Aida

A visual ritual in which beauty and conflict are in constant dialogue.

"When love and duty contradict one another, the heart becomes both altar and abyss at the same time"

Søren Kierkegaard

El Liceu opens its season with an exceptional cast led by Anna Netrebko and Anna Pirozzi in the role of Aida, alongside Yusif Eyvazov and Piotr Beczała as Radamès. A deluxe opening to bring to life one of Verdi's most monumental operas, presented in a striking production by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, which turns Aida into "a visual ritual in which beauty and conflict are in constant dialogue".

This production, originating from the Salzburg Festival, shuns the usual grandiloquence and sets Verdi's drama in a universe of great symbolic force. Neshat, with her poetic and committed vision, transforms Aida into a narrative that engages with contemporary tensions: identity, exile, oppression, and the fragility of power. The opera thus becomes a mirror of the present, in which aesthetics are combined with a subtle yet piercing political reading.

Often interpreted as a love story in an idealised Egypt, Aida reveals a deeper conflict: the collision between the sacred and established power. Aida, an enslaved Ethiopian princess, and Radamès, an Egyptian hero, love each other in secret and defy a system that condemns love as dissent. Their story, doomed from the start, highlights a rigid structure in which law and religion merge to justify repression.

Neshat's staging accentuates this tension with a visual beauty that does not renounce critique. In the final tomb, Aida and Radamès find a final space of freedom: death becomes redemption, in a gesture of emotional and spiritual liberation that transcends the violence surrounding them.

With musical direction by Antonello Manacorda, and featuring Ekaterina Semenchuk and Ksenia Dudnikova as Amneris, as well as Artur Ruci