Aida

I saw Aida the other night as part of my "Society and Arts" class. It wasn't the more recent musical; it was actually a production of the original opera by Verdi.

There was a lot that I really liked about it. The sets were dazzling - the show was set in ancient Egypt, and a couple of the acts took place inside a temple. The set was realistic enough that while I was watching the religious scenes, I actually felt somewhat like I was witnessing some kind of sacred ritual, and not just a dramatic performance.

The music was outstanding. I haven't heard too much of Verdi's music, but I thoroughly enjoyed his compositions for the opera. Most of the time opera tends to grate on me - too much soprano, or even mezzo soprano just makes me grumpy. While there certainly was a fair amount of that in the opera, there were also a number of segments where Verdi daringly chose to make the score more interesting or more present than the vocals.

I thought the story was pretty much total crap, though. I felt like it portrayed Aida as too much of a passive innocent, and the female antagonist, Amneris, didn't seem like an inherently evil character. Sometimes I felt like Amneris, as the daughter of the pharaoh, basically got the raw end of the deal - she was genuinely in love with Radames (the leader of the Egyptian army who was in turn in love with Aida, who was an Ethiopian girl ((secretly the daughter of the Ethiopian king)) being held by the Egyptians). I was unable to find anything in Amneris' character that seemed outside of the bounds of normal human behavior, and no reason for Radames to refuse her love.

It's true that there were a couple of occasions where she acted out of jealousy, which isn't the most admirable characteristic. However, I still felt like she wasn't any worse than Aida herself. Aida was held captive by her emotions just as strongly as Amneris was; the only difference was that while Amneris fell prey to fits of jealousy, Aida attempted to persuade Ramades to betray his obligation to his country and slink away with her in the night. Neither of the women can be commended for engaging in upright, admirable behavior. There was nothing inspiring, or even truly romantic to me, about the scene with Aida and Ramades dying together in his tomb where they were buried alive. I feel like if they had truly loved each other, they would have found an honorable way to handle the situation instead of simply wallowing in the agony of their positions and throwing away two perfectly good lives while Amneris wept above. To me, that last act was the perfect example of what love is not: being in love with someone shouldn't mean being buried alive with them.

I think it's ironic that we claim to value life so much, and yet find so much significance in death. If life, and love, are so important, shouldn't we do what we can to keep both of them? It's Easter season right now, and this is kind of the point to me: death shouldn't be used to give life its meaning, even though death is the clear opposite of life. This is definitely one of those situations where relativistic definitions just don't work: life is so much more than the absence of death, and it's worth it to consider that we, as humans, are designed to be active agents. To me, resurrection means that it's not much more than a lame excuse to use dying and death (or other less, uh, permanent, forms of passivity and victimization) to give significance to our waking actions - and that we are perfectly capable, as participants in that allegory, of rising (pun intended) above whatever pettiness might motivate us to do so.

In conclusion, a three and a half hour spectacle that ended in nothing more than a glorification of death made me mildly uncomfortable. Honestly, though, the music was pretty amazing. I'd see it again, just for that. And the sets.