Aida is one score very known, but that it continues surprising. Its premičre in the Opera of Cairo was the zenith of the humiliation of the Islam for the European bourgeoisie. Aida places in a space inexistent and in a timeless time: the ancient Egypt where the action happens has lost for us all meaning; the space, the period and the characters only exist in the stage: they have become a pure symbol.
It is logical, then, that in the Liceu we all were, from the Catalan bourgeoisie tighter until the one that has just arrived. President Pasqual Maragall was there, ripped and launched in the wastepaper basket how the envelope of the letter for the Spanish socialists, with whom he had come to an agreement about the "finis Cataloniae" without pain. Joan Maria Nin was there, in the balcony of la Caixa, of which he is new general manager. Many uncles who do not go out any more from home were there; and they led the grandchildren with her. To cry them with the spiritual love of "Celeste Aida, forma divina" of the first act; so that they cried with the material epic of the trumpets of "Gloria all'Egitto" of the second act.
The ritual of going to see Aida in the Liceu this year it’s magnificent: the bond between love and eternity, emotional and brilliantly pompous, happening "like always", that is, in the scenography used by Josep Mestres i Cabanes for the first time in year 1945. This precisely has been one of the best ideas of the Liceu of this winter: representing Aida with the magnificent curtains of 1945, of always, that the sight does not get tired of admiring.
Why to change them? The Egyptians grasped the universe as essentially static. With this the existence of the change was not denied; but the change, in the measure in which had a sense, was the repetition of the change, the vital rhythm of a universe that had come out, complete and immutable, of the hands of its creator. How we would have wanted to be the bourgeois world.
The melodies of Aida, paradigm of the immortal beauty of a static world, are for the public of the Liceu a valuable possession, an exercise of recognition of something imprecise. The familiarity of each of the melodies of Aida is the means to exercise this unreal memory. Aida ties us to the memory of a thing forgotten a lot of time ago: the legendary golden age of the Catalan bourgeoisie.
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