The polemicist Heather Mac Donald detects the dead hand of Edward Said behind the Met’s dysfunctional new production of Aida in which the supernumerary hero is a befuddled Egyptologist. Her brilliant article appears in next month’s issue of the neocon New Criterion.
Sample text:
Contemporary directors are particularly intent on putting an additional frame around a story’s original frame: we are not seeing Aida, for example, we are seeing the Egyptologists’ conception of Aida. Thus the recurring motif during an overture or at the start of a play of the actors and stagehands putting the final touches on their costumes and sets, all to arrest any naive identification that gullible audience members may have with the characters.
But the wandering Egyptologists have a more particular purpose as well. They are the vehicle through which Michael Mayer pays homage to the Ur-theorist of colonialist oppression: Edward Said. A month before the Mayer production opened, the Metropolitan Opera’s much-diminished house organ Opera News (now folded into a British magazine) ran an admiring essay on Said’s analysis of Aida. Even without that prep work, however, it was hard to miss the Saidian gloss on the famous triumphal-march scene. Gone were the chariots of the conquering Egyptians parading their gilded war trophies, gone were the horses pulling those chariots—a crowd-pleasing extravagance that was a beloved feature of the Met’s previous Aida production. Jaded music critics scorn the applause that inevitably breaks out when a live animal enters a stage. Now the horses and all the showy booty around them could be jettisoned for a reason beyond just highbrow embarrassment: the opportunity to replace them with the very image of orientalist cultural appropriation. As a handful of victorious Egyptian soldiers pass before the king, the Egyptologists carry relics stolen from the tomb—a miniature wooden elephant, a large white ibex, sculpted gryphons and falcons—up a long staircase at the back of the stage, the loot roped onto platforms like human chattel. Another Western interloper with a clipboard catalogues the heist.
The relationship between the opera’s Bronze Age characters and these nineteenth-century marauders was as inscrutable as ever. It was merely enough to know that we were watching a theft in progress. For Said devotees, that theft includes the opera itself.
Michael Mayer is best known among New York operagoers for setting Verdi’s Rigoletto in a glitzy 1960s Las Vegas—anachronisms like a feudal duke, a humpbacked courtier, and a virginal ingenue daughter be damned. Compared to the universe of the wrecking-ball directors who now dominate European opera houses, Mayer is innocuous, however. That makes his postcolonial framing of Aida all the more telling.
Said analyzed Aida in his 1994 book Culture and Imperialism. The Aida chapter encapsulates the most poisonous parts of Said’s project of deconstructing what he calls “Orientalism”—a phrase whose original scholarly meaning Said discards and replaces with everything he loathes about the West. Said presents Aida as a consummate act of Western pillage that left its target, never exactly defined, stripped of an equally undefined patrimony. Doing so entails distorting the opera’s rich historical background.
Read on here.
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