Already when Michael Cavanagh was asked to direct Aida at the Royal Swedish Opera, he saw a challenge in digging a little deeper into psychology than traditional productions usually do.
– Aida is actually one of Verdi’s best intimate portrayals. It is a triangle drama in which Radamès, Aida and Amneris are torn between their strong private feelings and public obligations. The whole drama revolves around what these three people are expected to do and what they then choose to do, says Michael and adds:
– The opera must be able to both expand and condense, open and close.
For Michael, the challenge lies precisely there: to show both the intimate and the grand, such as national pride, official moments and heroes. But Michael also wants to liken the opera to »an emotional black hole«.
– The more the main characters resist what they feel deep down, the further they are drawn into the hole. And Aida, Amneris and Radamès are far from alone, he believes.
– There are people who deny their feelings their entire lives. If you try to deny or resist what you really feel, the risk of one day exploding inside increases all the time.
Are there other messages in the opera?
– Through Aida, Verdi also showed the destructiveness of war and what it does to people. You cannot stop a war by going to war, that is the great irony of the triumphal march.
– Someone might ask why Radamès betrays his country, just to run away with the enemy’s daughter. But that is because he is damaged by the war. And from that perspective, the episode »Guerra, Guerra« (war, war) also finds itself in a new light. Verdi knew what the audience wanted: grand scenes and grand music. But then Verdi also shows what happens if you govern a country in the wrong way. And that one war almost always leads to another, Michael notes.
What is your first memory of Aida?
– I saw Aida for the first time when I was 12 years old in Canada, it was a fairly traditional production. Nevertheless, I was completely absorbed and I remember, for example, that Radamès came riding in on a real horse…
At that time, Aida was not very common in the United States, except at the major opera houses in New York, San Francisco and Chicago. The opera was considered expensive to stage, compared to Madama Butterfly or La bohème. But in the 1990s, Aida began to appear at other opera houses as well, not least because of the surtitle machines, Michael says.
– Through the surtitles, the audience could follow all the twists and turns of the drama in a completely new way, and this benefited operas like Aida.
Technology can also help the audience delve deeper into the messages in other ways. In this production, for example, you can see on film what Radamès experienced during the war, while the drama is taking place on stage.
– Verdi probably had that intention from the beginning: to show what war does to us. But he was smart enough to deliver his uncomfortable message in a beautiful package.
Thematically, there are similarities between Aida and John Adams’ Nixon in China, the first production that Michael directed for the Royal Swedish Opera in 2016. That opera also pits the public against the private. Both operas are about how major political events affect the individual and how all this is filtered in the memory, but also about the expectations that are placed on public figures.
– Nixon and Mao love the public and their political obligations, but Pat Nixon could actually be an Aida. She dreams of a quiet private life outside the public eye, as Madame Mao also does at the end of Nixon in China.
Where is the hope in Aida?
– Every main character in Aida sings about how they are prepared to die for love and that is what true heroism is: to be prepared to give your own life for another person and what you believe in.
The set design is therefore an important part of Aida, Verdi made that clear from the beginning. In this production, Magdalena Åberg has worked on both the set design and costumes.
– There are three different rooms or layers on the stage, each room has a camera shutter that can be opened and closed towards the audience: a black room closest to the audience that is private and where the characters remember and feel, in the middle the official concrete room and at the far end the gold room that stands for the religious or spiritual. The room zooms in and out, she says.
– Take the triumphal march for example, in our case it is not about pomp and show, elephants and soldiers, but rather about Radamès' war memories. He transforms from a naive superhero into a broken, deeply traumatized man. He has also been exploited by the system, she says, adding:
– Actually, the whole opera is about different types of post-traumatic stress disorder, but also about the problem of loving your enemy.
The production that Magdalena Åberg did for the Royal Swedish Opera before Aida was Mats Ek's ballet Julia & Romeo, a production that has also had great success elsewhere in the world.
– Julia & Romeo is also about impossible love. But I also want to focus on the idea of the little person's struggle against the collective or the system. Aida finds herself in a difficult dilemma, either she must betray her father and her homeland or her beloved and her own heart. Amonasro is a patriot who thinks more about the country than her daughter's happiness, she says.
Magdalena thinks that the father-daughter relationship is portrayed very interestingly in Aida, a theme that recurs in Verdi's operas.
– Although it is a bit strange that mothers are not even mentioned in Aida. Sometimes I have wondered how Verdi himself felt about that…
The first time she met Michael Cavanagh, Nixon in China had just premiered and she remembers that they went to an exhibition about Tutankhamun together to get to know each other. But also to familiarize themselves with ancient Egypt a little more before working on Aida.
– The gold and the colors are what we took with us from the exhibition.
Architecturally, Magdalena Åberg has also been inspired by the »concrete brutalism« of the 1960s, for example the Filmhuset in Stockholm. Just like Michael Cavanagh, she emphasizes that the set design is more emotional than time or place-specific.
– The room does not tell the story of a specific time or place. Rather, I would like to call it the palace of emotions.
Eva Clementi
FORMER EDITOR AT THE ROYAL SWEDISH OPERA
(2018)
