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'Aida' shows desire to do right universal
Register-Guard OPINION Friday, December 31, 1999
By Sharon Schuman
In a Dec. 27 opinion page column, William Pfaff pointed out that throughout Western history there has been a central belief in a moral authority that exists beyond humans. But now, for the first time in history, there is no general acknowledgment of an external standard of reference for how humans and their states should conduct themselves. According to Pfaff, an all-but-complete secularization of thought among ruling elites has replaced monotheism with individualism, leaving us a series of competing "isms" (capitalism, totalitarianism, socialism), but otherwise "alone in the universe." He ended his column somewhat wistfully, wondering what this New Age will be like.
I would like to offer the observation, though, that just as when Sophocles wrote "Antigone" for his fifth-century B.C. Athenian audience, its function was to help them confront the most important moral and political questions of the day; today, the function of art is still to help us choose the best path. That art rarely succeeds in fulfilling this function does not diminish our need for it or our appetite for "the best that can be thought and said."
The current production of "Aida" at the Hult Center is an example in point. It is the "Iliad," "Antigone" and "Hamlet" of opera. Its epic sweep, involving a war between the Egyptians and Ethiopians, is only intensified by conflicts between civic and familial loyalty and by an impossible love between Radames, the commander of the Egyptian forces, and the slave Aida, daughter of the Ethiopian king. In it Giuseppe Verdi combines Homer's mastery of scale with Sophocles' sense of conflict and Shakespeare's grasp of personal crisis.
Like these other great interpreters of the human dilemma, Verdi gives us the experience of struggling with conflicting commitments - whether personal, political or religious - and infuses us with a sense that when necessary it is humanly possible to make the most difficult choices and sacrifices.
It is thus an opera not to be missed. And not just for opera lovers. Anyone who likes an intense story of heroism, familial conflict and love will be swept along by this tale. Like the "Iliad," it opens with a pause in the fighting of a great war. Radames, much more of a Hector than an Achilles, hopes he will be chosen to lead the Egyptian forces. But whereas Hector's wife is among the vulnerable Trojans, Radames' love is one of the enemy. Eventually he makes the difficult decision Hector couldn't, to renounce his heroism for love.
The plan to flee with Aida to Ethiopia is foiled, however, by several forces from the tragic world of Antigone. At the heart of the tragedy is the relationship between Aida and her father, the Ethiopian king, also taken prisoner in the course of the opera. In the third act he sings some of its most beautiful music as he paints a picture of the Ethiopia she will never see again. According to the philosopher Hegel, Sophocles created in "Antigone" the greatest work of art in history because he perfectly captured the tension between equally important but mutually exclusive loyalties. In that play, it was the conflict between familial and civic piety, acted out by Antigone, who wants to bury her traitorous brother, and Creon, who has threatened to execute anyone who tries.
In "Aida" the conflict is first between Aida's loyalty to her father, who needs to find out the Egyptians' plan of attack, and her love for Radames, who is to lead the attack. There is a conflict also between Radames' loyalty to Egypt and his love for Aida. Verdi makes us feel the intensity of the impossibility of any good solution emerging, even as our hopes, along with those of Aida and Radames, drive the plot relentlessly forward.
When Aida convinces Radames to forsake his vocation to flee with her, we feel the enormity of the weight of his decision as much as we do Hamlet's finally to kill Claudius. And yet, unlike in "Hamlet," in "Aida" there are no villains, just people trying to do what's right.
Among the most conflicted is Amneris, the daughter of the Pharaoh. She has probably loved Radames since childhood, and as the princess she can rightly hope that the arranged marriage to which she is destined might be with this hero. Some of the most poignant moments of the opera come as she first declares her hopes, then uncovers the relationship between Aida and Radames. Her oblivious father rewards Radames for his victory by bestowing on him his daughter's hand. Even in the last act, after Radames has been condemned as a traitor for revealing military secrets to the enemy, he could save himself by forsaking Aida and marrying Amneris.
But he refuses, and this refusal leads to Amneris' greatest moment, which comes in the last scene, itself worth the price of admission. There, in a trio beyond describing, this rejected betrothed, who has been through the full range of emotions - from love, to disbelief, to bitter resentment - begs above for Radames' life, while entombed below, the reunited Radames and Aida sing their last words. Here Amneris rises above her own sense of injury and rejection to beg first for mercy, then, when that fails, for peace.
Because of its great expense, "Aida" is rarely performed (never before in Eugene and perhaps never again). For many of us, then, this production provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at the end of the 20th century to see how art can inspire us, as religion perhaps no longer can, not to feel alone in the universe.
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