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Aida and Nine Readings of Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

Ralph P. Locke
Ralph P. Locke
Affiliation:
Eastman School of Music
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Extract

What influence did contemporary attitudes towards empire and towards ‘Other’ peoples exert on musical works, especially when those peoples were perceived as being of a different race?

The answer surely varies with the genre and also with the complexity of the given work. The late Edward Said – the most prominent and controversial figure in cultural critique of this sort – put it well: a work that is ‘rich in … aesthetic intellectual complexity’ must not be treated as if it were a crudely ‘jingoistic ditty’ – or, for the present context, a racist one. Said's specific example of a complex literary work, in that passage from his important book Culture and Imperialism, is Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, with its occasional, resonant references to a sugar plantation in the Caribbean and thus also to the British slave trade.1 The problem becomes even more intense in music (of equivalent aesthetic complexity). Instrumental works are particularly difficult to interrogate on any ‘extra-musical’ basis, for an obvious and much-discussed reason: the relative inability of music, without verbal or visual anchors, to denotate and to narrate.2

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Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , June 2006 , pp. 45 - 72
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

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References

1 Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), 96Google Scholar . (The British edition is differently paginated.)

2 Among recent writings debating the inherent (in)ability of music to denotate, bear meaning, and/or tell a story, I might mention Kramer, Lawrence, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, 2002)Google Scholar ; Scott, Derek B., From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Steinberg, Michael P., Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar ; Almen, Byron, ‘Narrative Archetypes: A Critique, Theory, and Method of Narrative Analysis’, Journal of Music Theory 47 (2003): 1–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Dell'Antonio, Andrew, Beyond Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing (Berkeley, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and two studies focusing on whether music can ‘have a past tense’, in the particular case of Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Abbate, Carolyn, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991), 30–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Caballero, Carlo, ‘Silence, Echo: A Response to “What the Sorcerer Said”’, Nineteenth-Century Music 28 (2004–2005): 160–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

3 Recent studies include Hunter, Mary, ‘The Alla Turca Style in the Late Eighteenth Century: Race and Gender in the Symphony and the Seraglio’, in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Bellman, Jonathan (Boston, 1998), 43–73, 317–23Google Scholar ; and Head, Matthew, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music (London, 2000)Google Scholar .

4 Scott, , From the Erotic to the Demonic, 155–78, 235–39Google Scholar ; and Head, Orientalism. For an overview of commonly used exotic style elements, see my ‘Exoticism and Orientalism in Music: Problems for the Worldly Critic’, in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Bové, Paul A. (Durham, NC, 2000), 257–81, 306–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

5 I discuss this further in two articles: ‘Reflections on Orientalism in Opera and Musical Theater’, Opera Quarterly 10/1 (autumn 1993): 48–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and ‘Constructing the Oriental “Other”: Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila’, Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991): 261–302Google Scholar (especially the passages on Abimelech, the Philistines’ Hymn to Dagon, and Dalila).

6 For typical instances of exotically worded choruses, see Lacombe, Hervé, ‘The Writing of Exoticism in the Libretti of the Opéra-Comique, 1825–1862’, Cambridge Opera Journal 11 (1999): 135–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

7 Locke, , ‘Constructing the Oriental “Other”’, and ‘Beyond the Exotic: How “Eastern” Is Aida?’, Cambridge Opera Journal 17 (2005): 105–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

8 Busch, Hans, ed. and trans., Verdi's Aida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents (Minneapolis, 1978), 33Google Scholar (quotation), see also 20, 32; beards: 34; priestesses: 32, 38, 475–6, 479. Mariette's letters mostly stressed the visual aspect, over which he was given charge, but some refer glancingly to the need for ‘local colour’ in the music (of certain scenes?). One of his various statements was clearly unfeasible: ‘the Viceroy's desire [is] to see the opera composed [i.e., entirely?] and executed in a strictly Egyptian style’ (35).

9 ‘Quaint’ (singolari) in a review reprinted in Le opere di Giuseppe Verdi a Bologna (1843–1901), ed. Luigi Verdi (Lucca, 2001), 223; ‘hieratic’: Filippi, Filippo, review in La perseveranza (13 Jan. 1872)Google Scholar , in Jürgensen, Knud Arne, The Verdi Ballets (Parma, 1995), 303Google Scholar ; also in another Filippi quotation given below on p. 50.

10 Filippi, Filippo, Musica e musicisti: Critiche[,] biografie ed escursioni (Milan, 1876), 365–6Google Scholar .

11 Shaw, George Bernard, ‘Aida Fills the House’ (6 Jul. 1888)Google Scholar , in Shaw's Music, 3 vols, ed. Laurence, Dan H. (London, 1981), 1: 519Google Scholar . See also 3: 185.

12 Seta, Fabrizio Della, ‘“O cieli azzurri”: Exoticism and Dramatic Discourse in Aida’, trans. Groos, Arthur, Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991): 49–62 (62)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; see also Mila, Massimo, ‘A Difficult Opera’, in Aida in Cairo: The Birth of an Opera by a Famous Italian Composer, ed. Codignola, Mario and Sanctis, Riccardo de (Rome 1982), 18Google Scholar : ‘the difficulties and sufferings of this [earthly] life.’ Della Seta's article will appear in the original Italian, with a substantial and thoughtful postscript, in a forthcoming volume on Aida and exoticism, to be published by the Teatro Regio (Parma); the volume will contain other previously published essays by Adriana Guarnieri, Marcello Conati and Mercedes Viale Ferrero.

13 Filippi, , Musica, 366Google Scholar .

14 ‘Allegory’ is a term used inconsistently within studies of musical genres. Sometimes it refers simply to abstract mythological figures, such as Love, Fate, or War. Other times – as here – it refers more to the contemporary ramifications of a specific singing role (e.g., an ancient emperor or military leader) or, more generally, a foreign or enemy people (e.g., ancient Persians or Canaanites in certain Handel operas and oratorios).

15 On Verdi and the Risorgimento, see n. 17 below and the Appendix.

16 Mila, , ‘A Difficult Opera’, 17Google Scholar ; Arblaster, Anthony, Viva la libertà!: Politics in Opera (London, 1992), 143Google Scholar ; and – to be discussed further below – Robinson, Paul, ‘Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?’ Cambridge Opera Journal 5 (1993): 133–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Robinson's essay was reprinted in Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture, ed. Beverly Allen and Mary Russo (Minneapolis, 1997), 156–66; and (without footnotes) in Robinson's, Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters (Chicago, 2002), 123–33Google Scholar .

17 In the 1860s, Verdi grew increasingly furious at the Pope, who had declared his infallibility and had threatened with excommunication anybody who worked to create a secular, unified Italy, the one political cause that Verdi unhesitatingly promoted his whole life long. See Martin, George, Verdi: His Music, Life and Times, paperback edn (New York, 1983), chaps. 32 and 34 (esp. pp. 418, 448, 458, and 239, 349, 408, 425–39, 550)Google Scholar ; and Smith, Patricia Juliana, ‘“O patria mia”: Female Homosociality and the Gendered Nation in Bellini's Norma and Verdi's Aida’, in The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, ed. Dellamora, Richard and Fischlin, Daniel (New York, 1997), 102Google Scholar . Verdi specifically urged that the flabellum that is carried in the triumphal procession be modelled on the one that ‘they carry in Rome at papal ceremonies’ ( Busch, , Verdi's Aida, 264Google Scholar ).

18 Said, , Culture and Imperialism, 111, 130Google Scholar . References to this book in the next few paragraphs will be given in the main text. The Aida essay was first published (with slight differences) as ‘The Imperial Spectacle’, Grand Street 6/2 (winter 1987): 82–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

19 Verdi's letter of 19 February 1868 ( Busch, , Verdi's Aida, 3Google Scholar ) indicates not an indifference to Egypt, as Said argues, but (as I argue in ‘Beyond the Exotic’) a combined active distaste for the authoritarian menace conveyed by its ancient monuments and fascination with the country's current condition (its ‘beauty and ugliness’).

20 Busch, , Verdi's Aida, 36Google Scholar .

21 Said, , Culture and Imperialism, 123, also 121Google Scholar . A third factor that he invokes in this regard is Verdi's decision to use formal counterpoint in certain numbers involving the priests (a style trait that critics have overemphasized, as I have argued in ‘Beyond the Exotic’).

22 Said, , Culture and Imperialism, 121–2Google Scholar . (Indeed, the Moorish boys do another grotesque dance in the Triumphal Scene.) In my ‘Beyond the Exotic’, I argue that there is more, and more varied, local colour – and ‘ancient’ colour – in Aida than many writers have recognized.

23 Mark Everist sensitively notes ‘a certain reluctance’ on Said's part to relate Aida and its commissioning to Orientalist stereotypes: ‘Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto: Mélodrame, Opera, Orientalism’, Cambridge Opera Journal 8 (1996): 224 n. 26Google Scholar . A related remark by Everist (250 n. 103) – distinguishing Said's (in some ways) narrower 1978 book from his broader 1993 one – is taken out of context and mischaracterized in Head, Matthew, ‘Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory’, Music Analysis 22 (2003): 218CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Head also inadvertently attributes to Victorian-era novelist H. Rider Haggard a remark that is actually a comment on his work by present-day cultural theorists Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (214, 227 n. 3).

24 Filippi, , Musica, 379–80Google Scholar .

25 Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar .

26 One might also view it as a subset of Reading 8 (Egypt as European overseas imperialism, to be discussed a bit later), given that the Khedive's forces were, in those years, closely allied to, almost puppets of, the British. Somewhat later, the British encouraged the Italians in turn against Ethiopia, as a bar to the French; see Zewde, Bahru, A History of Modern Ethiopia: 1855–1974 (London, 1991), 50–54, 73Google Scholar .

27 Reyer, Ernest, Notes de musique (Paris, 1875), 197Google Scholar . Supernumeraries who were of sub-Saharan origin were likewise used in the Paris Opéra 1880 production, if one can trust costume sketches and magazine illustrations.

28 Kerman, Joseph, Opera as Drama (New York, 1956), 160Google Scholar , quoted in Said, , Culture and Imperialism, 113Google Scholar .

29 Encouragingly, in a recent issue of Cambridge Opera Journal, three musicologists do refer to Said's article: see Mary Ann Smart, ‘Primal Scenes: Verdi in Analysis’, Huebner, Steven, ‘“O patria mia”: Patriotism, Dream, Death’, and Cruz, Gabriela, ‘Aida's Flute’ – respectively, Cambridge Opera Journal 14 (2002), 1–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar (esp. 4), 161–75 (esp. 175), and 177–200 (esp. 180).

30 Robinson, , ‘Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?’, 140Google Scholar (with references to Said's essay in its initial publication of 1987).

31 Ipid., 134. Robinson, quotes the first phrase from Said (now in Culture and Imperialism, 129)Google Scholar.

32 Robinson, , ‘Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?’, 135Google Scholar .

33 Ipid., 134, 138, 139.

34 Ipid., 139 (quoted phrases) and 137–38. Robinson's claims have recently been endorsed, too quickly, by the noted opera scholar Barry Millington: ‘Robinson convincingly demonstrates … [that in Aida] oriental motifs [in a few of the dances and choruses] are constantly negated by occidental [ones in the rest of the opera]’ (review of Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters, in BBC Music Magazine, Jul. 2002, 112Google Scholar ).

35 Budden, Julian, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols, rev. edn (New York, 1992) 3: 258Google Scholar . On Budden's denial of ‘racialism’ (as well as on Robinson's double overstatement), see Locke, , ‘Beyond the Exotic’, 105, 112–13, 122Google Scholar .

36 Robinson, , ‘Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?’, 140Google Scholar ; see also Arblaster, , Viva la libertà, 142–3Google Scholar . Matthew Head rightly terms Robinson's recourse to a familiar endotic (that is, internal European) explanation here an ‘ill-considered’ and inadequate attempt at a ‘corrective to Said's complex essay’ – Head, , ‘Musicology on Safari’, 213–14Google Scholar .

37 Robinson, , ‘Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?’, 139–40Google Scholar , also 135. This was relocated but also slightly belated, given that most of Italy had become unified by 1861, Venice was incorporated in 1866, and Rome, finally, on 20 September 1870 – just when Verdi was busy cajoling Ghislanzoni into remaking the Aida libretto to his demands.

38 John M. MacKenzie, ‘Occidentalism: Counterpoint and Counter-polemic’ [review of Said's, Culture and Imperialism], Journal of Historical Geography 19 (1993): 342Google Scholar .

39 MacKenzie, John M., Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995), 155Google Scholar .

40 Said, , Culture and Imperialism, 130, 131Google Scholar . At one point, Said nearly stumbles upon Reading 8 (in spite of himself?): he describes the Triumphal Scene as the ‘one opening that Verdi allowed in the work, an aperture through which he seems to be letting in an outside world otherwise banned from entry’. But Said immediately continues that the denizens of the ‘outside world’ enter only this opera as ‘exotica or as captives’ (thus back to Reading 4) – Culture and Imperialism, 125.

41 Rosselli, John ‘“Trust the Tale, Not the Teller”’, in Verdi in Performance, ed. Latham, Alison and Parker, Roger (Oxford, 2001), 38–41, 40Google Scholar ; Rosselli's paper derives from a conference in 1995.

42 Verdi objected, early on, to there being no singing for the chorus of Ethiopian prisoners in the Act 2 finale. In all published scores, though, they do they sing along with Aida (though to more kindly words – see Ex. 4) when she repeats Amonasro's hymnic plea to the king of Egypt, sing two prominent cries of ‘Pietà!’ along with Aida, and join in singing briefly with the Egyptian popolo but to their own distinctive, if often inaudible, words: first pleading (‘Tua pietade … imploriamo’, words they first sang in the passage with Aida), then joyful (‘Gloria al clemente egizio’). This corrects a misleading statement in Busch, Verdi's Aida, 72. A recent musical-theatre version of the Aida story, by Tim Rice and Elton John, goes much further in giving the captive slaves a voice.

43 Budden, , Operas of Verdi 3: 258Google Scholar (including the previous quoted remark, about Amonasro).

44 Della Seta (among others) briefly notes the various contrasts of dark indoors (Egypt) and sunny nature (Ethiopia): ‘“O cieli azzurri”’, 54–5.

45 See Locke, , ‘Beyond the Exotic’, 107–8, 134Google Scholar .

46 Casini argues that Radames's betrayal, later in the opera, is ‘a deserved retaliation for Egyptian oppression of the vanquished Ethiopian people’, Verdi, 304; see also Ferrero, Mercedes Viale, ‘Scenery and Costumes’, in Aida in Cairo, ed. Codignola, and Sanctis, de, 144Google Scholar .

47 Seta, Della, ‘“O cieli azzurri”’, 62 n. 47Google Scholar . I translate his original wording (which he kindly conveyed to me in a recent email): ‘troppo attualizzanti’. The published translation of 1991 added a tone of moral disapproval: ‘too fashionable’.

48 I might mention the famous Indian Rebellion (or ‘Indian Mutiny’, as the British long called it) of 1857, repeated Algerian and Egyptian uprisings against the French and British, respectively, and the (short-lived but famous) military triumphs of Zulu warriors over the British in the 1870s (alluded to by George Bernard Shaw in analogy to Amonasro – ‘Aida Fills the House’, 520). On growing awareness in Europe of colonial resistance (for example, disillusionment and distress at the ‘horrific atrocities and reprisals on both sides’ of the Indian Rebellion), see Stockwell, A.J., ‘Power, Authority, and Freedom’, in The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, ed. Marshall, P.J. (Cambridge, 1996), 158 (147–84)Google Scholar . Further on native resistance, see such diverse studies as Colley, Linda, Captives (New York, 2002), 21–134, 389–401Google Scholar ; Behdad, Ali, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and – concerning an epoch-making event of 1896 (to which I shall return later) that caused rage and consternation in Italy and elsewhere in the West, namely the defeat of the Italian troops at Adwa – Zewde, History of Modern Ethiopia, 55–84. More generally, on the West's refusal to recognize or even (in literature) portray non-Western and anti-colonial voices, see Said, , Culture and Imperialism, xix–xxiiGoogle Scholar .

49 Arblaster suggests that Budden ‘is simply out of sympathy with the liberal idealist’ as embodied in several of Verdi's tenor and baritone heroes: Viva la libertà! 139; see also 5–6.

50 Said, , Culture and Imperialism, xiv, xxi–xxii, 18, 39, 81, 96Google Scholar (including repeated attacks on ‘the rhetoric of blame and defensiveness’). It is also true that, as Michael Wood notes, ‘what [Said] himself says very often sounds like blame’; Wood notes a passage in the Aida essay as ‘too blunt’, namely Said's remark that Verdi's insistence on maintaining sole domination over his operatic work ‘dovetailed conveniently’ with growing European imperialist control of Egypt – ‘Lost Paradises’, New York Review of Books 3 (Mar. 1994), 44–7Google Scholar . Wood substantially shortened and reworked this review when republishing it in his Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction (New York, 1998), 157–69Google Scholar . See also Said, , Culture and Imperialism, 116–17Google Scholar .

51 Studlar, Gaylyn and Bernstein, Matthew, eds, Orientalism in Film (New Brunswick, NJ, 1997)Google Scholar .

52 Steinberg, Michael P., Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 179–80Google Scholar .

53 Steinberg's footnote cites Said, Robinson and Della Seta.

54 For a more radical position on ‘leaving things open’ in interpretation, see Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic’, Critical Inquiry 30 (2003–2004): 516 (505–36)Google Scholar .

55 The slave boys were ballerinas made up to look ‘completely black’, according to Verdi's express wish ( Busch, , Verdi's Aida, 264Google Scholar ), that is, with black leggings (and long-sleeved tops?) and body make-up. Here and elsewhere, he wanted the opera to avoid all ‘display of nudity’, which he considered a ‘French import’ (he associated it with the sexual provocativeness of Offenbach-style operetta: Ipid., 256). By contrast, Amonasro, Aida and, presumably, the other Ethiopians, must have ‘olive, dark-reddish skin’ according to the authoritative production book put out by the opera's publisher Ricordi (Ipid., 558–9). In an early letter, Verdi did propose this stage direction for Amneris's chamber scene: ‘Ethiopian boys carry vases, perfumes, crowns, etc.’, and ‘dance to the sound of castanets’ ( Busch, , Verdi's Aida, 48)Google Scholar . But the specific identification of the Moorish boys with Ethiopia was abandoned, consciously or inadvertently, in the published score, libretto and production book.

56 See also Budden, , Operas of Verdi 3: 216–17, 226Google Scholar . (Morocco and Algeria had, of course, been Turkish-ruled on and off for centuries by Verdi's day.) Filippo Filippi stated (in a review of the Milan premiere) that the episode in F major for the moretti in the Triumphal Scene is ‘di stile etiopico’, but he weakened the specificity by continuing ‘just like similar things that Gottschalk transcribed in his piano pieces entitled Bamboula and Bananier’ ( Jürgensen, , Verdi Ballets, 308Google Scholar ); the comparison to Gottschalk's music is intriguing and plausible, as regards questions of musical style, but it also suggests that ‘Ethiopian’ was a broad, almost racial category for Filippi and perhaps other listeners. (The term was also used by various blackface minstrel troupes in the USA and Europe.) Another early critic saw the dances in Amneris's chamber, presumably including the one for the moretti, as Arab in style (306). And yet another describes that dance of the little Moors in terms that simply equate Ethiopian (or, rather, ‘Nubian’) and Arab: ‘a Nubian dance composed on an Arab rhythm’ (316).

57 Complicatingly, the flute can also stand for Egyptian ritual (three flutes play the Dance of the Priestesses in the Act 1 Consecration Scene, for example) and can ‘betoken [Radames's] death’: Budden, , Operas of Verdi 3: 203Google Scholar (the quotation), 213, 236, 237–8, 241–2; see also Seta, Della, ‘“O cieli azzurri”’, 55–61Google Scholar and Cruz, ‘Aida's Flute’. For further discussion of the distinctive styles in Aida, such as the priests’ supposed penchant for canonic texture, see my ‘Beyond the Exotic’, 112.

58 Filippi, , Musica, 364Google Scholar .

59 Filippi, review in La perseveranza (12 Feb. 1872)Google Scholar , in Jürgensen, , Verdi Ballets, 308Google Scholar .

60 Ahmad Šauqī, (untitled) elegy for Verdi, in Bachmann, Peter, ‘Zwei arabische Verdi-Würdigungen aus dem Jahre 1901’, in Musikalische Quellen – Quellen zur Musikgeschichte: Festschrift für Martin Staehelin zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Konrad, Ulrich, with Jürgen Heidrich and Hans Joachim Marx (Göttingen, 2002), 443–4 (439–47)Google Scholar . Further excerpts are given in my ‘Beyond the Exotic’, 133, 134.

61 Casini, Claudio, Verdi (Milan, 1981), 304Google Scholar ; Mila, , ‘A Difficult Opera’, 13, 19Google Scholar ; Arblaster, , Viva la libertà, 144Google Scholar ; Said, , Culture and Imperialism, 124–5Google Scholar (this is Said's strongest hint at Reading 8).

62 Review by Filippi, 14 Jan. 1872, in Jürgensen, , Verdi Ballets, 304Google Scholar . Remarkably, one critic, in 1876 (Paris), reports that the sound of the long trumpets ‘did not screech’ (n’a rien de criard); perhaps he did not know that the instruments had a hidden valve and so was surprised that they played even approximately in tune (review in Le Petit Journal, 24 Apr. 1876, in Jürgensen, , Verdi Ballets, 310Google Scholar ).

63 Cormac Newark insightfully points out that such interpretations must have been widely shared even though contemporaries rarely mentioned them: see his review of the Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. Charlton, David: Cambridge Opera Journal 16 (2004): 239–47 (241)Google Scholar .

64 My renderings of passages from Ghislanzoni's verses are based freely on Weaver's, William translation, in Seven Verdi Librettos (New York, 1977)Google Scholar .

65 F major was the key of the most famous instrumental piece entitled ‘Pastoral’: Beethoven's Symphony No. 6. See also Steblin, Rita, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, 2nd edn, (Rochester, NY, 2002), 258–62Google Scholar (F major as appropriate to, among other things, ‘serious and religious matters’ – Pietro Lichtenthal, 1826; and ‘inner holy peace, comforting solace, joy at the works of nature … [and] spiritual ease’ – Gustav Schilling, 1835–36).

66 Singing the soprano line alone gives Aida both more prominence and the option of singing with greater rhythmic flexibility and with other interpretive touches, such as portamento.

67 The whole passage, beginning with Amonasro's statement, is caressed (particularly by Thomas Hampson) in the complete recording of the opera conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt: Teldec 8573-85402-2.

68 Taruskin, Richard, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 55–8, 165–72, 176–85, 242–3Google Scholar .

69 The moment of faux-fauxbourdon presumably echoes more with certain hallowed traditions of Renaissance sacred music, thus adding a hint of divine approbation to the Ethiopians’ cause.

70 Casini argues that Radames's betrayal, later in the opera, is ‘a deserved retaliation for Egyptian oppression of the vanquished Ethiopian people’, Verdi, 304. A word here about the biblical account of the Hebrews’ enslavement: increasingly, archeologists and biblical historians are regarding it – and the Exodus and the ‘conquering of the Land’ – as more mythical than historical. See, for example, Finkelstein, Israel and Silberman, Neil Asher, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York, 2001)Google Scholar . Still, the biblical account was widely accepted by most opera-goers of the day (including Aida's original Cairo audience, which was primarily European) and so, almost automatically, functioned as a silent subtext.

71 Seta, Della, ‘“O cieli azzurri”’, 62Google Scholar ; his allusions, unidentified, are to lines in Act 1 (Egyptian messenger: ‘invaso dai barbari Etiopi’; Aida: ‘le squadre dei nostri oppressor’).

72 Weaver's translation of ‘alle perfide voci’ – ‘to their perfidious voices’ – seems too narrow, if one takes his ‘their’ as referring only to the Ethiopians.

73 O’Connor, David, Ancient Nubia: Egypt's Rival in Africa (Philadelphia, PA, 1993)Google Scholar .

74 Greenblatt, Stephen, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York, 2004), 323–4Google Scholar (cf. 328: ‘arbitrary’ actions thus appear ‘rooted in deep psychological needs’). See Adam Gopnik's insightful review of Greenblatt's book, arguing that Shakespeare was ‘an instinctive liberal humanist’ in that he ‘[made] all the parts in a play sound like real people’; he had ‘a matchless all-sidedness … which could prove two ideas at once and never quite come down on the “side” of either’ – ‘Will Power’, The New Yorker (13 Sep. 2004), 94, 95 (90–95)Google Scholar .

75 See my ‘The Border Territory between Classical and Broadway: A Voyage Around and About Four Saints in Three Acts and West Side Story’, in Liber Amicorum Isabelle Cazeaux: Symbols, Parallels and Discoveries in her Honor, ed. Bempéchat, Paul-André (Hillsdale, NY, 2005), 179–226Google Scholar.

76 Camille Paglia repeats Reading no. 9 (Aida as a general attack on ‘political tyranny’ in whatever time and place) in her review ‘Scholar, Aesthete, Activist: Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism’, reprinted in her Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (New York, 1994), 382–6 (384).

77 Wood, , ‘Lost Paradises’, 45Google Scholar (borrowing the term from Said, who used it in reference to the academy).

78 That Verdi's early operas embodied an intense Italian patriotism is not doubted by any Verdi scholar, even Roger Parker, despite his patient efforts at exploding certain myths, such as that ‘Va pensiero’, from Nabucco, was widely recognized and sung, from its first days, as a hymn of national liberation. See Parker, Roger, ‘“Va pensiero” and the Insidious Mastery of Song’, in his book Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdi Discourse (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 20–41Google Scholar , and the fuller version: ‘Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati’: The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s (Parma, 1997)Google Scholar . See also Gossett, Philip, ‘Becoming a Citizen: The Chorus in Risorgimento Opera’, Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990): 41–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and Parakilas, James, ‘Political Representation and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Opera’, Nineteenth-Century Music 16 (1992–1993): 181–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

79 8 September 1870, in Busch, , Verdi's Aida, 61Google Scholar .

80 On Pizzi, who worked at the famous Biblioteca Laurenziana, and his annual visits with Verdi, see Phillips-Matz, Mary Jane, Verdi: A Biography (Oxford, 1993), 670, 752, 759Google Scholar .

81 Pizzi, Italo, ‘Unpublished Verdi Memoirs’ (first published under that title in 1901), in Encounters with Verdi, ed. Conati, Marcello, trans. Stokes, Richard (Ithaca, NY, 1984), 337–57 (351)Google Scholar . I have incorporated some details of translation from Martin, , Verdi, 466–8Google Scholar ; the paperback edition is differently paginated. On the Ethiopians' defeat of the Italian colonial troops at Adwa, see Zewde, , History of Modern Ethiopia, 72–9Google Scholar . (Adwa is sometimes written as Adowa or, in Italian, Adua.)

82 Budden, Julian, Verdi (London, 1985), 150, 272Google Scholar . See also, similarly, Seta, Della, ‘“O cieli azzurri”’, 62Google Scholar (‘the priests are the custodians of a raison d’état whose necessity the ageing Verdi's political realism could not fail to comprehend’).

83 Budden, , Verdi, 150Google Scholar .

84 Letter to Francesco Maria Piave, 21 Apr. 1848, in Phillips-Matz, , Verdi, 230–31Google Scholar .

85 MacKenzie, , ‘Occidentalism’, 342, 344 n. 10Google Scholar ; and Orientalism, 173 n. 38.