Blackness in Opera

3. Nationalism, Racial Difference, and "Egyptian" Meaning in Verdi's Aida

3 Nationalism, Racial Difference, and “Egyptian” Meaning in Verdi’s Aida christopher r. gauthier and jennifer mcfarlane-harris In a July 16, 1870, letter to Giuseppe Piroli, a good friend in Rome, Giuseppe Verdi writes, “I am busy. Guess! . . . Writing an opera for Cairo!!! Oof. I shall not go to stage it because I would be afraid of being mummified. . . . If anyone had told me two years ago, You will write for Cairo, I would have considered him a fool; but now I see that I am the fool.”1 Verdi’s humor reveals his attitude toward Egypt; like many Westerners of the period, Verdi regarded Egypt and its “civilization” as a curiosity. In fact, as the above letter indicates, Verdi did not go to Cairo for the world premiere of Aida at the Cairo Opera House on December 24, 1871. Instead, he put monumental effort into preparing the singers and staging for Aida’s European debut at La Scala in Milan.2 Critics and commentators ever since seem to have followed Verdi’s lead; effectively, the history of the performance of Aida does not begin until 1872.3 Perhaps a lack of information on the first performance in Cairo has led to a certain silence about Aida as it was first staged in Egypt. Indeed, other than the oft-quoted article by Filippo Filippi, an Italian critic who attended the Egyptian premiere, there seems to be little information available on the first production of Aida in Cairo.4 Despite a lack of evidence regarding the Egyptian reaction to this first performance , however, we should no longer ignore the Egyptian context. Instead, we must return to Cairo circa 1871to answer one of the most intriguing questions suggested by this opera: how do we make sense of the dynamics of race in Aida? Race Relations Race matters in Aida, but how it matters hinges on multiple factors. Although race has been discredited as a valid scientific means of human classification, it is still tempting to view race as a biological concept based on correlations between heredity and physiology. This temptation likely arises from a “commonsense” understanding of race as a taxonomic system based on “a set of physical categories that can be used consistently and informatively to describe, explain, and make predictions about groups of human beings and individual members of those groups.”5 The fact that the physical characteristics employed to differentiate racial categories (such as complexion, hair texture, facial features, and so on) vary across cultures and throughout history makes biological explanations of racial difference dubious. The very idea of race is a product of human endeavor rather than “natural” forces. Furthermore, because racial signifiers and their meanings are articulated differently according to time, place, and social context, the content of racial categories is highly unstable.6 Ian F. Haney López maintains that this instability stems from the fact that racial categories are constructed in order to perform the ideological function of justifying or explaining the relative positions of subjugated and elevated groups.7 Simply put, race is a signifier that justifies and explains social difference. Therefore, any meaningful analysis of race must bypass the compulsion to treat race as a universal concept in favor of an approach that is sensitive to history, contingency, and local meaning. In this chapter we will focus on Aida as a European cultural artifact that, when considered in the context of nineteenth-century Egypt, generates Egyptian meaning as a by-product. The 1871 Cairo premiere of Aida is a fruitful historical locality to examine when trying to understand the workings of racial difference, particularly because such differences lie uncomfortably on the surface of the opera. Our interpretation locates Aida at the nexus of race and nationalism in Egypt. We argue that, for Egyptians, Aida may have spoken to a sense of emergent Egyptian identity, an identity at least partially forged in relation to darker-skinned Africans living to the south. By analyzing the libretto and music of Aida and demonstrating how these elements connect to discourses of light-skinned Egyptian superiority and dark-skinned African inferiority, we will show that racial dynamics in the opera are revealed through aural, visual, and textual dynamics.8 The specificities of Egypt’s relations with its racial-national Others are manifested through the relationships between characters in the opera, illuminating a larger project of Egyptian identity formation through “racial fabrication.”9 Aida and the Orientalist Critique In order to understand how identity categories such as Ethiopian...