Edward Said - The Imperial Spectacle

Ben Sonnenberg
The Imperial Spectacle Author(s): Edward W. Said Source: Grand Street, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 1987), pp. 82-104 Published by: Ben Sonnenberg Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25006961 . Accessed: 21/12/2013 16:04
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THE IMPERIAL SPECTACLE Edward W. Said
idameans Grand Opera of a uniquely high nineteenth century type. It has survived for over a century as both an immensely popular work and one forwhich mu sicians, critics and musicologists have a healthy respect. Yet Aida's grandeur and eminence-evident to all with eyes to see and ears to hear-are surprisingly complex matters. They have engendered all sorts of theories,most of which connect Aida to its historical and cultural mo ment in the West. InOpera: The Extravagant Art, Herbert Lindenberger puts the imaginative theory thatAida, Boris Gudonov and Die Gotterdammerung, all operas of 1870, are tied respectively to archaeology, nationalist histori ography and philology. Wieland Wagner, who produced Aida at Berlin in 1962, sees in thework a prefiguration of his grandfather's Tristan with an irreducible conflict be tween Ethos and Bios at its core. In his scheme, Amneris is the central figure dominated by a "Riesenphallus" which hangs over her like a mighty club; according to Opera, "Aidawas mostly seen prostrate or cowering in the back ground." Wieland Wagner treats the opera as "anAfrican mys tery,"but there has been no shortage of directors forwhom as spectacle, display and melodrama Aida is unparalleled in the Italian repertory. Still, even ifwe overlook the vul garity to which the second scene of Act II often lends itself, there is something to the fact thatAida climaxes the development in style and vision that brought Verdi from Nabucco and I Lombardi in the 1840s through Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata, Simon Boccanegra and Un Ballo in Maschera in the 1850s, to the problematic Forza del Des tino and Don Carlos in the 1860s. During three decades Verdi had become the preeminent Italian composer of his day, his career accompanying and seeming to comment on the Risorgimento. Aida was the last public and political opera he wrote before he turned to the essentially domes tic, albeit intense, pair of operas with which he ended his [82 ]
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life as a composer, Otello and Falstaff. All the major Verdi scholars-Julian Budden, Frank Walker, William Weaver, Andrew Porter, JosephWechsberg-note that Aida not only reuses traditional musical forms like the cabaletta and concertato but adds to them a new chromat icism, subtlety of orchestration and dramatic streamlining rarely found in the works of other composers of the time exceptWagner. Joseph Kenman's demurral in Opera and Drama is interesting at thispoint forhow much it acknowl edges about Aida's singularity:
The result in Aida is, in my opinion, complexity an almost constant of the musical ex
disparity between the particular glib simplicity of the

libretto and the alarming
pression-for of courseVerdi's techniquehad never been

so rich. Only Amneris comes to life; Aida is thoroughly confused; Rhadames seems like a throwback, if not to Metastasio, at least to Rossini. It goes without saying that some pages, numbers, and scenes are beyond praise, rea son enough for this opera's great popularity. Nevertheless, there is a curious falsity about Aida which is quite unlike
Verdi, and which recallsMeyerbeer more disturbingly

than the grand-opera apparatus tions, and brass bands. of triumphs, consecra
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 precisely because it involved and drew in its audience directly. Not only did his music-dramas portray often incorrigibly red blooded heroes and heroines in the full splendor of con tests (often incestuous) over power, fame and honor,but as Paul Robinson has convincingly argued in Opera and Ideas-Verdi set out almost always towrite political op eras, replete with rhetorical stridency,martial music and unbuttoned emotions. "Perhaps themost obvious compo nent ofVerdi's rhetorical style-to put thematter bluntly is sheer loudness.He is,with Beethoven, among the nois iest of all major composers. . . Like a political orator, Verdi can't remain still for long. Drop the needle at ran dom on a recording of aVerdi opera, and you will usually be rewardedwith a substantial racket."Robinson goes on to say, however, that Verdi's splendid noisiness is both
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effective and harnessed to such occasions as "parades, ral lies and speeches," which in the context of the Risorgi mento were seen as Verdi's amplifications of real life occurrences. Aida is certainly no exception. Early in Act One, for example, there is a tremendous ensemble piece, "Su del nilo," involving several soloists and a massed chorus. It is now a commonplace that tunes fromVerdi's earlier operas (Nabucco, I Lombardi and Attila in par ticular) stimulated his audiences to frenzies of participa tion, so immediate was the impact of Verdi's operas, the clarity of their contemporary reference and the sheer skill at whipping everyone into enormously urgent, "big" the atrical climaxes. However, Verdi's earlier operas, despite often exotic or outre subject matter, seemed always addressed to Italy and Italians, whereas Aida was concerned with only the Egypt and Egyptians of early antiquity, a farmore remote phenomenon thanVerdi had ever treated. Not thatAida wants 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 of everything an opera house can collect and parade. Rather the opera is self-limiting and held-in in quite an atypical way, and there seems to be no record of any participatory enthusiasm connected with it, even though at theMetro politan Opera, for instance, it has been performed more times than any other work. Verdi's other works had occa sionally dealt with remote or alien cultures, a fact that didn't inhibit his audiences from identifying with them anyway. And like his earlier operas, Aida is about a tenor and a sopranowho want tomake love but are prevented by a baritone and a mezzo. What are the differences in Aida?Why has the habitual Verdian mix in his "Egyptian" opera produced so unusual a blend of masterly compe tence and affective neutrality? s a way of providing an answer we should recognize that the circumstances of Aida's firstproduction-the circumstances inwhich the opera came to be written-are unique inVerdi's career.Moreover the political and cer tainly the cultural setting inwhich Verdi worked between early 1870 and late 1871 included not only Italy but im A
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perial Europe and viceregal Egypt, an Egypt technically within the Ottoman Empire but gradually being estab lished as a dependent and subsidiary part of Europe. I want to try to show how Aida's peculiarities-its subject matter and setting, itsmonumental grandeur, its strangely unaffecting visual and musical effects, its overdeveloped music and constricted domestic situation, its eccentric place inVerdi's career-do require a sort of jigsaw puzzle interpretation, an interpretation assimilable neither to the standard view of Italian opera nor more generally to pre vailing views of the great masterpieces of nineteenth century European civilization. Aida, like the opera form itself, is a hybrid, radically impurework that belongs equally to the history of culture and to the historical experience of overseas European domination. Itmust therefore be regarded as a composite work, built around disparities and discrepancies which have been either ignored or unexplored, but which can be recalled and mapped descriptively not just because they are interesting in and of themselves but because theymake more 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 that paradoxically cannot be overlooked but has systematically been overlooked, mostly because the embarrassment of Aida is finally that it is a work not somuch about but of imperial domination, that is, that stretches across Euro pean boundaries intoAfrica and the Orient. If one reads or interpretsAida from that perspective, with some con sciousness of the fact that the opera was written for and firstproduced in a country with which Verdi had no con nection, a number of thingswill stand out. The first thing to be mentioned is that Verdi himself says something to this effect in the letter that inaugurates his connection, as yet almost completely latent, with an Egyptian opera.Writing Camille Du Locle, a close friend who had just returned from a voyage en Orient, Verdi says on February 19, 1868: "Whenwe see each other, you must describe all the events of your voyage, the wonders you have seen, and the beauty and ugliness of a countrywhich
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once had greatness and a civilization I had never been able to admire." On November 1, 1869, the inauguration of the Cairo Opera House was a brilliant event during celebrations for the opening of the Suez Canal; Rigoletto was the opera performed. A few weeks before, Verdi had turned down Khedive Ismail's request towrite a hymn for the occasion, and inDecember 1869 he wrote Du Locle a long letter on the dangers of "patchwork"operas: "Iwant art in any of
itsmanifestations, not the arrangement, the artifice, and

the system that you prefer," he told Du Locle, arguing that for his part he wanted "unified" works, inwhich "the idea isONE, and everything must converge to form this ONE." Although Verdi's assertionswere made in response toDu Locle's suggestion that he should write an opera for Paris, they turn up enough times in the course of his work on Aida to become an important theme. On January 5, 1871, he writes Nicola De Giosa that "today operas are written with somany different dramatic and musical in tentions that it is almost impossible to interpret them; and it 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 the work under the direction of the author himself." To Tito Ricordi he writes on April 11, 1871, that he permitted "only one creator" for his work, himself; "I don't concede the right to 'create' to singers and conductors," he continues, "be cause, as I said before, it is a principle that leads into the abyss." Why then did Verdi finally accept Khedive Ismail's offer towrite a special opera for Cairo? Money certainly was a reason: he was given 150,000 francs in gold. He was also flattered, since after all he was choice number one, ranked ahead of Wagner and Gounod. Probably just as important was the story offered him by Du Locle, who had received a sketch for a possible operatic treatment fromAuguste Mariette, a renowned French Egyptologist.
On May 26, 1870, Verdi indicated in a letter to Du Locle
that he had read "the Egyptian outline," that it was well done, and that "it offers a splendid mise-en-sce'ne." He notes also that the work shows "a very expert hand in it, one accustomed towriting and one who knows the theatre
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very well." By early June he began work on Aida, imme diately expressing his impatience toRicordi at how slowly thingswere progressing, even as he requested the services of Antonio Ghislanzoni as librettist. "This thing should be done very fast," he says at this point. In the simple and intense and above all authentically "Egyptian" scenario by Mariette, Verdi perceived a unitary intention, the im print or trace of amasterly and expertwill which inmusic he hoped tomatch. At a time when his career had pro vided him with far toomany disappointments, toomany intentions, toomany unsatisfying collaborations with im presarios, ticket-sellers, singers-the Paris premiere ofDon Carlos was a recent, still smarting instance-Verdi saw the opportunity to create a work whose every detail he could supervise, from beginning sketch to opening night. In addition he was to be supported in this enterprise by royalty, and, indeed,Du Locle not only suggested that the viceroy desperately wanted the piece for himself, but that he had helped Mariette in writing it. Thus Verdi could assume that a wealthy Oriental potentate togetherwith a genuinely brilliant and single-minded archaeologist had combined to provide him with an occasion to be as com manding and undistracted an artistic presence as possible. The story's alienating Egyptian provenance and setting seemed 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, France and Germany, Verdi felt absolutely nothing aboutmodem Egypt, even though during those two years he worked on the opera he kept getting assurances that he was doing something forEgypt on a national level.Draneht Bey (ne Pavlos Pavlidis), the Cairo Opera manager, told him this,
and Mariette who came to Paris to get costumes and
scenery ready in the summer of 1870 (and was subse quently caught there during the Franco-PrussianWar) frequently reminded him thatno expense was being spared tomount a truly spectacular show. Verdi was intent on getting words and music absolutely right,making certain that the perfect "theatricalword" was found by Ghislan zoni, overseeing performance details with unflagging at tention. In the immensely complicated negotiations for
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casting the firstAmneris, Verdi's contribution to the im broglio earned him the title of "the world's foremost Jesuit."Egypt's submissive or at least indifferent presence in 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 a pure, even distant operatic fable, with the Romantic ideal of an organically integrated, seamlesswork of art, informed only by a single aesthetic intention. Thus an imperial notion of the artist dovetailed conveniently with an imperial notion of a non-European world whose claims on the European composer were either minimal or nonexistent. To Verdi the conjunctionmust have seemed to be eminently worth nursing along. Subject for years to the obtrusive vagaries of opera house personnel, he could now rule his domain unchallenged and, as he prepared the opera for perfor mance in Cairo and a couple of months later (February 1872) for its Italian premiere at La Scala, he was told by Ricordi that "you will be the Moltke of La Scala." So strongwere the natural attractions of this role that at one point, in a letter to Ricordi, he explicitly connects his aesthetic aims with Wagner's and more significantlywith the Bayreuth performances (as yet only a theoretical pro posal) over which Wagner intended to have dominion.
The seating arrangement of the orchestra is of much
greater importance than is commonlybelieved-for the blending of the instruments,for the sonority,and for the
effect. These small improvements will afterward open the way for other innovations, which will surely come one day; among them, taking the spectators' boxes off the stage, bringing the curtain to the footlights; another, making the orchestra invisible. This is not my idea but It's excellent. It seems impossible that today we Wagner's. tolerate the sight of shabby tails and white ties, for ex ample, mixed with Egyptian, Assyrian and Druidic cos tumes, etc., etc., and, even more, almost in the middle of the floor, of seeing the tops of the harps, the necks of the double basses, and the baton of the conductor all up in the air.
Verdi spoke here of a theatrical presentation removed from the customary interferences of opera houses, removed
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and isolated in such a way as to impress the audience with a novel blend of authority and verisimilitude. The parallels are 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 his torical composition of place." The difference is thatVerdi could avail himself and indeed, for the first time in Euro pean opera, could bring into the opera house the historical vision and academic authority of Egyptology, a science embodied at relatively close quarters forVerdi inAuguste Mariette, whose French nationality and training are part of a crucial imperial genealogy. Verdi perhaps had no way of knowing much in detail about Mariette, but, as I noted above, he was strongly enough impressed by Mari ette's initial scenario to recognize the qualified expert whose competence could represent ancient Egypt with a legitimate credibility. he rather simple point to be made here is that Egyp was Egyptology and not Egypt. Auguste 1tology Mariette was almost literally made possible by two im portant predecessors, both French, both imperial phe nomena, both reconstructive and both presentational: these two were, one, the various archaeological volumes of Napoleon's Description de l'Egypte, and, two, Cham pollion's deciphering of hieroglyphics presented in 1822 in his Lettre a' M. Dacier and in 1824 in his Pre'cisdu systenme hie'roglyphique. By presentational and reconstructive I mean a number of characteristics that seemed tailor-made for Verdi: Napoleon's military expedition to Egypt was motivated by a desire to capture Egypt, to threaten the British, to demonstrate French power; but Napoleon and his academic experts in the expedition were there also to put Egypt before Europe, in a sense to stage its antiquity, itswealth of associations, cultural importance and unique aura for a European audience. For themost part this could not be done without an aesthetic (aswell as) political in tention. What Napoleon and his teams foundwas an Egypt whose antique dimensions were screened by theMuslim, Arab and even Ottoman presence standing everywhere between the French and ancient Egypt. How then to get to that other, older and more prestigious part?
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Here began the particularly French aspect of Egyptol ogy, which continued in the work of Champollion and Mariette. Egypt had to be reconstructed in models or drawings whose scale, projective grandeur and exotic distance were unprecedented. The reproductions of the De'scription therefore are not descriptions but ascriptions. First the temples and palaces had to be reproduced in an orientation and perspective staging the actuality of ancient Egypt as reflected through the imperial eye; then-since all of themwere empty or lifeless-they had to be made to speak, and hence the efficacy of Champollion's decipher ment; then, finally, they could be dislodged from their context in order to be transported to Europe for use there. This, as we shall see, was Mariette's contribution. This is a continuous process, roughly from 1798 until the 1860s, and it isFrench because, unlike England, which had India, and Germany, which had the organized learn ing thatwent with Persia and India, France had this rather imaginative and entelprising field inwhich, as Raymond Schwab says in The Oriental Renaissance, the French scholars "from Rouge toMariette at the end of the line [started by Champollion's work] . . .were . . . explorers with isolated careers who learned everything on their own." The Napoleonic savants were also explorers who had learned everything on their own, since therewas no body of organized knowledge about Egypt on which they could draw. Champollion and Mariette were likewise ec centrics and autodidacts. The meaning of this in the ideo logical terms of Egypt's presentation in French archaeol ogy is that Egypt could be described "as the first and essential oriental influence on theWest," which Schwab quite rightly regards as false since it ignores Orientalist work done by European scholars in other parts of the ancient world. In any event, Schwab says, Writing in theRevue des Deux-Mondes in June1868 [just
at the point that Draneht, Khedive Ismail and Mariette began to conceive of what was to become Aida] Ludovic Vitet hailed "the unparalleled discoveries" of the oriental ists over the preceding fifty years. He even spoke of "the archeological revolution for which the Orient is the the started atre," but calmly asserted that "the movement 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 estab lished in the public mind, he then passed on to the Assyr ian monuments and finally to a few words on the Vedas. Vitet did not linger. Clearly, after Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, the monuments there and the scholarly mis sions to Egyptian sites had already spoken to everyone. India never revived except on paper.
Auguste Mariette's career is significant forAida therefore in all sorts of interesting ways. Although there has been some dispute about his exact role in theAida libretto, his intervention has been vindicated definitively by Jean Humbert as the important inaugurating one for the opera. Immediately behind the librettowas his role as principal designer of antiquities at the Egyptian pavilion in the Paris International Exhibition of 1867. In the catalogue he wrote, Mariette rather strenuously stressed the recon structive aspects of what was exhibited, leaving little doubt in anyone's mind that he, Mariette, had brought Egypt to Europe, as it were, for the first time. He could do so because of his spectacular archaeological successes at some thirty-five sites, including those at Gizeh, Sakka rah,Edfu and Thebes where, in Brian Fagan's apt words, he "excavatedwith complete abandon." In addition,Mari ette was engaged regularly in both excavating and empty ing sites, so that as European museums (especially the Louvre) grew in Egyptian treasure, the actual tombs in Egypt were rather cynically displayed as empty by Mari ette, who apparently kept a bland composure in his ex planations to "disappointed Egyptian officials." Mariette was employed by the Khedive and in his ser vice encountered Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Canal's archi tect.We do know that the two collaborated in various restorative and curatorial schemes, but I am convinced that both men had a similar vision-perhaps going back to earlier Saint-Simonian,Masonic and theosophic Euro pean ideas about Egypt-out of which they spun their quite extraordinary schemes, whose effectiveness, it is im portant to note, was increased by the alliance in each of them between personal will, a penchant for theatricality, and scientific dispatch. Mariette's libretto led to his design for costumes and [9.1]
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sets, and this in turn led through his experiences as an archaeologist back to the remarkably prophetic scenic designs of the Description. If we look at a series of the most striking pages of theDescription we will directly be struck by how they seem to beseech some very grand actions or personages to fill them, and how their emptiness and scale look like opera sets waiting to be populated. In short, their impliedEuropean context is a theater of power and knowledge, whereas their actual Egyptian setting has simply dropped away. p he temple at Phylae as rendered in the Description (and not a supposed original at Memphis) was in Mariette's mind as he designed the first scene inAida and although it is unlikely thatVerdi saw these very prints, he did see reproduced versions of them that circulated in Europe, the better to be able to house the loudmilitary music that occurs so frequently in Aida's first two acts. Similarly, it is also likely that Mariette's notions about costumes came from illustrations in theD4scription, which he adapted for the opera: the results can be readily com pared, and can also be shown to be fairly different. The difference seems to be that Mariette transmuted the phara onic 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 the giveaways. The result was an Orientalized Egypt, which quite on his own Verdi had also arrived at in themusic. There are a few well-known examples, most of which occur in the second act, and which seem to have borne most of the weight of Verdi's Oriental imagination: the chant of the priestess, and a little later the ritual dance.We know that Verdi was most concerned with the accuracy of this scene since it required themost authentication and caused him to ask themost detailed historical questions. A document sent by Ricordi toVerdi in the summer of 1870 contains a lot of material on ancient Egypt, of which the most de tailed sort concerned consecrations, priestly rites, and some other information about ancient Egyptian religion. Verdi used very little of itbut the sources are indicative of a gen eralized European awareness of theOrient as derived from
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Volney and Creuzer, towhich was added themore recent archaeological work of Champollion. All of this, however, concerns priests: no women arementioned. Verdi does two things to thismaterial. He converts some of the priests into priestesses, thus following conventional European practice on the centrality of Oriental women to any exotic practice: the functional equivalent of his priest esses are in fact dancing girls, slaves, concubines and bathing harem beauties fairly prevalent inmid-nineteenth century European Orientalist art. Some of this is carried over into the scene inside Amneris's chamber in the next act, inwhich sensuality and cruelty are inevitably associ ated (for example, in the dance of Moorish slaves). The other thingVerdi does is to convert the general Orientalist cliche of life at court into a more directly allusive barb against themale priesthood. Ramfis, the High Priest, is a creature informed both by Verdi's Risorgimento anticler icalism and his ideas about the despotic Oriental potentate, aman who will exact vengeance out of sheer bloodthirsty zeal well covered in legalism and scripturalprecedent. As for themodally exotic music in this scene, we also know from his letters that Verdi had consulted the work of Frangois-Josephe Fetis, a Belgian musicologist who seems to have irritated and fascinated Verdi in equal measure. Fetis had been the firstEuropean to attempt a study of non-European music as a separate part of the general history of music. His Resume philosophique de l'histoire de lamusique is about non-Western music, and his Histoire gene'rale de lamusique depuis bes temps an ciens d nos jours carried the project further, emphasizing the unique particularity of exotic music, its integral iden tity, although interestingly he allowed as how the only influences of this music occurred between northwestern Islamic and Spanish music of themedieval period on the one hand, and Europe on the other. F6tis seems to have known E. W. Lane's work on nineteenth-century Egypt, as well as the two volumes on Egyptian music in the Description. The upshot of Fetis's value forVerdi was that he could read examples of "Oriental"music-whose sign was a flattening of the hypertonic-and see instances of Oriental instruments (which in some cases corresponded to repre
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sentation in the De'scription). These instruments were harps, flutes and the by now well-known case of the cere monial trumpet,which Verdi went to a great deal of some what comic effort to have built in Italy. Lastly, Verdi andMariette collaborated imaginatively in my opinion, most successfully-in creating the quite wonderful atmospherics of Act III, the so-called Nile scene.Here too an idealized representation in theDe'scrip tion was a probable model forMariette, whereas Verdi heightened his conception of an antique Orient by using less literal and more suggestive means. The result is a superb tonal picture with a permeable outline that can sustain the quiet scene-painting of the act's opening and then open out to its turbulent and conflicted climax.Mar iette's sketch for the setting of thismagnificent scene is like a synthesis of his Egypt: "The set represents a garden of the palace. At the left, the oblique favade of a pavilion -or tent. At the back of the stage flows the Nile. On the horizon themountains of the Libyan chain, vividly illum inated by the setting sun. Statues, palms, tropical shrubs." No wonder then that, likeVerdi, he saw himself as a cre ator: "Aida,"he said in a letter to the patient and ever resourceful Draneht (July 19, 1871), "is in effect a prod uct of my work. I am the one who convinced theViceroy to order its presentation; Aida, in a word, is a creation of my brain." II L have so far spoken of Aida as an opera that incorporates and fuses material about Egypt into a form that both Verdi andMariette could claim with justification to be of theirmaking. Yet I have also been suggesting that thework suffers-or is at least peculiar-because of the selectivity and emphases of what is included and by implication of what is excluded. Verdi must have had opportunities to wonder what modern Egypt thought of his work, what individual listeners responded to in his music, what would become of his work after theAida premiere. Little of this found its way into the record, except a few ill-tempered letters rebuking European critics invited to the premiere for the unwelcome publicity they gave him. In his letter
to the critic Filippi we already begin to get a sense of
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Verdi's distance from the opera, a Verfremdungseffekt already written intoAida's scene and libretto:
. . .You in Cairo? This is the most powerful publicity for Aida one could imagine! It seems to me that in this way art is no longer art but a business, a game of pleasure, a hunt, something to be chased after, something which must be given if not success, at least notoriety at any cost! My reaction to this is one of disgust and humiliation! I always remember with joy my early days when, with almost no friends, without anyone to talk about me, without prep arations, without influence of any kind, I wvent before the public with my operas, ready to be blasted and quite happy if I could succeed in stirring up some favorable impression. Now, what pomposity for an opera!!!! Journal
ists, artists, choristers,conductors, instrumentalists, etc.,

etc. All of them must carry their stone to the edifice of publicity and thus fashion a framework of little trifles that add nothing to the worth of an opera; in fact they obscure the real value (if there is any). This is deplorable, pro
foundlydeplorable!!!!
I thank you for your courteous offers for Cairo, but I the day before yesterday everything wrote to Bottesini concerning Aida. For this opera I want only a good and, above all, an intelligent vocal and instrumental perfor As for the rest, a la grace de mance and mise-en-scene. Dieu; for so I began and so I wish to finish my career.... The protestations work of art, he here are an extension to be saying, and of his attitudes let's leave it at
about the opera's single intention: Aida is a self-sufficient

seems
that.But isn't there something else going on here too, some

sense on Verdi's cannot relate to, with for a place he part of an opera written a plot that ends in hopeless deadlock
and literal entombment? Verdi's awareness of Aida's incongruities appears else where. At one point he speaks ironically of adding Pales trina to the harmony of Egyptian music, and he seems also to have been quite conscious of the extent towhich ancient
Egypt was, in fact, not only of death, whose a dead ideology civilization of conquest but also a culture (as he
adapted it from Herodotus and Mariette) was directly connected to an ideology of the afterlife. As noted earlier, the rather somber, vestigial and disenchanted attachment
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thatVerdi had to the politics of the Risorginwnto appears inAida asmilitary success entailing personal failure or, as it can also be described, as political triumph rendered in the ambivalent tones of human impasse, in short, of Real politik. Verdi seems to have imagined the positive attri butes of patria as ending up in the funereal tones of terra addio, and certainly the divided stage inAct IV-with a possible source in theDe'scription-powerfully impressed on hismind the discordia concors of Amneris's unrequited passion and Aida's and Radames's blissful death. Aida's airlessness and immobility is relieved only by ballets and triumphal parades, but even those commun icate a feeling of undermined display. The dance of con secration in Act I leads to Radames's demise in Acts III and 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 the really famous part of Act II, Scene II, here we have per haps the core of Aida's special, not to say egregious appeal to audiences and directors alike, who take the scene as an opportunity to do more or less anything so long as it is excessive and full of display. This in fact may not be far fromVerdi's intention. Take
Aida
as threemodern examples the following:

in Cincinnati (March 1986). A press release from
theCincinnatiOpera announces that for its performance

of Aida this season the following animals would take part in 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 cheetah total 11; and that the body count for the production will total 251, being made up of 8 principals, 117 chorus (40
regularchorus,77 extras), 24 ballet, 101 supernumeraries (including 12 zoo keepers), and 11 animals. OperaMag azine. This isAida as amore or less untreated, partly comic out pouring of opulence, a feat played and replayed with matchless vulgarity at the Baths of Caracalla. In contrast there isWieland Wagner's Act II, Scene II, parade of Ethiopian prisoners carrying totems,masks, ritual objects
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as elements of an ethnographic exhibition presented di rectly to the audience. This "was the transference of the whole setting of thework from the Egypt of the Pharoahs to the darkerAfrica of a prehistoric age":
Whlat I was trying to do, in regard to the scenery, was to give Aida the colourful fragrance that is in it-deriving it not from an Egyptian museum, but from the atmo sphere inherent in the work itself. I wanted to get away from false Egyptian artiness and false operatic monumen historical painting, and return tality, from Hollywoodish to arcnlaic-w' ich is to say in terms of Egyptology-to
pre-dynastic times. NVagner's emphasis is on the difference between "our" world anid "theirs," surely something that Verdi empha sized too, with hiis recognition that the opera was first composed and designed for a place thatwas decidedly not Paris,Milan orVienna. And this recognition, interestingly enough, brings us toAida inMexico, 1952,where it is the leading singer Maria Callas who outperforms the whole ensemble by ending up on a high E-flat, one octave above the note written by Verdi. In all three examples there seems to be an effortmade to exploit this one opening in the wvork thatVerdi allowed, an aperture through lwhich he seemed to be letting in an outside 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 de vices he hardly ever used before, all of them designed to signal the audience that a musical master, steeped in the learned traditional techniques scorned by his bel canto contemporaries, was at work. On the twentieth of Feb ruary, 1871, he wrote a correspondent, Giuseppe Piroli, that "for the young composer, then, I would want very long and rig,orous exercises in all branches of coulnter point. . . .No study of themoderns!" This was in keeping wvith the mortuary aspects of the opera he was writing (making the mummies sing, he once said), which opens
with a piece of strict canon writing. Along with the martial
inusic (a set number of which was later to become the Khedival Egyptian national anthem) dotting Aida's score,
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these learned passages strengthen the opera's monumen tality and-more to the point-its wall-like structure. Aida, in short, quite precisely recalls the enabling cir cumstances of its commission and composition and, like an echo to an original sound, conforms to aspects of the contemporary context it appears so determinedly to ex clude. Studied as a highly specialized form of aesthetic memory then,Aida embodies, as itwas intended to do, the authority of Europe's vision of Egypt at a particular moment in its nineteenth-century history, a history for which Cairo in the years 1869-71 was an extraordinarily suitable site. My contention quite simply is that a full appreciation of Aida will reveal a web of affiliations, con nections, decisions and collaborations which, paradox ically, can be read negatively as leaving only reminders in the opera's text, visual and musical presentation, and its production. ( onsider the story-an Egyptian army defeats an Ethi 'Aopian force, but the young Egyptian hero of the cam paign is impugned as a traitor, is sentenced to death, and dies by asphyxiation. This episode of antiquarian inter African rivalry acquires considerable nineteenth-century resonance against the background of Anglo-Egyptian ri valry in East Africa, from the 1840s till the 1860s. The British regarded the Egyptian objectives there as a threat to their Red Sea and hence route-to-India hegemony; nevertheless, because the French and Italians also had ambitions in Somalia and Ethiopia, a prudent shift inBrit ish policy occurred, encouraging Ismail'smoves in East Africa as a way of blocking Franco-Italian incursions.By the early 1870s the change was completed, and in any event in 1882 Britain occupied Egypt entirely. From the French point of view incorporated by Mariette, Aida dramatized the dangers of too successful an Egyptian policy of force in Ethiopia, especially since Ismail him self-as Ottoman viceroy-was interested in such ventures as a way of achieving more independence from Istanbul. There ismore than that inAida's simplicity and severity, particularly as somuch about the opera, and the Opera House, which was built in a sense with Verdi expressly inmind, concerns Ismail himself. There has been a fair
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amount of recent work done in the economic and political history of European involvement in Egypt during the eighty years after Napoleon's expedition. Much of this work concurs with early twentieth-century Egyptian na tionalist historians (Sabry, Rafi, Ghorbal) that with the exception of the intransigentAbbas, all the viceregal heirs who comprisedMohammad All's dynasty, in a descending order ofmerit, involved Egypt more andmore irreversibly inwhat Roger Owen has called "the world economy," a euphemism for European financiers, merchant bankers, loan corporations and commercial adventures.... This led ineluctably to the British occupation of 1882 and just as ineluctably 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 inEgyptian cotton sales at a timewhen theAmerican CivilWar closed that supply to European mills accelerated distortions in the local economy, so that by the 1870s, according to Owen, "the entire Delta had been converted into an ex port sector devoted to the production, processing and ex port of two or three crops."This vulnerability was only a small corner of a much larger,more depressing situation. Egypt was opened to schemes of every sort, some crazy, some (like the constructions of railroads and roads) benefi cial, all of them-especially the Canal-extremely costly. Development was financed by the growth of the public debt, the issuing of treasurybonds, printing of money, in creasing the budgetary deficit; these measures added a good deal to Egypt's foreign debt, the cost of servicing it and the added penetration of the country by foreign in vestors and their local agents. The general cost for foreign loans seems to have been somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of their face value. During Ismail's reign (1863-1879), in addition to its deepening economic weakness and its dependency on European finance, Egypt underwent an important series of antithetical developments. At the same time that the population grew naturally, the size of foreign resident communities grew geometrically-90,000 by the early '80s (some estimates put the figure almost ten times higher). The concentration of wealth in the viceregal family and its
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retainers in turnbred a pattern of almost feudal landhold ing and urban privilege, which in its turn hastened the development of a nationalistic consciousness of resistance. Public opinion seems to have opposed Ismail asmuch be cause he was perceived to be handing Egypt over to for eigners as because those foreigners for their part appeared to take Egypt's quiescence and weakness for granted. Thus itwas noted, says the Egyptian historian M. Sabry with anger, thatwhen, at the Canal's opening, Napoleon III made his speech, he mentioned France and its Canal but never Egypt. Moreover Ismail was publicly attacked by pro-Ottoman journalists for the folly of his exorbi tantly expensive European trips (which are chronicled in almost sickening detail in volume two of Georges Douin's Histoire du Regne du Khedive Ismail), his pre tense of independence from the Porte, his overtaxing of his subjects, his lavish invitations to European celebrities for the Canal opening. The more Khedive Ismail wished to appear independent themore his effrontery cost Egypt, the more the Ottomans resented his shows of indepen dence, and the more his European creditors resolved to keep a closer hand on him. But, as David Landes has written inBankers and Pashas, "ambition and imagination startled his listeners. In the hot, straitened summer of 1864, he was thinkinignot only of canals and railroads, but of Paris-on-the-Nile and of Ismail, Emperor of Africa. Cairo would have its grands 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 of many Europe ans (among themDraneht) and the development of a new class of urban dwellers whose tastes and requirements portended the expansion of a localmarket geared to ex pensive imported goods. As Owen says, "where foreign importswere important . . .was in catering to the com pletely different consumption pattern of a large foreign population and those among the local Egyptian landown ers and officialswho had begun to live in European types of houses in the Europeanized section of Cairo and Alex [100]
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andria where almost everything of importance was pur chased from abroad-even building materials." And, we might add, operas, composers, singers, conductors, sets and costumes. An importantadded benefit to such projects was to convince foreign creditors with visible evidence that theirmoney was being put to good use. Unlike Alexandria, however, Cairo was an Arab and Islamic city, even in Ismail's heyday. Aside from the ro mance of theGiza sites, Cairo's past did not communicate easily or well with Europe; here were no Hellenistic or Levantine associations, no gentle sea breezes, no bustling Mediterranean port life. Cairo's massive centrality to Africa, to Islam, to theArab and Ottoman worlds seemed like an intransigent barrier to European investors, and this fact surely prompted Ismail to go about the city's modernization, which was tomake itmore accessible and attractive to European investors. This he did essentially by dividing Cairo. I can do no better here than to quote from the best twentieth-century account of Cairo, which is written by the American urban historian Janet Abu Lughod in her Cairo: One Thousand Years of the City Victorious:
Thus by the end of the nineteenth century Cairo con
sisted of two distinct physical communities,divided one from the other by barriers much broader than the little single street thatmarked theirborders.The discontinuity
between Egypt's past and future, which appeared as a small crack in the early nineteenth century, bad widened into a gaping fissure by the end of that century. The city's physical duality was but a manifestation of the cultural
cleavage.
To the east lay the native city, still essentially pre industrial in technology, social structure, and way of life; to the west lay the "colonial" city with its steam-powered techniques, its faster pace and wheeled traffic, and its European identification. To the east lay the labyrinth street pattem of yet unpaved harat and durub, although by then the gates had been dismantled and two new thoroughfares pierced the shade; to the west were broad flanked by wide walks and straight streets of macadam setbacks, militantly crossing one another at rigid right angles 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 itinerant water peddlars,although residents

in the western city had their water delivered through a
convenientnetwork of conduitsconnectedwith the steam pumping station near the river. Eastern quarterswere plunged into darkness at nightfall, while gaslights illu minated the thoroughfares to thewest. Neither parksnor
street trees relieved the sand and mud tones of the medi eval city; yet the city to the west was elaborately adorned
with French formal gardens, strips of decorative flower

beds, or artificially shaped trees. One entered the old by caravan and traversed it on foot or animal-back; one en tered the new by railroad and proceeded via horse-drawn victoria. In short, on all critical points the two cities, de
spite their physical contiguity,were miles apart socially and centuriesapart technologically. The Opera House built by Ismail forVerdi sat right at the center of the north-south axis, in themiddle of a spa cious square, facing the European city which stretched westward to the banks of theNile. To the north therewere the railroad station, Shepheard's Hotel, the Azbakiyah Gardens for which, Abu-Lughod adds, "Ismail imported the French landscape architect whose work he admired in 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, and belvederes which instituted the inevitable cliches of a nineteenth century French garden."To the south layAbdin Palace, redesigned by Ismail as his principal residence in 1874. Behind the Opera House lay the teeming native quarters of Muski, Sayida Zeinab, 'Ataba al-Khadra, held back by the Opera's imposing size and European au thority. It is perhaps worth noting quickly that Cairo was also beginning to register the intellectual ferment of reform, some but by no mneans all of it under the influence of the European penetration which resulted, according to Jacques Berque, in a confusion of production. Perhaps the finest account of Ismailian Cairo is to be found in the Khittah Tawfikiya of Ali PashaMobarak, the prodigiously energetic minister of public works and education, an en gineer, nationalist, modernizer, tireless historian, village
son of a humble faqir, a man as fascinated by the West as
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he was compelled by the traditions and religion of the Islamic East. Ali does not mention the Opera, although he speaks in detail of Ismail's lavish expenditure on his palaces, on his gardens and zoos, on his displays for vis iting European dignitaries. One has the impression that Cairo's changes in this period forceAli Pasha to record the city's life in recognition that the dynamics of Cairo now required a new, modern attention to detail, detail that stimulated unprecedented discriminations and observa tions on the part of the native Cairene. Later Egyptian writers will, likeAli, note the ferment of this period, but will also note (e.g. Anwar Abdel Malek) theOpera House and Aida as antinomian symbols of the country's artistic life and its imperialist subjugation. In 1971 the Opera House burned, its wooden structure providing no resis tance to the flames; itwas never rebuilt, although its site was firstoccupied by a parking lot, later (and until today) by amultistoried parking structure. C learlywe should conclude that Cairo could not long I sustainAida as an opera written for an occasion and a place it seemed to outlive, even as it triumphed onWest ern stages formany decades. Aida's Egyptian identitywas part of the city's European fa,ade, its implicity and rigor inscribed on those imaginary walls dividing the colonial city's native from its imperialist quarters. Aida's is an aes thetic of separation, for we cannot see in Aida quite the congruence between it and Cairo that Keats saw in the frieze of the Grecian urn on the one hand, which corre sponded, on the other,with the town and citadel "emptied of this folk, this pious morn." Aida, for Egypt, was an im perial article de luxe purchased by credit for a tiny clien telewhose entertainment was incidental to their real pur poses inCairo. Verdi saw in it amonument to his separate art; Ismail andMariette, for diverse purposes, lavished on the work's preparation their surplus energy and restless
will.
Despite its shortcomings, Aida can be enjoyed and in terpreted as a species of rigid curatorial art, whose rigor and unbending frame recall,with a relentlessly mortuary logic, a precise historicalmoment and a specifically dated aesthetic form, the imperial spectacle designed to alienate [103]
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and impress. This of course is not exactly Aida's position in the cultural repertory today.Certainly it is the case that many of the great aesthetic objects of empire are remem bered and admired without the baggage of domination that they carried through the process from gestation to production. Yet the empire remains, in inflection and traces, to be read, seen and heard. By not taking account of the imperialist heritage that is inscribed inworks like Aida we reduce them to caricatures, elaborate ones per haps, but caricatures nonetheless.
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Edward Said - The Imperial Spectacle

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Edward Said - The Imperial Spectacle

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Ben Sonnenberg

THE IMPERIAL SPECTACLE Edward W. Said

disparity between the particular glib simplicity of the

pression-for of courseVerdi's techniquehad never been

Verdi, and which recallsMeyerbeer more disturbingly

itsmanifestations, not the arrangement, the artifice, and

ists, artists, choristers,conductors, instrumentalists, etc.,

about the opera's single intention: Aida is a self-sufficient

that.But isn't there something else going on here too, some

as threemodern examples the following:

theCincinnatiOpera announces that for its performance

pendent upon itinerant water peddlars,although residents

with French formal gardens, strips of decorative flower

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