Back in the old days, Aida was the fun opera — OK, maybe not exactly The Barber of Seville, but as much fun as something which ends with two people being bricked up in a vault could be. What everyone knows about it is pyramids and apocryphal elephants, all that Pharaonic ceremonial with massive parades and Verdi in triumphal-march mode. Then there’s the central love triangle, with Princess Amneris in killer-bitch overdrive after finding that her intended, the army guy Radames, is making cow-eyes at her scuzzy Ethiopian slave Aida. She gets a lot of mileage out of setting rather obvious traps for them to shop themselves — which they do with gratifying readiness. 

Carsen chickens out of having a cartoon villain

Obviously fun is not what we go to the opera for these days. Nor is opera, really, if this new staging by the “dependable” Canadian director Robert Carsen is anything to go by. No, we are in a world of determinedly low-key angst (and attractive ferro-concrete). Nobody is waving their arms or staggering about in despair and maddened jealousy, the elephants and dancing girls have been replaced by fatuous tableaus of people gloomily laying tables and soldiers saluting in a lubberly fashion or handing out hymn books with arse-numbing slowness. This allows us to hear just how by-the-numbers all that tarantara stuff is, previously just a nice rousing background to diverting visual fooflah. Done like this, utterly pointlessly, you silently scream, “Cut it!” (which would make it a nice short opera, to be sure.)

Verdi was perhaps making (inter alia) some sort of point about war and all that, or writing a “savage denunciation of macho power posturing” as the usual 11-Plus programme intro informs us (who on earth do they think goes to Covent Garden?). So Carsen lines up the usual naughty boys — Russia, America, China — outside the headmaster’s study, making a rather revealing decision to excise the religious angle. In fact it is theocracy that Verdi — never a big fan of priests, and here in 1871 grabbing the chance to take a swipe at their overweening power following Italian unification — has it in for, but Carsen chickens out of having a cartoon villain like old Patriarch Kirill overseeing the show-trial that sends Radames to the ultimate cooler, instead delegating this duty to a gang of soldiers sitting in a bunkerish chapel. To be fair, everything here is bunkerish.

Aida is a strange opera, no doubt, written to entertain international liggers at the Cairo opera house (the joint being run by Turkey then, you remember). Clearly Covent Garden can’t do any Africa-based thing, given prevailing neuroses — though Venice did a full-on “Egyptian” production, with, er, “heavy make-up” as recently as 2019. Perhaps there’s never been a satisfactory staging. Certainly previous goes at Covent Garden — a regularly glacial tai-chi-in-the-desert number by Robert Wilson, followed by a forgettable brutalist job by the Royal Opera’s discarded darling David McVicar — both failed to find a way of putting the bits together in a cogent way. Same here, really, though Carsen’s highly controlled mise-en-scene has a certain logic, even if it merely disapproves of militarism without offering any smart ideas about how these Egyptians should actually deal with an Ethiopian invasion in a manner the Guardian might approve.

Musically, we couldn’t be in better hands

We’re down to the central trio, and they’re pretty good, with Elena Stikhina’s very focused and touching heroine having to shoulder the entire burden of speaking directly to our hearts, which many would say is Verdi’s trump suit. In this sense Aida is the prototype of the much starker Tosca, written by Puccini about 30 years later, featuring the same setup of innocence crushed by nasty power structures. Naturally, with Puccini it’s larded with tons of salacious sadism, and the comparison clarifies Verdi’s amazing strength in unsentimental, non-melodramatic, appallingly graphic pathos. Stikhina comes as close as possible to making Aida into a genuine human — rather simple-minded, dreadfully conflicted, quite unsuited to this unpleasant world. Her boss/nemesis Amneris, with a distinctly Melanian air, isn’t allowed the full, gleeful Dynasty hellcat number, but Agnieszka Rehlis is forthright enough. Stalwart Francesco Meli as Radames, the bullheaded soldier with a soft heart, is a bit shouty but manages the nightmarish (for a tenor) Celeste Aida opening number with some delicacy and total control. This is about the most important part of his job.

Musically, we couldn’t be in better hands, even if you wish conductor Tony Pappano would let rip a bit more in the Nuremberg-rally stuff. It’s all very cultured, the orchestra is on top form, the exotica beguiling, the sudden woodwind solos that speak of love and sadness amid the turmoil beautifully placed and stabbingly effective. Sure, much brow-furrowed effort is wasted on trying to make Aida something it isn’t, really, but Verdi fights back like a champ. 

You can catch it at the flicks in October.