a non-European world whose claims on the Europeancomposer were either minimal or nonexistent. To Verdithe conjunction must have seemed to be eminently worthnursing along. Subject for years to the obtrusive vagariesof opera house personnel, he could now rule his domainunchallenged and, as he prepared the opera for perfor

mance in Cairo and a couple of months later (February1872) for its Italian premiere at La Scala, he was told byRicordi that "you will be the Moltke of La Scala." Sostrongwere the natural attractions of this role that at onepoint, in a letter to Ricordi, he explicitly connects hisaesthetic aims with Wagner's andmore significantlywiththe Bayreuth performances (as yet only a theoretical proposal) over which Wagner intended to have dominion.

The seating arrangement of the orchestra is of muchgreater importance than is commonly believed-for theblending of the instruments, or the sonority,and for theeffect. These small improvements will afterward open theway for other innovations, which will surely come oneday; among them, taking the spectators' boxes off thestage, bringing the curtain to the footlights; another,

making the orchestra invisible. This is not my idea butWagner's. It's excellent. It seems impossible that today we

tolerate the sight of shabby tails and white ties, for example, mixed with Egyptian, Assyrian and Druidic costumes, etc., etc., and, even more, almost in the middle ofthe floor, of seeing the tops of the harps, the necks of thedouble basses, and the baton of the conductor all up inthe air.

Verdi spoke here of a theatrical presentation removedfrom the customary interferencesof opera houses, removed[881



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and isolated in such a way as to impress the audiencewitha novel blend of authority and verisimilitude. The parallelsare evident between what Verdi had inmind and what,discussing historical writers likeWalter Scott and Byron,Steven Bann in The Clothing of Clio has called "the historical composition of place."The difference is thatVerdicould avail himself and indeed, for the first time in European opera, could bring into the opera house thehistoricalvision and academic authority of Egyptology, a scienceembodied at relatively close quarters forVerdi inAuguste

Mariette, whose French nationality and training are partof a crucial imperial genealogy. Verdi perhaps had noway of knowing much in detail about Mariette, but, as Inoted above, he was strongly enough impressed byMariette's initial scenario to recognize the qualified expert

whose competence could represent ancient Egypt with alegitimate credibility.he rather simple point to be made here is thatEgyp

1tology was Egyptology and not Egypt. AugusteMariette was almost literallymade possible by two important predecessors, both French, both imperial phenomena, both reconstructive and both presentational:these two were, one, the various archaeological volumesof Napoleon's Description de l'Egypte, and, two, Champollion's deciphering of hieroglyphics presented in 1822 inhis Lettre a'M. Dacier and in 1824 in his Pre'cisdu systenmehie'roglyphique. By presentational and reconstructive Imean a number of characteristics that seemed tailor-madefor Verdi: Napoleon's military expedition to Egypt wasmotivated by a desire to capture Egypt, to threaten theBritish, to demonstrate French power; but Napoleon andhis academic experts in the expedition were there also toput Egypt before Europe, in a sense to stage its antiquity,itswealth of associations, cultural importance and uniqueaura for aEuropean audience. For themost part this couldnot be done without an aesthetic (aswell as) political intention.What Napoleon and his teams foundwas an Egyptwhose antique dimensions were screened by theMuslim,Arab and even Ottoman presence standing everywherebetween the French and ancient Egypt. How then to getto that other, older and more prestigious part?

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Here began the particularly French aspect of Egyptology, which continued in the work of Champollion andMariette. Egypt had to be reconstructed in models ordrawings whose scale, projective grandeur and exoticdistance were unprecedented. The reproductions of theDe'scription therefore are not descriptions but ascriptions.First the temples and palaces had to be reproduced in anorientation and perspective staging the actuality of ancientEgypt as reflected through the imperial eye; then-sinceall of themwere empty or lifeless-they had to bemade tospeak, and hence the efficacy of Champollion's decipherment; then, finally, they could be dislodged from theircontext in order tobe transported to Europe foruse there.This, aswe shall see, was Mariette's contribution.This is a continuous process, roughly from 1798 untilthe 1860s, and it is French because, unlike England, whichhad India, andGermany, which had the organized learning thatwent with Persia and India,France had this ratherimaginative and entelprising field inwhich, as RaymondSchwab says in The Oriental Renaissance, the Frenchscholars "fromRouge toMariette at the end of the line[started by Champollion's work] . . .were . . . explorerswith isolated careers who learned everything on theirown." The Napoleonic savants were also explorers whohad learned everything on their own, since there was nobody of organized knowledge about Egypt on which theycould draw. Champollion andMariette were likewise eccentrics and autodidacts. The meaning of this in the ideological terms of Egypt's presentation in French archaeology is that Egypt could be described "as the first andessential oriental influence on theWest," which Schwabquite rightly regards as false since it ignoresOrientalistwork done by European scholars in other parts of theancient world. In any event, Schwab says,

Writing in theRevue des Deux-Mondes inJune1868 [justat the point that Draneht, Khedive Ismail and Mariettebegan to conceive of what was to become Aida] LudovicVitet hailed "the unparalleled discoveries" of the orientalists over the preceding fifty years. He even spoke of "thearcheological revolution for which the Orient is the theatre," but calmly asserted that "the movement started

with Champollion and everything began because of him.

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He is the point of departure for all these discoveries."Vitet's own progression following the one already established in the public mind, he then passed on to the Assyrian monuments and finally to a few words on the Vedas.

Vitet did not linger. Clearly, after Napoleon's expeditionto Egypt, the monuments there and the scholarly missions to Egyptian sites had already spoken to everyone.India never revived except on paper.

Auguste Mariette's career is significant forAida thereforein all sorts of interesting ways. Although there has beensome dispute about his exact role in theAida libretto,hisintervention has been vindicated definitively by JeanHumbert as the important inaugurating one for the opera.Immediately behind the librettowas his role as principaldesigner of antiquities at the Egyptian pavilion in theParis International Exhibition of 1867. In the cataloguehe wrote, Mariette rather strenuously stressed the reconstructive aspects of what was exhibited, leaving littledoubt in anyone'smind that he, Mariette, had broughtEgypt to Europe, as itwere, for the first time.He coulddo so because of his spectacular archaeological successesat some thirty-five sites, including those at Gizeh, Sakkarah,Edfu and Thebes where, inBrian Fagan's apt words,he "excavatedwith complete abandon." In addition,Mariettewas engaged regularly in both excavating and emptying sites, so that as European museums (especially theLouvre) grew in Egyptian treasure, the actual tombs inEgypt were rather cynically displayed as empty byMariette, who apparently kept a bland composure in his explanations to "disappointed Egyptian officials."

Mariette was employed by the Khedive and in his service encountered Ferdinand de Lesseps, theCanal's architect.We do know that the two collaborated in variousrestorative and curatorial schemes, but I am convincedthat both men had a similar vision-perhaps going backto earlier Saint-Simonian,Masonic and theosophic European ideas about Egypt-out of which they spun theirquite extraordinary schemes, whose effectiveness, it is important to note, was increased by the alliance in each ofthem between personal will, a penchant for theatricality,and scientific dispatch.Mariette's libretto led to his design for costumes and

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sets, and this in turn led through his experiences as anarchaeologist back to the remarkably prophetic scenicdesigns of theDescription. If we look at a series of themost striking pages of theDescription we will directly bestruck by how they seem to beseech some very grandactions or personages to fill them, and how their emptinessand scale look like opera sets waiting to be populated. Inshort, their implied European context is a theaterof powerand knowledge, whereas their actual Egyptian setting hassimply dropped away.

p he temple at Phylae as rendered in the Description(and not a supposed original atMemphis) was inMariette's mind as he designed the first scene inAida and

although it is unlikely thatVerdi saw these very prints, hedid see reproduced versions of them that circulated inEurope, the better to be able to house the loudmilitarymusic that occurs so frequently in Aida's first two acts.Similarly, it is also likely that Mariette's notions aboutcostumes came from illustrations in theD4scription, whichhe adapted for the opera: the results can be readily compared, and can also be shown to be fairly different. Thedifference seems to be thatMariette transmuted the pharaonic originals into a rough modern equivalent, that is,into what prehistoric Egyptians would look like in 1870.Faces, moustaches and beards in theAida models are thegiveaways.

The result was an Orientalized Egypt, which quite onhis own Verdi had also arrived at in themusic. There area few well-known examples,most of which occur in thesecond act, and which seem to have borne most of theweight of Verdi's Oriental imagination: the chant of thepriestess, and a little later the ritual dance.We know thatVerdi was most concernedwith the accuracy of this scenesince it required themost authentication and caused himto ask themost detailed historical questions. A documentsent by Ricordi toVerdi in the summer of 1870 contains alot of material on ancient Egypt, of which the most detailed sort concerned consecrations, priestly rites, and someother information about ancient Egyptian religion.Verdiused very little of itbut the sources are indicative of a generalizedEuropean awareness of theOrient as derived from

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Volney and Creuzer, towhich was added themore recentarchaeologicalwork of Champollion. All of this, however,concerns priests: no women arementioned.

Verdi does two things to thismaterial. He converts someof the priests into priestesses, thus following conventionalEuropean practice on the centrality of Oriental women toany exotic practice: the functional equivalent of his priestesses are in fact dancing girls, slaves, concubines andbathing harem beauties fairly prevalent inmid-nineteenthcentury European Orientalist art. Some of this is carriedover into the scene inside Amneris's chamber in the nextact, inwhich sensuality and cruelty are inevitably associated (for example, in the dance ofMoorish slaves). Theother thingVerdi does is to convert the generalOrientalistcliche of life at court into a more directly allusive barbagainst themale priesthood. Ramfis, theHigh Priest, is acreature informed both by Verdi's Risorgimento anticlericalism and his ideas about thedespoticOriental potentate,aman who will exact vengeance out of sheer bloodthirstyzeal well covered in legalism and scripturalprecedent.

As for the modally exotic music in this scene, we alsoknow from his letters thatVerdi had consulted the workof Frangois-Josephe Fetis, a Belgian musicologist whoseems to have irritated and fascinated Verdi in equalmeasure. Fetis had been the firstEuropean to attempt astudy of non-European music as a separate part of thegeneral history of music. His Resume philosophique del'histoirede lamusique is about non-Western music, andhis Histoire gene'ralede lamusique depuis bes temps anciens d nos jours carried the project further, emphasizingthe unique particularity of exotic music, its integral identity, although interestingly he allowed as how the onlyinfluences of this music occurred between northwesternIslamic and Spanish music of themedieval period on theone hand, and Europe on the other. F6tis seems to haveknown E. W. Lane's work on nineteenth-century Egypt,as well as the two volumes on Egyptian music in theDescription.

The upshot of Fetis's value forVerdi was that he couldread examples of "Oriental"music-whose sign was aflattening of the hypertonic-and see instances of Orientalinstruments (which in some cases corresponded to repre

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sentation in the De'scription). These instrumentswereharps, flutes and the by now well-known case of the ceremonial trumpet,which Verdi went to a great deal of somewhat comic effort tohave built in Italy.

Lastly,Verdi andMariette collaborated imaginativelyin my opinion, most successfully-in creating the quite

wonderful atmospherics of Act III, the so-called Nilescene.Here too an idealized representation in theDe'scription was a probable model forMariette, whereas Verdiheightened his conception of an antique Orient by usingless literal and more suggestive means. The result is asuperb tonal picture with a permeable outline that cansustain the quiet scene-painting of the act's opening andthen open out to its turbulent and conflicted climax.Mariette's sketch for the setting of this magnificent scene islike a synthesis of his Egypt: "The set represents a gardenof the palace. At the left, the oblique favade of a pavilion-or tent. At the back of the stage flows the Nile. On thehorizon themountains of the Libyan chain, vividly illuminated by the setting sun. Statues, palms, tropical shrubs."No wonder then that, likeVerdi, he saw himself as a creator: "Aida,"he said in a letter to the patient and everresourcefulDraneht (July 19, 1871), "is in effect a product of my work. I am the one who convinced theViceroyto order its presentation; Aida, in aword, is a creation ofmy brain."

IIL have so far spoken ofAida as an opera that incorporatesand fuses material about Egypt into a form that both

Verdi andMariette could claim with justification to be oftheirmaking. Yet I have also been suggesting that theworksuffers-or is at least peculiar-because of the selectivityand emphases of what is included and by implication of

what is excluded. Verdi must have had opportunities towonder what modern Egypt thought of his work, whatindividual listeners responded to inhismusic, what wouldbecome of hiswork after theAida premiere. Little of thisfound itsway into the record, except a few ill-temperedletters rebuking European critics invited to the premierefor the unwelcome publicity they gave him. In his letterto the critic Filippi we already begin to get a sense of

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thatVerdi had to the politics of theRisorginwnto appearsinAida asmilitary success entailing personal failure or, asit can also be described, as political triumph rendered inthe ambivalent tones of human impasse, in short, of Realpolitik. Verdi seems to have imagined the positive attributes of patria as ending up in the funereal tones of terraaddio, and certainly the divided stage in Act IV-with apossible source in theDe'scription-powerfully impressedon his mind the discordia concors of Amneris's unrequitedpassion and Aida's and Radames's blissful death.Aida's airlessness and immobility is relieved only byballets and triumphal parades, but even those communicate a feeling of undermined display. The dance of consecration in Act I leads to Radames's demise in Acts IIIand IV; the dance of theMoorish slaves inAct II, Scene I,is after all a dance of slaves,who entertain Amneris as she

malevolently plays with Aida, her slave rival.As for thereally famous part of Act II, Scene II, here we have perhaps the core ofAida's special, not to say egregious appealto audiences and directors alike,who take the scene as anopportunity to do more or less anything so long as it isexcessive and full of display. This in factmay not be farfromVerdi's intention.

Take as threemodern examples the following:Aida in Cincinnati (March 1986). A press release fromthe CincinnatiOpera announces that for its performanceof Aida this season the following animals would take partin the Triumphal scene: 1 aardvark, 1 donkey, 1 elephant,1 boa constrictor, 1 peacock, 1 toucan, 1 red-tail hawk, 1

white tiger, 1 Siberian lynx, 1 cockatoo, and 1 cheetahtotal 11; and that the body count for the production willtotal 251, being made up of 8 principals, 117 chorus (40regularchorus,77 extras), 24 ballet, 101 supernumeraries(including12 zookeepers), and 11 animals.OperaMagazine.

This isAida as amore or lessuntreated, partly comic outpouring of opulence, a feat played and replayed withmatchless vulgarity at the Baths of Caracalla. In contrastthere isWieland Wagner's Act II, Scene II, parade ofEthiopian prisoners carrying totems,masks, ritual objects

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as elements of an ethnographic exhibition presented directly to the audience. This "was the transference of thewhole setting of thework from theEgypt of the Pharoahsto the darkerAfrica of a prehistoric age":

Whlat I was trying to do, in regard to the scenery, was togive Aida the colourful fragrance that is in it-derivingit not from an Egyptian museum, but from the atmosphere inherent in the work itself. I wanted to get awayfrom false Egyptian artiness and false operatic monumentality, from Hollywoodish historical painting, and returnto arcnlaic-w' ich is to say in terms of Egyptology-topre-dynastic times.

NVagner'semphasis is on the difference between "our"world anid "theirs," surely something that Verdi emphasized too, with hiis recognition that the opera was firstcomposed and designed for aplace thatwas decidedly notParis,Milan orVienna. And this recognition, interestinglyenough, brings us to Aida inMexico, 1952, where it is theleading singer Maria Callas who outperforms the wholeensemble by ending up on a high E-flat, one octave abovethe note written by Verdi.

In all three examples there seems to be an effortmade toexploit thisone opening in the wvorkhatVerdi allowed, anaperture throughwhich he seemed to be letting in anoutside world otherwise banned from entry. His terms,though, are astrinogent:come in as exotica or as captives,he says, stay awhile and then leave me to my business.

And to shore up his territory he resortsmusically to devices he hardly ever used before, all of them designed tosignal the audience that a musical master, steeped in thelearned traditional techniques scorned by his bel cantocontemporaries, was at work. On the twentieth of February, 1871, he wrote a correspondent, Giuseppe Piroli,that "for the young composer, then, I would want verylong and rig,orous exercises in all branches of coulnterpoint. . . .No study of the moderns " This was in keepingwviththemortuary aspects of the opera he was writing(making themummies sing, he once said), which opens

with a piece of strict canon writing. Along with the martialinusic (a set number of which was later to become theKhedival Egyptian national anthem) dotting Aida's score,

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these learned passages strengthen the opera'smonumentality and-more to the point-its wall-like structure.Aida, in short, quite precisely recalls the enabling circumstances of its commission and composition and, likean echo to an original sound, conforms to aspects of thecontemporary context it appears so determinedly to exclude. Studied as a highly specialized form of aestheticmemory then,Aida embodies, as itwas intended to do, theauthority of Europe's vision of Egypt at a particularmoment in its nineteenth-century history, a history forwhich Cairo in the years 1869-71 was an extraordinarilysuitable site. My contention quite simply is that a fullappreciation of Aida will reveal aweb of affiliations, connections, decisions and collaborations which, paradoxically, can be read negatively as leaving only remindersin the opera's text, visual and musical presentation, anditsproduction.( onsider the story-an Egyptian army defeats anEthi'Aopian force,but theyoung Egyptian hero of the campaign is impugned as a traitor, is sentenced to death, anddies by asphyxiation. This episode of antiquarian interAfrican rivalry acquires considerable nineteenth-centuryresonance against the background of Anglo-Egyptian ri

valry in East Africa, from the 1840s till the 1860s. TheBritish regarded theEgyptian objectives there as a threatto their Red Sea and hence route-to-India hegemony;nevertheless, because the French and Italians also hadambitions in Somalia and Ethiopia, a prudent shift inBritish policy occurred, encouraging Ismail'smoves in EastAfrica as away of blocking Franco-Italian incursions.Bythe early 1870s the change was completed, and in anyevent in 1882 Britain occupied Egypt entirely. From theFrench point of view incorporated by Mariette, Aidadramatized the dangers of too successful an Egyptianpolicy of force in Ethiopia, especially since Ismail himself-as Ottoman viceroy-was interested in such venturesas a way of achieving more independence from Istanbul.There ismore than that inAida's simplicity and severity,particularly as so much about the opera, and the OperaHouse, which was built in a sense with Verdi expresslyinmind, concerns Ismail himself. There has been a fair

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amount of recent work done in the economic and politicalhistory of European involvement in Egypt during theeighty years after Napoleon's expedition. Much of thiswork concurs with early twentieth-century Egyptian nationalist historians (Sabry, Rafi, Ghorbal) that with theexception of the intransigentAbbas, all the viceregal heirswho comprisedMohammad All's dynasty, in a descendingorder of merit, involvedEgypt more andmore irreversiblyin what Roger Owen has called "theworld economy," aeuphemism for European financiers,merchant bankers,loan corporations and commercial adventures.... This ledineluctably to the British occupation of 1882 and just asineluctably to the reclamation of the Suez Canal by Gamal

Abdul Nasser in July 1956.By the 1860s and 1870s the features of the Egyptian

economy that stand out are as follows.A boom inEgyptiancotton sales at a timewhen theAmerican CivilWar closedthat supply to European mills accelerated distortions inthe local economy, so that by the 1870s, according toOwen, "the entire Delta had been converted into an export sector devoted to the production, processing and export of two or three crops."This vulnerability was only asmall corner of a much larger,more depressing situation.Egypt was opened to schemes of every sort, some crazy,some (like the constructions of railroadsand roads) beneficial, all of them-especially theCanal-extremely costly.Development was financed by the growth of the publicdebt, the issuing of treasury bonds, printing of money, increasing the budgetary deficit; these measures added agood deal toEgypt's foreign debt, the cost of servicing itand the added penetration of the country by foreign investors and their local agents. The general cost for foreignloans seems to have been somewhere between 30 and 40percent of their face value.

During Ismail's reign (1863-1879), in addition to itsdeepening economic weakness and its dependency onEuropean finance,Egypt underwent an important seriesof antithetical developments. At the same time that thepopulation grew naturally, the size of foreign residentcommunities grew geometrically-90,000 by the early '80s(some estimates put the figure almost ten times higher).The concentration ofwealth in theviceregal family and its

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retainers in turnbred a pattern of almost feudal landholding and urban privilege, which in its turn hastened thedevelopment of a nationalistic consciousness of resistance.Public opinion seems to have opposed Ismail asmuch because he was perceived to be handing Egypt over to foreigners as because those foreigners for their part appearedto take Egypt's quiescence and weakness for granted.

Thus it was noted, says the Egyptian historianM. Sabrywith anger, thatwhen, at the Canal's opening, NapoleonIIImade his speech, he mentioned France and itsCanalbut never Egypt. Moreover Ismail was publicly attackedby pro-Ottoman journalists for the folly of his exorbitantly expensive European trips (which are chronicledin almost sickening detail in volume two of GeorgesDouin's Histoire du Regne du Khedive Ismail), his pretense of independence from the Porte, his overtaxing ofhis subjects, his lavish invitations toEuropean celebritiesfor the Canal opening. The more Khedive Ismail wishedto appear independent themore his effrontery cost Egypt,the more the Ottomans resented his shows of independence, and themore his European creditors resolved tokeep a closer hand on him. But, as David Landes haswritten in Bankers and Pashas, "ambitionand imaginationstartled his listeners. In the hot, straitened summer of1864, hewas thinkinignot only of canals and railroads,butof Paris-on-the-Nile and of Ismail, Emperor of Africa.Cairo would have itsgrands boulevards, Bourse, theatres,opera; Egypt would have a large army, a powerful fleet.

Why? asked the French consul.He might also have asked,How?"CCHow" was to proceed with the renovation of Cairo,which required the employment ofmany Europeans (among themDraneht) and the development of a newclass of urban dwellers whose tastes and requirementsportended the expansion of a localmarket geared to expensive imported goods. As Owen says, "where foreignimportswere important . . .was in catering to the completely different consumption pattern of a large foreignpopulation and those among the localEgyptian landowners and officialswho had begun to live inEuropean typesof houses in the Europeanized section of Cairo and Alex

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andria where almost everything of importancewas purchased from abroad-even building materials." And, wemight add, operas, composers, singers, conductors, setsand costumes. An important added benefit to suchprojectswas to convince foreign creditors with visible evidencethat theirmoney was being put to good use.

Unlike Alexandria, however, Cairo was an Arab andIslamic city, even in Ismail's heyday. Aside from the ro

mance of the Giza sites, Cairo's past did not communicateeasily or well with Europe; here were no Hellenistic orLevantine associations, no gentle sea breezes, no bustlingMediterranean port life. Cairo's massive centrality toAfrica, to Islam, to the Arab and Ottoman worlds seemedlike an intransigent barrier to European investors, andthis fact surely prompted Ismail to go about the city's

modernization, which was tomake itmore accessible andattractive to European investors. This he did essentiallyby dividing Cairo. I can do no better here than to quotefrom the best twentieth-century account of Cairo, whichis written by the American urban historian Janet AbuLughod in her Cairo: One Thousand Years of the CityVictorious:

Thus by the end of the nineteenth century Cairo consisted of twodistinct physical communities,divided onefrom the other by barriersmuch broader than the littlesingle street thatmarked theirborders.The discontinuitybetween Egypt's past and future, which appeared as asmall crack in the early nineteenth century, bad widenedinto a gaping fissure by the end of that century. The city'sphysical duality was but a manifestation of the culturalcleavage.

To the east lay the native city, still essentially preindustrial in technology, social structure, and way of life;to the west lay the "colonial" city with its steam-poweredtechniques, its faster pace and wheeled traffic, and its

European identification. To the east lay the labyrinthstreet pattem of yet unpaved harat and durub, althoughby then the gates had been dismantled and two newthoroughfares pierced the shade; to the west were broadstraight streets of macadam flanked by wide walks andsetbacks, militantly crossing one another at rigid rightangles or converging here and there in a rondpoint or

maydan. The quarters of the eastern city were still de

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pendent upon itinerantwater peddlars,although residentsin the western city had their water delivered through aconvenientnetwork of conduits connectedwith the steampumping station near the river. Eastern quarterswereplunged into darkness at nightfall, while gaslights illuminated the thoroughfares o thewest. Neither parksnorstreet trees relieved the sand and mud tones of the medieval city; yet the city to the west was elaborately adornedwith French formal gardens, strips of decorative flowerbeds, or artificially shaped trees. One entered the old bycaravan and traversed it on foot or animal-back; one entered the new by railroad and proceeded via horse-drawnvictoria. In short, on all critical points the two cities, despite their physical contiguity,were miles apart sociallyand centuries apart technologically.The Opera House built by Ismail forVerdi sat right atthe center of the north-south axis, in themiddle of a spa

cious square, facing the European city which stretchedwestward to thebanks of theNile. To thenorth therewerethe railroad station, Shepheard's Hotel, the AzbakiyahGardens forwhich, Abu-Lughod adds, "Ismail importedthe French landscape architect whose work he admiredin the Bois de Boulogne and Champs de Mars and com

missioned him to redesign Azbakiyah as a ParcMonceau,complete with the free-form pool, grotto, bridges, andbelvederes which instituted the inevitable cliches of anineteenth century French garden."To the south layAbdinPalace, redesigned by Ismail as his principal residence in1874. Behind the Opera House lay the teeming nativequarters ofMuski, Sayida Zeinab, 'Atabaal-Khadra,heldback by the Opera's imposing size and European authority.It is perhaps worth noting quickly that Cairo was alsobeginning to register the intellectual ferment of reform,some but by no mneans all of it under the influence ofthe European penetration which resulted, according toJacques Berque, in a confusion of production. Perhapsthe finest account of Ismailian Cairo is to be found in the

Khittah Tawfikiya of Ali PashaMobarak, the prodigiouslyenergetic minister of public works and education, an engineer, nationalist, modernizer, tireless historian, villageson of a humble faqir, aman as fascinated by theWest as

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EDWARD W. SAIDhe was compelled by the traditions and religion of theIslamic East. Ali does not mention the Opera, althoughhe speaks in detail of Ismail's lavish expenditure on hispalaces, on his gardens and zoos, on his displays for visiting European dignitaries. One has the impression thatCairo's changes in this period forceAli Pasha to record thecity's life in recognition that the dynamics of Cairo nowrequired a new, modern attention to detail, detail thatstimulated unprecedented discriminations and observations on the part of the native Cairene. Later Egyptian

writers will, likeAli, note the ferment of thisperiod, butwill also note (e.g. Anwar Abdel Malek) theOpera Houseand Aida as antinomian symbols of the country's artisticlife and its imperialist subjugation. In 1971 the OperaHouse burned, its wooden structure providing no resistance to the flames; itwas never rebuilt, although its sitewas firstoccupied by a parking lot, later (and until today)by amultistoried parking structure.C learlywe should conclude that Cairo could not longI sustainAida as an operawritten for an occasion anda place it seemed to outlive, even as it triumphed onWestern stages formany decades. Aida's Egyptian identity waspart of the city's European fa,ade, its implicity and rigorinscribed on those imaginarywalls dividing the colonialcity's native from its imperialist quarters. Aida's is an aesthetic of separation, forwe cannot see in Aida quite thecongruence between it and Cairo that Keats saw in thefrieze of the Grecian urn on the one hand, which corresponded, on the other, with the town and citadel "emptiedof this folk, thispious morn." Aida, for Egypt, was an imperial article de luxepurchased by credit for a tiny clientelewhose entertainment was incidental to their real purposes inCairo. Verdi saw in it amonument to his separateart; Ismail andMariette, for diverse purposes, lavished onthe work's preparation their surplus energy and restlesswill.

Despite its shortcomings,Aida can be enjoyed and interpreted as a species of rigid curatorial art,whose rigorand unbending frame recall,with a relentlesslymortuarylogic, a precise historicalmoment and a specifically datedaesthetic form, the imperial spectacle designed to alienate

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and impress.This of course is not exactlyAida's positionin the cultural repertory today.Certainly it is the case thatmany of the great aesthetic objects of empire are remembered and admired without the baggage of dominationthat they carried through the process from gestation toproduction. Yet the empire remains, in inflection andtraces, to be read, seen and heard. By not taking accountof the imperialist heritage that is inscribed inworks likeAida we reduce them to caricatures, elaborate ones perhaps, but caricatures nonetheless.

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Documents

Edward Said- The Imperial Spectacle