On a postcolonial Aida.
To measure the reach of postcolonial theory, consider the Metropolitan Opera’s new staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, which debuted on December 31, 2024, and runs through May 9. As the opera’s gossamer prelude rises from the orchestra, a man in a pith helmet and safari suit descends on a cable from the house’s stratospheric proscenium, shining a spotlight through the smoky atmosphere. Once landed, he unhooks himself from his harness and trains his flashlight on a towering wall nearby, whose surface blooms into brilliantly colored hieroglyphics. After looking around further, the explorer exits the stage, but not before this mysterious dumb show has blotted from the viewer’s consciousness the prelude’s mysterious harmonies and yearning melodies.
The interloper will be back, accompanied by a dozen khakied colleagues who traipse across the stage at random moments, seemingly invisible to the opera’s ancient Egyptian and Ethiopian characters. The explorers seem just as oblivious to the courtiers, kings, and warriors playing out their amorous rivalries around them. Only by reading the program notes can one understand these encounters. The khakied supernumeraries, suitably if unhistorically gender-balanced, are Egyptologists; Aida is a story that they tell themselves as they navigate a newly discovered Pharaonic site. Never mind that the archaeologists do not appear to see the story’s characters; never mind that it is unclear who among them is doing the storytelling.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The New Criterion
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal. Her latest book is When Race Trumps Merit.
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