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Verdi, Aida: new production, Christopher Alden producer, soloists, chorus, orchestra Deutsche Oper Berlin, Renato Palumbo conductor, Germany. 2.3.2008 (MM)

The last new Aida at the Deutsche Oper was fifteen years ago, staged by the grand old man of West Berlin opera, Götz Fredrich. Thus it was high time for a new look and the first chance to see it was at its premiere on March 2nd. Inexplicable, perhaps even foolhardy was the Deutsche Oper Berlin's choice of an American production team for this Italian Egyptian classic. Led by stage director Christopher Alden, the team included Roy Rallo as co-director, Andrew Lieberman as designer, Doey Luethi as costume designer and Adam Silverman as lighting designer.

It was a site specific production as Berlin itself was the protagonist, physically represented on the Deutsche Oper stage by fine, slick modern architecture that self consciously evokes the historical and traditional Berlin – massive brick walls, ample marble, huge block shapes, clumsy neo-gothic references (nothing at all to do with the international avant guard mercantile Berlin plops of Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, or Jean Nouvel). Designer Andrew Lieberman encased Aida's eight scenes in this interior space, scene changes marked by light changes, the gamut of Verdi's atmospheres virtuostically evoked by Adam Silverman.

Just as Berlin has been reborn as political propaganda, Aida too was born as political propaganda to celebrate Egypt's new stature as the part-owner and guard dog of Suez Canal. Verdi reluctantly accepted the enormous commission only when he learned that if he did not, then  Wagner might. The nineteenth century French Egyptologist Mariette Bey provided Verdi with the gruesome background of a fanatical second millennium B.C. church/state to which Verdi sacrificed the not-so-innocent slave Aida. On a cold wet day in Berlin this sacrifice became a chilling love-death drowning.

Making this new Aida circular, the Alden/Rallo staging opens with a drowned body dragged from a black marble basin, the baptismal font in an evangelical church kept spotlessly polished by Aida, humbling herself as a servant to its massive power. Aida and the large congregation are clad in DDR socialist uniforms (gray skirts/pants, white blouses/shirts), holding, sometimes waving their Maoist bibles. These images from contemporary and recent history easily recall the countless fanatical tyrants and regimes that add political piquancy to centuries of opera stories.

The high priest Ramfis, an impeccably suited leader preaches on his platform, his face and body plastered against the marble, heaven-directed central pillar, his bible held tightly against the pillar to take strength from its strength, his voice magically, extra-corporeally (loud speakers) directing his followers. Radames, immobile on a folding chair, pours out his Celeste Aida. He is ordained by the priestess Amneris whose grace is marked by a symbolic tiara. Aida, Radames and Amneris sit unmoving on three adjacent downstage chairs to voice the conflicts that will momentarily rock the foundations of the church.

The Alden/Rallo triumphal scene is a masterpiece of satire with its frenzy of images illustrating the American mega-church phenomenon and its insidious use of vanity and self-indulgence as techniques of mind control. This scene is both highest comedy and harshest condemnation, yet always with the theatrics of magnificence that Verdi envisioned for this, his most famous scene. Capping the first part of the evening the triumphal scene was rewarded with thunderous applause from the opening night audience.

Back in the thick of emotional conflict,  Aida teased the high C of O patria mia, and made one of the evening's few staging movements, walking towards her father, hidden in the midst of a sea of empty chairs. The Alden staging poetic is based on developing concept not character. Dramatic tension is generated through the gradual revelation and friction of larger concepts, the actors  themselves not  characters but  concepts. Thus, dramatic interaction is irrelevant, as the music, voice and body are the symbols and facts of the concept. Alden succeeds in creating huge tensions, and these tensions palpably gripped the opening night audience.

Directors Alden and Rallo's vocal collaborators were eager participants in the ritual. Soprano Annalisa Raspagliosi was the beautiful young Aida, seemingly as comfortable polishing the floor as reaching for her high C. Mexican Tenor Carlo Ventre filled the shoes of Radames with his fine, well-schooled Italianate tenor, coolly the sacrificial murderer and the lover of Aida. Mezzo Irina Mishura made a large voiced, small scale Amneris, most effective at the end when humiliated in power and love and stripped of her grace, she delivered the last words of the opera, a curse, crouched in darkness against the proscenium. Bass Raymond Aceto exuded a raw, almost real, charisma as the high priest Ramfis, accompanied always by a mute, ruthless, sexless, stately blond matron acolyte embodied by Jacqueline Wagner. Baritone Zeljko Lucic was the less exotic - and in fact confusing - Amonasro, projecting a human presence, the only such warmth in this otherwise coldly conceptual Alden/Rallo Aida.

Marked by refinement of concept and elegance of realization, the production was light years away from the blatant and obvious, if serviceable conducting of Renato Palumbo, oblivious to the formidable theater art that was happening on the stage.

The one hundred seventy six cast members took bow after bow and  Mr. Palumbo was loudly applauded. After a suspenseful delay the production team appeared, the audience howled its appreciation and approval -  it only sounded like boos. Maestro Palumbo did not come to the post-performance party.

Michael Milenski

Fotos © Bettina Stöß

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