Class News

Stephen Greenblatt ’64 sees Russia and Ukraine reflected in Aida

March 14, 2022

Stephen Greenblatt ’64 is on sabbatical in Rome with his wife Ramie. He emailed:

“Ramie and I are still enjoying our sabbatical in Italy, though the events to our east are profoundly disquieting. Two weeks ago we took the train down to Naples to see Aida at the opera there, and what we saw had a strange, unnerving bearing on what was going on. I wrote it up, thinking I might send it out somewhere, but the events were moving at such a crazy speed that I thought better of it. I send it along to you, just so you catch a glimpse of us.”

Aida

by Stephen Greenblatt ’64

Ramie and I went to Naples on Saturday night to see the final performance in a production of Verdi’s Aida at the Teatro di San Carlo, the city’s beautiful and venerable opera house. Earlier in the run the soprano who sang the title role was the Russian superstar Anna Netrebko, but for the last set of performances, including the one we saw, Aida was sung by the splendid (but far less famous) Liudmyla Monastyrska.

With the war in Ukraine very much on our minds, it was difficult to keep a focus entirely on the the struggle between the Egyptians and the Ethiopians in ancient times. It is not that our minds were wandering. Rather, as with all powerful works of art, the music and the story reached forward from the distant world in which it is set, and from the historical circumstances when it first premiered in 1871 in the newly built opera house in Cairo. It seized instead upon the present moment and would not let it go. When the messenger tells the Pharoah that the enemy army has crossed the borders and is marching on the capital, or when the chorus calls for war to defend the homeland — “Guerra, e morte allo stranier!” — news reports from Kyiv and images of civilians filling bottles to make Molotov cocktails came flooding in upon us.

The production itself made no attempt to conjure up these images. On the contrary, its design made the usual rather shopworn gestures toward the Old Kingdom, complete with Sphynxes, scantily-clad orientalist dancers, head-shaven priests, stylized temple and tomb. Nor does the opera’s libretto, by the novelist and poet Antonio Ghislanzoni, lend itself particularly well to an allegory of the present. There is not, as there is overwhelmingly at this moment, a clear sense of right and wrong sides. The Egyptians are wronged by the Ethiopians but, as we discover through Aida and her father, the Ethiopians too have suffered, their beloved cities burned down, their people slaughtered. In Aida there is no evil tyrant consumed with a sense of imperial grandeur, no chorus of desperate civilians seeking shelter, no voice of simple human decency calling out for help. But what there is instead is the spectacular intensity, grandeur, and intelligence of Verdi’s music, qualities that cut through the barriers of time and space and speak directly to the feelings of outrage, fear, and grief that we have all been experiencing.

The intensity of our response on Saturday was heightened by our knowledge that Liudmyla Monastyrska is a Ukrainian, from Kyiv. It is difficult to imagine what it must have been like to perform the part at this moment or what she could have been feeling when she sang the words

Felice esser poss'io
Lungi dal suol natio, qui dove ignota
M'è la sorte del padre e dei fratelli?

[Ah, how can I be happy
Far from my native country, where I can never
Know what fate has befallen father and brothers?]

It was doubly difficult when we took in the fact that in the last night’s performance the mezzo soprano who was singing Amneris, Aida’s mortal rival and enemy, was Ekaterina Gubanova, a Russian from Moscow.

An article in the newspaper La Repubblica the morning after the performance took note of the fact that the two have sung the parts together at the Met and in Vienna. In response to the reporter’s question, Gubanova said cautiously that she is an artist and does not follow politics, but that she is in favor of peace. Monastyrska said that she is frantically anxious about her family and the fate of her country. The worst of it, she said, is that she cannot go home and does not know when she will be able to return.

Monastyrska must have been asked (or, in any case, felt the need) to explain how she could intend to sing at this moment with a Russian. “I will sing with Ekaterina because this is a theater,” she said. “In this production we are an international team: Italians, Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles. As always we go on stage with pleasure to make art together, and … I profoundly respect my colleagues, regardless of their nationality.”

In some sense this all seems utterly absurd and meaningless — as they sing, Putin’s troops are besieging Kyiv and other cities. And the absurdity is intensified by the libretto, with its calls for war and its triumphal marches and its longings for revenge. What does it matter that a Ukrainian and a Russian were on stage singing together or that they embraced during the curtain call? What does art matter in times of siege? But it was interesting that the audience at the performance we attended, after shouting the requisite appreciative calls of “Bravi,” began to shout “Pace,” an oddly fitting close for an opera in which there were stirring calls for “Guerra” but in which the tragic outcome was death for both the Egyptian and the Ethiopian.

And if in times of siege art seems powerless, I tell myself that the unbelievable courage manifested by the besieged people and their leaders must have its roots in soil enriched by centuries of visionary art-making of the kind epitomized in Giuseppe Verdi’s masterpiece.