Everything was seen as through a magnifying glass on that tiny stage: neither a harm -wink nor a gesture did not escape. The emotional impact of the delicate, poignant love story, finally ended up triumphing. The most coveted triumph for me. I don’t know if I will never be able to make a center again in the center as I did with this Aidina, a small small but immensely large ».
So Franco Zeffirelli, not the most modest of men, commented in 2001 the success of his Aida, set up in the Piccolo Teatro di Busseto, home of Giuseppe Verdi, whose centenary of death was then celebrated. Show that, with considerable organizational efforts, Polis Cultura, Foundation of Catona Teatro, has imported and re -proposed at the Chilea Theater in Reggio to celebrate its 40th year.
Interesting and fascinating experiment, despite its imperfection. In Aida, grandeur is not an tinsel but a precise stylistic figure, and the relationship between collective breath and individual pathos is not of contrast – as, to exemplify, in a force of fate or in a Carmen – but of participation. The Aida-Radames-Amneris love triangle does not take place inside the story but determines it, and the characters are not psychologically typed: they are stereotypes, and how they think and act. Specularly, therefore, the private story is incorporated by the collective dimension, by the tyrannical inexorability of the reason of state, translated into that grandeur that covers everything, like a gigantic cloak.
By simplifying the bone, the Zeffirellian “magnifying glass” this gigantic cloak would like to desal it, but it cannot. And the result fatally subtracts more than he adds. With the paradox, indeed charming zeffirellian, to add grandeur even when not requested.
The most indigestible subtraction, useless to turn around us, breaks down on the triumph scene, with the brutal cut operated (as well as on the dancers, completely abolished) on the famous “glory to Egypt”, and with the trumpets of the march which, instead of launched by the choir, as by a catapult, instead attack in a perfect anticlimax, almost to apologize for their existence, sending volumely, shatter the most famous number of the work. Conversely, the paradox that scarves the extraordinary ending, those five useless veiled and fluttering figures around Amneris intent on elaborating his “peace of impressive” on the grave in which the beloved Radames Spira embraced in Aida. As if to say: magnifying glass yes, but used on the contrary.
There is therefore the love story: “delicate and poignant” defined by the master, not even that of the Bohème. In fact, in fact, questionable adjective aside, Zeffirelli makes the center, and the healthy and authentic direction theater really pays his dividends. Since the duet of the first act, the attention paid to Amneris, the true engine of the work, is clear, in the presence of which is gray and discharged, from the beginning succubus and aware of its destiny. Mobile, suspicious and neurotic each, motionless and pleading the other. Likewise, the trio and the second dramatic duet between the two women. The third act is enchanting, a perfect mechanism that the direction subtracts from the always impending risk of the stasis, and even more remarkable the great scene of Amneris, a dramatic peak of the score, which is benefited from the dimension collected to explode in all its grandeur. The ending was said, the most beautiful by decreasing in the history of the work, above every tamper, which for over 150 years has turned off on the word peace. For everyone, always.