In describing Verdi’s Aida (1870-71) as ‘not so much about but of imperial domination’, Said identifies the opera as a work which, by participating in the cultural activity associated with ‘sordid imperial exploitation’, helps to ‘confirm the Orient as an essentially exotic, distant, and antique place in which Europeans can mount certain shows of force’[1]. Although it is possible to analyse this argument in isolation, the veracity of Said’s claim is best assessed in view of the opposing evidence, that Aida is not a work of Empire at all; Paul Robinson believes that ‘one can make much more sense of the politics of Aida if one regards it first and foremost as an Italian opera, rather than an orientalist opera’[2]. Assessment of Said’s argument is therefore best undertaken through a comparison of his and Robinson’s respective positions on the genesis of the opera, Verdi’s personal approach towards Egypt, exoticism in the plot and music, and the opera’s place within music history. Evidence from the score will also be taken into account.

One of Said’s principal arguments for Aida being a work of Empire is that the political background to the opera’s genesis still makes the work imperialist even when performed on post-colonial Western stages [3]. Not only was the time of Aida’s composition, according to Said, one in which Egypt was ‘gradually being established as a dependent and subsidiary part of Europe’ under Khedive Ismail [4], but the formation of the opera linked to historical examples of imperialism. Said argues that, in basing Aida’s story on Napoleon’s Description de l’Egypt, Auguste Mariette was as guilty of ‘a desire to capture Egypt’ as the French military commander; both combined aesthetic with political intentions in achieving dominance over Egypt [5], a country ‘relatively unknown’ in Europe before Napoleon’s 1798 expedition [6]. Said also presents Mariette as the link between the Description’s scenic designs and Aida’s mise-en-scène, implicating Mariette’s work on the Egyptian pavilion at the 1867 Paris Exhibition [7]. Certainly Mariette wrote that ‘what the Viceroy [Ismail] wants is a purely ancient and Egyptian opera’, one ‘so archaeologically Egyptian and Egyptological that you [Camille Du Locle] cannot write the libretto without an adviser at your side’ [8]. Robinson does not dispute this evidence. He corroborates the factual aspects of Mariette’s involvement, agreeing that Mariette helped lower Egypt to ‘its appropriately subordinate place in Europe’s imperial imagination’, to engage the European audience who ‘had transformed Egypt into a semi-colony’ [9]. Robinson therefore gives substance to Said’s argument that the cultural context of Aida’s genesis makes it a work of Empire.

Said also addresses Verdi’s personal approach to Egypt. This is important because, as Robinson reminds us, ‘in opera the composer is the dramatist’ [10]; Verdi’s position is as important as that of Mariette in deciding the legitimacy of Said’s argument. Said claims that Verdi was not just unfamiliar with Egypt, but actively disliked its ‘culture of death’; he cites Verdi as calling it ‘a country which once had a greatness and a civilization I had never been able to admire’ [11]. Robinson agrees that Verdi did not accept Ismail’s commission in order to benefit Egyptian nationalistic propaganda, although he finds Verdi’s sentiments towards the nation to be, at worst, disinterested [12]. For Said, even this could support the view that Aida is a work of Empire. By accepting 150,000 francs to stage an opera in a non-European country for which he had little sympathy or knowledge [13], Verdi could be seen as using ‘the East as career’, participating in the Orientalism that dominated and restructured the true Orient until it became ‘almost a European invention’[14]. If Verdi was an Orientalist then on Said’s terms Aida would be a work of Empire. However, although John MacKenzie admits that Aida is ‘emblematic of the composer’s distaste for Egypt’, and therefore ‘highly implicated in European imperial expansion in the region’, he also suggests that Aida was the only Orientalist venture of Verdi’s career [15]. Thus the ambivalence surrounding Verdi’s approach to Egypt casts doubt on Said’s argument that his Aida is a work of Empire.

A more definitive assessment of Said’s argument can be made with consideration of the plot, to which Said devotes just one sentence. His gloss that ‘an Egyptian army defeats an Ethiopian force’ appears to serve merely as an elicitor of discussion on the ‘background’ of Anglo-Egyptian rivalry in East Africa around 1850 [16]. That this justifies a reading of Aida as a work of Empire is disputed by Robinson, who suggests that designation of a work as Orientalist requires detailed engagement with the drama itself [17]: something Said fails to do. Under Robinson’s more thorough analysis of the plot, ‘Said’s contention that Aida serves to “stage” Egypt for European imperial consumption begins to look rather dubious’; this is because the role of imperialist oppressor is played by Egypt itself, with Ethiopia as the ‘non-European Other’ [18]. Although this situation, which invites criticism of Egypt from Western audiences, does not preclude Aida from being Orientalist, Robinson believes that the plot makes Aida a work not of but against Empire [19]. If this is true then Verdi’s unrealistic positioning of Egypt within the plot may be merely an attempt to minimise the ‘risk’ he took in making critical commentary on ‘current . . . imperial realities’ [20]. MacKenzie, however, suggests a less politicised approach; with the real interest in the characters’ private lives, he says, ‘nationalistic divisions cease to matter’ [21]. Thus the Egyptian-Ethiopian conflict of the opera may be no more than a background for the love conflict between Amneris, Radamès and Aida [22]. Even for those not standing in direct opposition to Said, therefore, his argument that Aida’s plot makes it a work of Empire does not stand up to scrutiny.

Discussions of an opera are academic, according to Robinson, unless the music is taken into account [23], and Said’s belief that Verdi’s score creates ‘an Orientalized Egypt’ is certainly part of his ‘contrapuntal reading’ of the opera as one of Empire [24]. He refers to specific examples such as the ‘loud military music’, the ‘chant of the priestesses’, the ‘ritual dance’, and the ‘Nile scene’ [25]. Certainly these examples can be shown to contain what Ralph Locke refers to as ‘the dialects of musical exoticism within Western art music that evoke the East or the orient’ [26]. The militaristic Su! Del Nilo [Example 1] and Gloria all’ Egitto [Example 2] contain many features of exoticism, such as monotone melodic motives and emphatic bass progressions, chromaticism in the harmony and scalic figures, off-the-beat rhythmic emphasis and juxtaposition, and repetitive instrumental elaborations set against vocal heterophony. The Sacred Dance of the Priestesses in the Consecration Scene [Example 3] has a primitivistic repetitive bass pedal on E-flat, with a “snake-charmer” style of melody combining trills, acciaccaturas and triplets; the entry of the priestesses for ‘Hail mighty Phtha!’ undulates with an other-worldly semitonal motive around E-flat. Many such features are employed for the Dance of Young Moorish Slaves [Example 4] and the Shores of the Nile Scene [Example 5], although in these instances the strangeness is emphasised by the repeated use of staccato and stark octave relationships respectively. The identification of these features as exotic certainly suggests a sonic Orientalization of Egypt, lending credence to Said’s argument that ‘traces’ of Empire are still ‘to be read, seen, and heard’ in the work [27].

However, while Said mentions familiar features of exoticism such as ‘harmonic clichés’, ‘a flattening of the hypertonic’, and ‘instances of Oriental instruments’ [28], he fails to connect these - other than by association - to specific occurrences in Aida’s score. Said’s point that Aida’s music is Orientalist because Verdi was inspired by Napoleon’s idealised Description, rather than by accurate Egyptological research [29], fails to convince Robinson. Engaging with the score itself [30], Robinson agrees that the Sacred Dance of the Priestesses, the Dance of Young Moorish Slaves and the Shores of the Nile Scene are of ‘the oriental style’, an idiom he also identifies in the Tomb Scene [31] [Example 6], which does indeed contain chromaticism and rhythmic juxtaposition, florid melodic elaborations, and monotonous bass progressions. Yet, because these Orientalist tropes are identified - in Robinson’s view - not with Egypt but with its subjects, the music ‘hardly serves to create what Said calls “an Orientalized Egypt”’ [32]. Robinson even denies that the Egyptian martial music of the first two Acts is Orientalized at all, supporting his point both with anecdotal evidence, and with his analysis that ‘[Su! Del Nilo] is four-square, closed and classical, its harmonies familiar, and its accompaniment emphatic’ [33]. While Robinson’s analysis may dismiss as militaristic some features - such as emphatic accompaniment - which I have identified as exoticisms, his survey of the score clearly casts doubt on Said’s argument that Verdi’s sources of musical inspiration make Aida a work of Empire.

Said’s argument concerning the music is further weakened once gender considerations are taken into account. Said argues that, in transforming the priests of ancient Egyptian rites into priestesses, Verdi is not just demonstrating his anti-clericalism but also ‘following the conventional European practice of making Oriental women central to any exotic practice’ [34]. Robinson concedes that ‘all of the opera’s exotic music, in both its liturgical episodes and its ballets, is associated with women’, and his evidence that exoticist pictorialisms from women in Aida are ‘ideologically cancelled’ by music of the Western male idiom [35] is certainly credible. In, for example, the Consecration Scene [Example 3], the chromatic undulation of the priestesses is checked by an E-flat major plagal cadence - with its Bachian associations of the Western Church [36] - from the priests. If the Orientalist musical tropes of women in the opera find expression only within the frame of those from European male institutions [37], then Aida would be considered a work of Empire. However, since Robinson finds the exotic music of Aida to occupy ‘a kind of no-mans land’ [38], the tropery of gender need not signify subjugation of Orient by Occident. If Aida’s part [Example 7] is gendered by ‘its sinuous irregularity, its long legato lines, its close intervals, its chromatic harmonies, and its subdued woodwind orchestration’ [39], these exoticisms may simply portray her as more romantically inviting than Amneris. This is supported by MacKenzie’s reading that the generic ‘oriental atmosphere’ of Aida’s public scenes is mere ‘backdrop’ to the real drama: the characters’ personal lives [40]. Thus Said’s acknowledgement of the gendered binary opposition in Aida’s music does not necessarily strengthen his argument that the work is one of Empire.

Said’s argument gains greater substance where he takes a broader view of the opera, and his links between its overall structure and Verdi’s changing role as creator are convincingly presented. Verdi’s statement that he was interested only in composing ‘“unified” works, in which “the idea is ONE, and everything must converge to form this ONE”’ [41] leads Said to a bold conclusion:

. . . I believe Verdi fatally confused this complex and in the end collaborative capacity to bring a distant operatic fable to life with the Romantic ideal of an organically integrated, seamless work of art, informed only by the aesthetic intention of a single creator. Thus an imperial notion of the artist dovetailed conveniently with an imperial notion of a non-European world . . . [42]

This idea that Aida’s ‘self-sufficient’ unity made it ‘unique’ [43], both within Verdi’s career and in music history up to that point, is countered by Robinson’s claim that ‘Aida is still at heart a traditional number opera’, which maintains the style of Verdi’s previous works [44]. While Robinson’s point supports his contextualisation of Aida with Italian risorgimento politics [45], it is by no means corroborated by the score [Example 3]; scenes move seamlessly between instrumental passages, and solo, duet and chorus parts of various motivic idioms. Although proving Said’s structural analysis correct, this does not necessarily endorse his ‘imperial’ associations; Said’s dovetailing of Wagnerian seamlessness with Orientalism surely places the convenience on his part and not Verdi’s. Thus, even without denying Aida its place within the development of Romantic opera, it is possible to undermine Said’s argument that Verdi’s corresponding artistic metamorphosis makes the work one of Empire.

Robinson’s comment that, unlike opera, instrumental music leaves Said ‘liberated from the need to be ever watchful for orientalist subtexts or anti-Arab prejudices’ [46] is particularly telling. That Robinson must descend to personal mockery to achieve binary opposition with Said certainly casts doubt on his conservative interpretations of the Egyptian music, and his groundless assertion that Aida is merely one of Verdi’s number operas. Robinson’s comment is nevertheless a perspicacious reading of Said’s position in Culture and Imperialism which, by Said’s own admission, is ‘to focus as much as possible on individual works . . . and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire’ [47]. Thus Said is bound to implicate the cultural context and political associations of the opera’s genesis and mise-en-scène in his designation of the work as one of Empire. However, while Aida is firmly set in the ‘remote antiquity’ [48] of Egypt, this need not restrict it to issues of Empire [49]; also, Said’s notion that artists ‘were misguided by their age’s ambitions and imperial conspiracies’ is ‘faulty’ and ‘misleading’ according to some commentators [50].

Perhaps the central fallacy of Said’s argument is his insistence that Aida still ‘recalls’ its ‘enabling circumstances’ through ‘ghostly notations in the opera’s . . . musical text’ [51]. Placed against Robinson’s plot-centered technical analysis, this simply fails to convince. I would suggest that Verdi’s emphasis on characterisation and structural organicism makes his musical exoticisms nothing more than ‘a means of refreshing and expanding’ the musical language [52] for improvement of his artistic craft: one which, after all, does ‘demand the dramatic distancing of time and place’ [53]. Thus Verdi ‘fuses the exotic and spectacular features of grand opera’ for his ‘vivid delineation of personal relationships’ [54]. Said’s notion that such an approach makes Aida a work of Empire therefore only gains credence with his own Orientalism as the background. Like the Orientalist tropery fuelling his critique [55], Said’s argument is more self-referential than realistic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Budden, Julian. Liner Notes for Verdi: Aida. Middlesex: EMI Records, 1994.

Boyden, Matthew. The Rough Guide to Opera. 2nd Edition. London: Penguin Books, 1999.

Harlow, Barbara & Mia Carter, eds. Imperialism & Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

Haynes, Charles. Liner Notes for Verdi: Aida: The 1928 La Scala Recording. Wadhurst: Pavilion Records, 1990.

Locke, Ralph P. ‘Exoticism’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. Laura Macy (Accessed [06/03/02]) <http://www.grovemusic.com>.

____________. ‘Orientalism’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. Laura Macy (Accessed [06/03/02]) <http://www.grovemusic.com>.

____________. ‘Cutthroats & Casbah Dancers, Muezzins & Timeless Sands: Musical Images of the Middle East’ in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.

MacKenzie, John M. ‘Orientalism and Music’ in Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. 138-175.

Robinson, Paul. ‘Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?’, Cambridge Opera Journal 5/2 (July 1993). 133-140.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin Group, 1978.

_____________. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.

Scott, Derek B. ‘Orientalism and Musical Style’, The Musical Quarterly 82/2 (Summer 1998). 309-335.

Searight, Sarah. The British in The Middle East. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969.

Sharafuddin, Mohammed. Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient. London: Tauris & Co., 1994.

NOTES

[1] Edward W. Said, ‘The Empire at Work: Verdi’s Aida’ in Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), pp. 133-4, 138.

[2] Paul Robinson, ‘Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?’, Cambridge Opera Journal 5/2 (July 1993), p. 140.

[3] Said (1993), pp. 156-7.

[4] ibid., pp. 137, 152-6.

[5] ibid., pp. 141-2.

[6] Sarah Searight, The British in The Middle East (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 145.

[7] Said (1993), pp. 142-5.

[8] Barbara Harlow & Mia Carter, eds., Imperialism & Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p. 114.

[9] Robinson, p. 134.

[10] ibid., p. 135.

[11] Said (1993), pp. 138, 148.

[12] Robinson, p. 134.

[13] Said (1993), pp. 138-9.

[14] Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Group, 1978), pp. 1, 3, 5.

[15] John M. MacKenzie, ‘Orientalism and Music’ in Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 155.

[16] Said (1993), p. 151.

[17] Robinson, p. 135.

[18] ibid., p. 135.

[19] ibid., p. 135.

[20] Ralph P. Locke, ‘Orientalism’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. Laura Macy (Accessed [06/03/02]) http://www.grovemusic.com.

[21] MacKenzie, p. 166.

[22] Matthew Boyden, ed., The Rough Guide to Opera. 2nd Edition. (London: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 238-40.

[23] Robinson, p. 135.

[24] Said (1993), pp. 134, 145.

[25] ibid., pp. 145-7.

[26] Locke, ‘Orientalism’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online.

[27] Said (1993), p. 157.

[28] ibid., pp. 146-7.

[29] ibid., pp. 145-7.

[30] Robinson, p. 135.

[31] ibid., p. 137.

[32] ibid., p. 137.

[33] ibid., p. 136.

[34] Said (1993), p. 146.

[35] Robinson, pp. 138-9.

[36] ibid., p. 136.

[37] Derek B. Scott, ‘Orientalism and Musical Style’, The Musical Quarterly 82/2 (Summer 1998), p. 327.

[38] Robinson, p. 138.

[39] ibid., p. 136.

[40] MacKenzie, p. 166.

[41] Said (1993), p. 138.

[42] ibid., p. 140.

[43] ibid., pp. 137, 148.

[44] Robinson, pp. 139-40.

[45] ibid., pp. 139-40.

[46] ibid., p. 133.

[47] Said (1993), p. xxiv.

[48] Julian Budden, Liner Notes for Verdi: Aida (Middlesex: EMI Records, 1994), p. 9.

[49] Ralph P. Locke, ‘Cutthroats & Casbah Dancers, Muezzins & Timeless Sands: Musical Images of the Middle East’ in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Johnathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), p. 107.

[50] Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient (London: Tauris & Co., 1994), pp. viii-ix.

[51] Said (1993), p. 151.

[52] Ralph P. Locke, ‘Exoticism’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. Laura Macy (Accessed [06/03/02]) http://www.grovemusic.com.

[53] MacKenzie, p. 148.

[54] Charles Haynes, Liner Notes for Verdi: Aida: The 1928 La Scala Recording (Wadhurst: Pavilion Records, 1990).

[55] Scott, p. 309.