Aida - sexing up Opera and pseudo Marxist interpretations.
BBC4 7.30pm. Verdi imbued his work with a quintessentially 19th century theme. Copied by Gilbert & Sullivan (in The Sorcerer) the eponymous heroine of Aida is a slave but in fact (of course) secretly the daughter of the King of Ethiopia. Hidden class and the empire building of Egypt and England or Italy. Tonight the use of quasi modern costume
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Aida is Ethiopian - she's black. But he's an arabian military hero, and he loves her despite her being black, and a political hostage. And that sends Amneris insane with jealousy... that he'd prefer a black slave, to an Egyptian Princess.
Early sketches show that Verdi originally intended to call it "Amneris", but changed his mind... so we have an Egyptian opera, named after an Ethiopian slave.
Powerful stuff indeed. At the heart of all that awesome hill of beans, there's the story of just three little people.
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The Grand March staged with a small troop of 8-year-old boys, joyously given a Hitler Salute to the Pharoah.
This is a story for all time. Shortly before I emigrated to Moscow, I was at a funny and packed birthday party somewhere in North London, with a mixed group of Brits and various E European friends. Someone wanted to see the footy results, so the tv was briefly turned-on... and we astounded to see coverage of the RAF bombing Belgrade. "Give it those bastards!" cheered one bloke amongst those gathered. In the kitchen there was a Serbian girl in unstoppable hysterical screaming.
That's the story of AIDA.
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Oh dear, you've entirely missed the point, haven't you?
AIDA is about the civilians who get caught up in the war atrocities of others.
Massacring a country's utterly blameless civilians for the alleged crimes of their leaders is the act of a nation of gutless w*nkers. The train on the bridge was the point when Britain signed-up to yankee thuggery. But it provided Slick Willy with a way to avoid testimonial in the blowjob case, didn't it? And that was the REAL point of the yankee invasion.
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We can still read and comment - don't need to have Independent Minds.
Am going away for a while but will read and comment on your journal when I return (if possible).
bob
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whatever furniture-shuffling happens, please keep in touch with your comments, even tho occasionally obscure & baffling. At least yours are interesting, in contrast to The Toul, a bore's bore, an unflagging fount of what Dennis Healey used to call "Geriatric shoe repair operatives".
What's his secret? Is he free/extremely cheap? Got some intimate snaps of the owner? Like a perpetual motion machine, cannot be turned off? Is he a 69 degree High Mekon of the Bilderberg coven? Whichever, something should be done.
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