Aida and the empire of emotions

• Published in: Current musicology 2009-04 (87), p.133-159
• Main Author: Goehr, Lydia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adorno, Theodor W; Alliances; Burial; Ideology; Italian Opera; Kluge, Alexander; Music Criticism; Music Critics; Musical performances; Opera; Reading; Said, Edward W; Singers; Singing; Sociomusicology; Story Line; Textual Analysis; Verdi, Giuseppe
• ISSN: 0011-3735; 2640-883X; 0011-3735
• DOI: 10.7916/cm.v0i87.5154

In Giuseppe Verdi's "Aida," two lovers are buried alive, their lungs are full of gas from the crypt; they are cramped with hunger and, as they perish, decay does its unspeakable work on their bodies. The ways in which Theodor W. Adorno, Edward Said, and Alexander Kluge read Verdi's opera "Aida" with respect to the theme of being buried alive, where being buried alive can occur not only to characters in an opera according to a discourse of fate, also to the opera itself. To write about being buried alive but living as it were to tell the tale, the three critics ask whether a residue of resistance in the opera remains that allows the opera to escape a totalizing discourse of fate or fatality that threatens to destroy it. To offer a critical reading is to refuse to take the opera at face value, which means in part, as it appears on the stage. Adorno and Kluge read the opera against its grain first, with the aim, second, to find buried in its tomb the fragile terms of its resistant meanings or gestures. How they differ from one another is more subtle than how they jointly differ from Said, who engages the first task but not the second. In general, critical theorists seek in an opera its aesthetic-political contradiction, blind spot, or tragic knot in order to undo it.