In a Chapter titled 'The Empire at Work- Verdi's Aida', Edward Said writes
Consider Aida, Verdi's famous "Egyptian" opera.
Egypt was ruled by an Albanian dynasty which had broken away from the Ottoman Caliph. Verdi came from Italy parts of which were still held by the Hapsburg Emperor. Thankfully, the defeat of the French Emperor by the Prussians meant that the Papal States could join the Kingdom of Italy. My point is that when the Egyptian King commissions Verdi to write an Opera for him, what is triumphing is Nationalis over Imperialism. Said, being a stupid American- though his father was born as a subject of the Ottoman Caliph- thinks the anti-Imperialist, Nationalist, Verdi represented 'the Empire at Work'. One may as well say that Said's book is 'the CIA at work' because Said is an American Citizen & the CIA 'centralizes American Intelligence'- or what passes for it.
As a visual, musical, and theatrical spectacle, Aida does a great many things for and in European culture, one of which is to confirm the Orient as an essentially exotic, distant, and antique place in which Europeans can mount certain shows of force.
Fuck off! Aida is an Ethiopian princess who has been captured and enslaved. The context is Egypt's push southward through the Sudan to Ethiopia & the headwaters of the Nile. The Egypt-Ethiopia war was fought between 1874-6. The opera was first performed in Cairo in 1871.
For the West, Aida is about ancient Empires- that of Egypt & Ethiopia & other such places where Moses or Abraham or other such Biblical personalities wandered around herding sheep or goats or camels or whatever.
For Egyptians Aida is a romantic melodrama. In the 1942 film 'Aida' starring Umm Khulthum, Aida is the daughter of a talented tenant farmer. After his death, the feudal landlord becomes her guardian. But his own son falls in love with her. Can true love triumph over differences of class and caste?
Concurrently with the composition of Aida, European "universal'' expositions routinely contained models of colonial villages, towns, courts, and the like; the malleability and transportability of secondary or lesser cultures was underlined.
So what? There were also models of ancient Roman or Egyptian or Celtic or Eskimo settlements. Said, racist cunt that he is, thinks anything not European is 'lesser' culture.
These subaltern cultures
Winston Churchill was a subaltern. The word, in English, means 'second lieutenant'- i.e. it is the first rank held by one of the officer class.
were exhibited before Westerners as microcosms of the larger imperial domain.
That was certainly true of Imperial Exhibitions. But it wasn't confined to colonies. There was a Japanese 'village' in Kensington, intended to boost exports of traditional handicrafts so as to help finance Japanese industrialization. This inspired 'The Mikado'- & with 'three little girls at school are we' the vast flood of Japanese school-girl porn which the internet has unleashed.
Little, if any, allowance was made for the non-European except within this framework.
Fuck off! Gilbert & Sullivan didn't think Japan would become a colony. They did think there was something ludicrous about a distant island emulating English institutions. But within 15 years, the Royal Navy was pressing for an alliance with that island.
Aida is synonymous with "grand opera" of the uniquely high nineteenth century type.
The French type but Italians & Germans developed it further in different directions. The Brits, thanks to WS Gilbert, infused it with wit & whimsy.
Along with a very small group of others, it has survived for more than a century both as an immensely popular work and as one for which musicians, critics, and musicologists have a healthy respect. Yet Aida's grandeur and eminence, although evident to anyone who has seen or heard it, are complex matters about which all sorts of speculative theories exist, mostly about what connects Aida to its historical and cultural moment in the West.
It was commissioned by the Khedive, whose status had been recognised by the Caliph in 1867, who hoped to be greatly enriched by the Suez Canal & was planning to secure Sudan & a route to the headwaters of the Nile. This is still an important feature of Egyptian foreign policy & represents a big problem for Ethiopia.
In Opera: The Extravagant Art, Herbert Lindenberger puts forward the imaginative theory that Aida, Boris Godunov, and GOtterdammerung are operas of 187o, tied respectively to archeology, nationalist historiography, and philology.
Aida was paid for by the Khedive to promote Egypt's 'material' interests. Suez & the headwaters of the Nile remain crucial to that country.
Wieland Wagner, who produced Aida at Berlin in 1962, treats the opera, in his words, as "an African mystery."
Because he had shit for brains. It is about Egypt's claim to a special role with respect to the Nile's headwaters.
... Whereas it had been Italy and Italians (with special force, paradoxically enough, in Nabucco) who were addressed in Verdi's earlier operas, despite the often exotic or outre subject matter, in Aida it was Egypt and Egyptians of early antiquity, a far remoter and less engaging phenomenon than Verdi had ever set to music.
Verdi wasn't stupid. There were plenty of Italians in Egypt. They knew the dynasty was foreign (Albanian) a were most of the Pashas (feudal landlords). The indigenous fellaheen were getting nothing. Like the contadino, the authentic Egyptian was the descendant of great Emperors & a sublime civilization but earned their bread hewing wood & drawing water for 'barbarian' masters.
Not that Aida wants for his customary political noisiness, for surely Act II, scene 2 (the so-called Triumphal scene) is the biggest thing Verdi wrote for the stage, a virtual jamboree of everything an opera house can collect and parade.
It's what the Khedive wanted. He thought he was the cat's whiskers. First Sudan, then Ethiopia, then Uganda- who knows how large his Empire would eventually become? Sadly, he ran out of cash & his French & English creditors imposed a 'Veiled Protectorate' which he had to accept because the alternative was an Arab revolt.
But Aida is self-limiting, atypically held in, and there is no record of any participatory enthusiasm connected with it, even though at New York's Metropolitan Opera, for instance, it has been performed more times than any other work.
Verdi did what was asked of him because he was well paid to do so. But he didn't really care if some Albanian or Circassian parasite, who had bought himself a title, styled himself as Magnifico or Fantastico or Biggest Dickico. The dude would soon get his comeuppance for saying 'my country is no longer only in Africa; we are now part of Europe, too. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions'. The Brits got the Caliph to rescind his title. His son became Britain's puppet. Ismail himself died in Istanbul- which is in Europe, but which is Islamic.
Verdi's other works that dealt with remote or alien cultures did not inhibit his audiences from identifying with them anyway, and, like the earlier operas, Aida is about a tenor and a soprano who want to make love but are prevented by a baritone and a mezzo. What are the differences in Aida. and why did Verdi's habitual mix produce so unusual a blend of masterly competence and affective neutrality?
The Egyptians got Verdi right. It was poor girl loves rich boy. Will Daddy permit them to get hitched? This is a popular plot in Bollywood musicals. The Egyptians are a bit more artistic & refined- i.e. no vulgar dance numbers- but an Indian can watch 'Nawara' happily enough though it only features instrumental tracks.
The circumstances of Aida's first production and under which it was written are unique in Verdi's career. The political and certainly the cultural setting in which Verdi worked between early 1870 and late 1871 included not only Italy, but imperial Europe
France lost its Emperor. Europe was becoming less Imperial. The new Kaiser was 'Emperor in, not of, Germany'.
and viceregal Egypt, an Egypt technically within the 'Ottoman Empire but now gradually being established as a dependent and subsidiary part of Europe.
No. It first moved in an independent direction but then ran out of money. Also, the indigenous Arabs were unhappy.
Aida's peculiarities--its subject matter and setting, its monumental grandeur, its strangely unaffecting visual and musical effects, its overdeveloped music and constricted domestic situation, its eccentric place in Verdi's career- require what I have been calling a contrapuntal interpretation,
Rather than the true explanation which was economic. Verdi was paid to produce something state of the art but with an Eastern setting. Is the 'liebestod' (love-in-death) finale unaffecting? No. Egypt has its own Sufi or 'hubb al Udhri' tradition. Aida dies of her own volition for such is the fate of the Udhri. The 'tomb within the tomb' is the final 'barzakh' uniting, as their common limit, Eros & Thanatos- Love & Death. Don't forget Wagner was influenced by Schopenhauer who was influenced by the Vedantic tradition as translated by Dara Shikoh- a Sufi.
assimilable neither to the standard view of Italian opera
The standard view is that it's fucking great, mate. The triumphal march from Aida is used by many football club supporters in Italy. The Scots, with greater discernment, adopted 'Yes Sir. I can boogie.'
nor more generally to prevailing views of the great masterpieces of nineteenth-century European civilization.
The prevailing view is that they were boring shite.
Aida, like the opera form itself, is a hybrid, radically impure work that belongs equally to the history of culture and the historical experience of overseas domination.
Nonsense! India was dominated by the Brits. We didn't have no fucking Opera. On the other hand, the Afro-American Jubilee singers were a big hit.
It is a composite work,
No. It is the work of an accomplished auteur. Verdi even got a special type of trumpet created.
built around disparities and discrepancies
There are no such things. Said could play the piano. He thought this made him a fucking musicologist.
that have been either ignored or unexplored,
because they are stupid shite
that can be recalled and mapped descriptively;
by a shithead
they are interesting in and of themselves, and they make more sense of Aida's unevenness,
wholly a product of the difficulties of staging. The music isn't uneven at all.
its anomalies, its restrictions and silences, than analyses of the kind that focus on Italy and European culture exclusively.
Did Verdi produce something which incorporated all the latest trends in Grand Opera? Yes. He did what he was paid to do.
I shall put before the reader material that paradoxically cannot be overlooked but systematically has been.
That material is shit Said pulled out of his ass.
This is mostly because the embarrassment of Aida is finally that it is not so much about but of imperial domination.
It is neither. The Khedive wanted to create a big African Empire. This seemed feasible. The problem was money & growing disaffection on the part of the indigenous Arab population.
Similarities with Jane Austen's work
Not to mention Grimm's fairy tales
-equally improbable as being involved with empire-
Austen wasn't involved with 'Empire'. One or two characters make money from West Indian estates or East Indian bounties. But, for the most part, Incomes are derived from rents on agricultural estates. Colonies could be lost at any moment. Fleets could be sunk. Even Consols might be repudiated if Napoleon won. That is why, rents on land were the safest investment.
-will emerge. If one interprets Aida from that perspective, aware that the opera was written for and first produced in an African country
a Mediterrannean country which had been ruled by Greeks & Romans and which was ruled by a dynasty of Albanian descent.
with which Verdi had no connection,
Did you know Nebuchadnezzar was actually a Milanese gentleman? He and Verdi's grandfather went into the Olive Oil business together.
a number of new features will stand out. Verdi himself says something to this effect in a letter that inaugurates his as yet almost completely latent connection with an Egyptian opera. Writing to Camille du Lode
a friend of the Egyptologist who outlined the story or 'scenario' for Aida
, a close friend who had just returned from a voyage en Orient, Verdi remarks on February 19, 1868: "When we see each other, you must-describe all the events of your voyage: the wonders you have seen, and the beauty and ugliness of a country which once had a greatness and a civilization I had never been able to admire."
A common enough sentiment. Egypt represented despotism. Rome & Athens had started off as Republics.
On November 1, 1869, the inauguration of the Cairo Opera House was a brilliant event during celebrations for the opening of the Suez Canal; Rigoletto was the opera performed. A few weeks before, Verdi had turned down Khedive Ismail's offer to write a hymn for the occasion, and in December he wrote du Lode a long letter on the dangers of "patchwork" operas: "I want art in any of its manifestations, not the arrangement, the artifice, and the system that you prefer," he said, arguing that for his part he wanted "unified" works, in which "the idea is ONE, and everything must converge to form this ONE."
In other words Verdi was yielding to the influence of Wagner. My own feeling is that the genius of sunny Italy or even sunnier India is for something more variegated. Thrill, Spills, Comedy, Tragedy, & poor girl marrying the rich boy & fucking the brains out of that milksop.
Said admits that, apart from the money,
...Verdi saw a chance to create a work whose every detail he could supervise from beginning sketch to opening night. In addition, he was to be supported in this enterprise by royalty: indeed, du Lode suggested that the Viceroy not only desperately wanted the piece for himself, but also had helped Mariette in writing it.
In other words, he'd get paid. But Verdi also wanted the thing to be 'best in class'. That is what he delivered.
... Egypt's submissive or at least indifferent presence in his life allowed him to pursue his artistic intentions with what appeared to be an uncompromising intensity.
Egypt was irrelevant just as Iraq was irrelevant to Nabucco. Aida was set in the distant past.
But I believe Verdi fatally confused this complex and in the end collaborative capacity to bring a distant operatic fable to life with the Romantic ideal of an organically integrated, seamless work of art, informed only by the aesthetic intention of a single creator.
Romantic & Romance are words which come from Rome- whose language was Latin. Romantic literature subsists by transfusions from the Classical world. Organically integrated & seamless just means that the ballet is detached from the rest of the Opera. In France, the aristocratic members of the Jockey Club wanted the ballet to always be in the Second Act because it was their brutal custom to skip the first act & then fuck the sweaty ballerinas after the Second Act. After that, they went to the Casino. Wagner had to withdraw Tannhauser, where the ballet is in the first Act, because of the ruckus created by the aristocrats.
My point is that this business of a Gesamtkunstwerk- a total art work- with a single auteur was a way to rid Opera of the undue influence of drunken lechers. If this hadn't been done Grand Opera would have swiftly degenerated into burlesque.
Thus an imperial notion of the artist
Represented by the Court composer or Master of Revels or whatever
dovetailed conveniently with an imperial notion of a non-European world whose claims on the European composer were either minimal or nonexistent.
Nonsense! Verdi, Wagner etc. catered to the bildungsburgertum/ beamte class as well as the commercial bourgeoisie & urban professional classes. They, like Kings, wanted to diminish the influence of the drunken, philistine, Aristocracy. Ultimately, the hope was, ballerinas might not be prostitutes whose protectors, as in Balzac's novels, hire claques to ensure their success or, rather, the failure of their rival.
To Verdi the conjunction must have seemed to be eminently worth nursing along.
No. Cairo was far away. He wanted his Operas to be put on in European Cities with good ports or railway connections. America too was becoming important.
Said sees some special significance in the fact that the scenario for Aida was by a French Egyptologist. The fact is the Khedive was Francophone & Auguste Mariette was his pampered protege.
The difference is that Verdi could and indeed, for the first time in European opera, did avail himself of Egyptology's historical vision and academic authority.
The first Opera set in Egypt had a scenario conceived by an Egyptologist working closely with the Khedive. Since no other Egyptologist was able to commission an opera, Aida is unique in that respect. So what?
This science was embodied at close hand for Verdi in the person of Auguste Mariette, whose French nationality and training were part of a crucial imperial genealogy.
No. Ismail had been sent to France to keep him out of the way. That's why he liked the French and brought some French people to Egypt once he became Khedive. The question was whether France would stand by him in his tussle with the Caliph. It wouldn't & then it went & lost a war against the Prussians. The Khedive's days were numbered.
Verdi perhaps had no way of knowing much in detail about Mariette,
Everything that needed to be known was known to Verdi. He really was a pal of the Khedive. Obviously, so long as French troops were in the Papal States, an Italian patriot might want to keep a distance from a French ally. But after 1867, this scruple would weaken.
but he was strongly impressed by Mariette's initial scenario and recognized a qualified expert whose competence could represent ancient Egypt with a legitimate credibility.
Nobody gave a fuck. Egyptology was in its infancy. Still, it is true that 'Abbot & Costello meet the Mummy' was based on a scenario written by Lord Carnarvon. Did you know 'Costello' in ancient Egypt means 'Ka's tower of shit'? American audiences back then were sticklers for attention to detail.
The simple point to be made here is that Egyptology is Egyptology and not Egypt.
& 'Orientalism' is Saidian shite. It has nothing to do with anything at all.
Mariette was made possible by two important predecessors, both French,
his cousin- a painter like himself- and his cousin's pal Champollion, a child prodigy, who deciphered hieroglyphics. Mariette got his start when he inherited his cousin's papers.
both imperial, both reconstructive,
Not imperial. Initially amateurish & entrepreneurial before gaining a limited amount of Government support in the context of a putative Franco-Egyptian alliance.
and, if I can use a word that I shall borrow from Northrop Frye, both presentational: the first is the archeological volumes of Napoleon's Description de J'Egypte; and the second is Champollion's deciphering of hieroglyphics presented in 1822 in his Lettre a M. Dacier and in 18z4 in his Precis du systeme hieroglyphique.
Napoleon's Imperialism failed in Egypt. It never became a colony. Still, there was a 'veiled protectorate' from the 1880s onwards till about 1922.
By "presentational" and "reconstructive" I mean a number of characteristics that seemed tailormade for Verdi: Napoleon's military expedition to Egypt was motivated by a desire to capture Egypt, to threaten the British, to demonstrate French power; but Napoleon and his scholarly experts were there also to put Egypt before Europe, in a sense to stage its antiquity, its wealth of associations, cultural importance, and unique aura for a European audience.
But the Jesuits had 'staged' China in the late seventeenth Century and then Sir William Jones had 'staged' India & Persia & so on and so forth. Napoleon needed money to stay in Egypt & thus made out that all sorts of treasures were discoverable there. Sadly, Nelson fucked up his fleet & so he had to return to France with his tail between his legs.
Yet this could not be done without an aesthetic as well as a political intention. What Napoleon and his teams found was an Egypt whose antique dimensions were screened by the Muslim, Arab, and even Ottoman presence standing everywhere between the invading French army and ancient Egypt. How was one . to get to that other, older, and more prestigious part?
Digging. Maybe they would find lots of gold.
Here began the particularly French aspect of Egyptology,
Stupidity. The Brits figured out a way to make money out of learning Sanskrit & Arabic & Persian & so forth. The fact is, if your judges know the personal law of Muslims & Hindus & so forth, then your Courts attract more & more business. Smart merchants shift to your jurisdiction. They lend you money to hire mercs to defeat neighbouring Princes- if they are shit- and thus expand the tax base. The French were too stupid & parochial to understand this.
which continued in the work of Champollion and Mariette. Egypt had to be reconstructed in models or drawings, whose scale, projective grandeur (I say "projective" because as you leaf through the Description you know that what you are looking at are drawings, diagrams, paintings of dusty, decrepit, and neglected pharaonic sites looking ideal and splendid as if there were no modern Egyptians but only European spectators), and exotic distance were truly unprecedented.
Nope. Thomas and William Daniell had emigrated to Calcutta around 1785 & started publishing by the end of the decade. They prepared several volumes of 'Oriental Scenery' & made good money. The French, it must be said, were ahead artistically, but were slower to tap the market.
The reproductions of the Description therefore are not descriptions but ascriptions.
they are also prescriptions for suppositories which Said should stick up his arse. Start with Cleopatra's Needle & work your way towards the Grand Pyramid.
First the temples and palaces were reproduced in an orientation and perspective that staged the actuality of ancient Egypt as reflected through the imperial eye;
Because painters are actually soldiers. Did you know that Genghis Khan was an acclaimed water-colourist?
then-since all of them were empty or lifeless--in the words of Ampere, they had to be made to speak, and hence the efficacy of Champollion's decipherment;
It was useful because it provided information to historians. Ultimately, it gave 'historicity' to the Old Testament & thus contributed to 'the higher Criticism'.
then, finally, they could be dislodged from their context and transported to Europe for use there.
Also, when White Man takes your picture, he captures your soul. Charlie Hebdo produced a cartoon of the Prophet. This shows Whiteys have taken over Islam. All these so called Ayatollahs are actually smelly French dudes.
This, as we shall see, was Mariette's contribution. This continuous process went on roughly from 1798 until the 1860s, and it is French.
Sadly, it was the Brits who became top-dog in Egypt.
Unlike England, which had India,
thanks to which it would also become hegemonic in Iraq, parts of Iran, the Gulf, Aden, Sudan, Uganda etc, etc
and Germany, which, at a remove, had the organized learning that went with Persia and India,
Hanover was in personal union with England. That's why some of its savants got into Sanskrit & Persian & so forth. The habit spread.
France had this rather imaginative and enterprising field in which, as Raymond Schwab
a know nothing belles lettrist
says in The Oriental Renaissance, scholars "from Rouge to Mariette at the end of the line [started by Champollion's work] ... were ... explorers with isolated careers who learned everything on their own."
They were poor but enterprising.
The Napoleonic savants
like the Jesuits
were explorers who learned everything on their own,
Which is why they were called explorers, not researchers.
since there was no body of organized, truly modern and scientific knowledge about Egypt on which they could draw.
Nor was there any such thing regarding France's pre-Roman past
As Martin Bernal
White dude. Us darkies like him because he suggests that all them smart Greek & Roman dudes were probably from Nigeria or Tamil Nadu
has characterized it, although the prestige of Egypt throughout the eighteenth century was considerable, it was associated with esoteric and mystifying currents like Masonry.
From about 1780 you had Cagliostro & Egyptian Freemasonry
Champollion and Mariette were eccentrics and autodidacts,
they were poor. Champollion got in trouble with the Ultras because he was trying to spread education through the 'pupil-teacher' method. We would regard him as a prodigy & a patriot- not an eccentric.
but they were moved by scientific and rationalistic energies.
They were intelligent & enterprising. Champollion saw that Coptic is descended from ancient Egypt. In other words, he was for the indigenous people, not foreign dynasties.
The meaning of this in the ideological terms of Egypt's presentation in French archaeology is that Egypt could be described "as the first and essential oriental influence on the West,"
That's what the Greeks had said. But, obviously, it was the Jews who were the biggest influence.
a claim that Schwab quite rightly regards as false, since it ignores Orientalist work done by European scholars on, other parts of the ancient world.
Said is obsessed with European scholars. He himself studied European texts. But he did not have sufficient emic 'background knowledge' to understand what he was reading.
The French had sought 'soft-power' in Egypt. They failed. The Brits took over the place after 1882. This also meant that British Egyptology supplanted French efforts in that field. Now, of course, Egypt has itself taken charge of making its ancient history intelligible and illuminating for the whole of Humanity.
What, au fond, is Said's 'contrapuntal' interpretation of Aida? The French had once dreamed of an Empire in Egypt but they failed. Some guys got jobs working for the Khedive. Could Egypt become an Imperial power in Africa in alliance with France? No. The Brits were stronger and had superior finances. They became paramount in Egypt and the Sudan. In 1898 there was a showdown with the French in Fashoda. England then offered Germany an alliance which it foolishly refused. Thus England allied with Japan. After Japan defeated the Russians, the Russians & the French needed England's naval supremacy while they sought to rearm sufficiently to take on the Germans & Austro-Hungarians. In effect, this meant the end of the European Imperial project. Aida's 'Triumphal March' was for the countries of Asia & Africa who would were free to rise up in the manner of Japan- unless they were too lazy or stupid or corrupt to do so.
Said takes a different view.
In short, Aida quite precisely recalls the enabling circumstances of its commission and composition,
The Khedive thought he would get rich from the Canal & conquer more & more of the Sudan & Ethiopia & so forth.
and, like an echo to an original sound, conforms to aspects of the contemporary context it works so hard to exclude.
Echoes don't do anything of the sort. Productions of Aida may or may not seek to exclude 'the contemporary context'.
As a highly specialized form of aesthetic memory,
it is an aesthetic production not a memory. Unless some impresario says he is recreating the first performance, 'aesthetic memory' is irrelevant. Even then, everybody would have a different one.
Aida embodies, as it was intended to do, the authority of Europe's version of Egypt
no such thing had any fucking authority. There was a bit of amateur Egyptology here and there but it was concerned with shite that happened 4000 years ago.
at a moment in its nineteenth-century history, a history for which Cairo in the years I869 I87I was an extraordinarily suitable site.
A place near the Pyramids is a suitable side for an opera about ancient Egypt. Said is a friggin genius!
A full contrapuntal appreciation of Aida reveals a structure of reference and attitude, a web of affiliations, connections, decisions, and collaborations, which can be read
by a shithead
as leaving a set of ghostly notations in the opera's visual and musical text. Consider the story: an Egyptian army defeats an Ethiopian force, but the young Egyptian hero of the campaign is impugned as a traitor, sentenced to death, and dies by asphyxiation. This episode of antiquarian inter-African rivalry acquires considerable resonance when one reads it against the background of Anglo-Egyptian rivalry in East Africa from the 1840s till the 186Os.
The problem was that the Arabs of Egypt were not interested in it. Nor were the Arabs of the Levant- Said's own ancestors. So this was a story about an Albanian usurper & his progeny seeking Empire over Arabs & Africans. But this harmed the Caliph & could endanger British interests. Still, if the Khedive hadn't wasted money on useless shite- like building a fucking Opera House- he may have prevailed.
This is a story about economics. But then Opera too is a story about economics. It isn't a story about Knowledge-as-Power-as-Paranoid-Grievance-Studies shite. Still, there can be little doubt that Said's brains were buggered to buggery by 'the Occidental gaze'.
The British regarded Egyptian objectives there under Khedive Ismail~ who was eager to expand southward, as a threat to their Red Sea hegemony, and the safety of their route to India; nevertheless, prudently shifting policy, the British encouraged Ismail's moves in East Africa as a way of blocking French and Italian ambitions in Somalia and Ethiopia.
The Brits backed winners. Could the Khedive be a winner? No. He was a shithead who squandered money on Opera houses.
By the early 187Os the change was completed, and by 1882. Britain occupied Egypt entirely.
Because Urabi Pasha- of indigenous peasant origin- had mutinied against the Khedive & his Anglo-French backers.
From the French point of view, incorporated by Mariette, Aida dramatized the dangers of a successful Egyptian policy of force in Ethiopia, especially since Ismail himself-as Ottoman Viceroy-was interested in such ventures as a way of achieving more independence from Istanbul.
If the Khedive was successful, in the South and had been checked when trying to expand to his East, he would look to his own West- i.e. Libya, Tunisia &.... French Algeria.
There is more than that in Aida's simplicity and severity, especially since so much about the opera, and the Opera House, which was built to house Verdi's work, concerns Ismail himself and his reign
No. Aida came out before the Khedive went bankrupt. The Ethiopians had kicked his ass at Gundet & Gura
. A fair amount of work
by shithead academics
has been done recently on the economic and political history of European involvement in Egypt during the eighty years after Napoleon's expedition; much of this concurs with the position taken by Egyptian nationalist historians (Sabry; Rafi', Ghorbal) that the viceregal heirs who composed Mohammad Ali's dynasty, in a descending order of merit (with the exception of the intransigent Abbas),
who wanted to side with the Ottoman Caliph.
involved Egypt ever more deeply in what has been called the "world economy"
i.e. they borrowed and wasted a lot of money
but more accurately was the loose agglomeration of European financiers, merchant bankers, loan corporations, and commercial adventures. This led ineluctably to the British occupation of 1882.,
Nope it led to a military revolt by a peasant origin officer
and, just as ineluctably, to the eventual reclamation of the Suez Canal by Gamal Abdel Nasser
also peasant origin. The dynasty had been deposed in 1952 which was also when the Said family lost their wealth and family business. Soon, they themselves would have to leave. It wasn't Jews, but Egyptians, who rendered them exiles. Said's oeuvre seeks to hide this shameful truth.
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