by Neelam Srivastava
The following article is entirely published and taken from Calibano #0 – Aida/Blackface, the cultural in-depth magazine of the Rome Opera House
Blackface is a term that was practically unknown in Italy until recently. It is linked to the minstrel show, an American traveling theater tradition that was very popular in the nineteenth century and for a good part of the twentieth. In it, white actors played the parts of Black characters, with exaggerated, caricatured ethnic features. Ostensibly, minstrel shows aimed to “inform” white audiences of the habits and customs of Black Americans, but in reality they projected grotesque racial stereotypes. Effectively, minstrel shows were one of the main vehicles for disseminating “knowledge” of the Black world among the white American population. Indeed, the stereotypes propagated by minstrel shows acted as a structuring element of the American racial imagination, with deep roots in the institution of slavery. So much so that in the United States, blackface, i.e. the use of black makeup by white actors, is considered a racist practice, and it is often banned in theatrical performances and films.
Opera has come rather late to the debate around the use of blackface in performances. Opera houses tend to invoke the importance of philological faithfulness to historical productions and original set designs. But in 2015, the New York Metropolitan Opera House took the historic decision to stop the use of blackface makeup in their production of Otello, and the Latvian tenor Aleksandr Antonenko thus played the first white Otello. Since then, the Met has prohibited the use of blackface in its productions. Met Opera on Demand, a streaming service that includes a video archive of the Met’s performances, features the following Content Advisory:
Some performances available in the Met Opera on Demand catalogue include offensive racial and cultural depictions and stereotypes. The issues are varied—from offensive past production practices such as blackface, brownface, and yellowface makeup to racist cultural depictions within the texts of the operas themselves. We continue to make these performances available because we believe they constitute an important part of the company’s artistic legacy. The Met is committed to addressing these vital issues in our programming, whether archival or in the future.
From 2015 onwards, the debate became quite heated. A large number of spectators, critics and singers criticized the Met’s decision, accusing it of excessive political correctness and of betraying the original artistic vision of composers and librettists. Some claimed that having a white Otello would make the racial tensions that are at the heart of the work disappear. In Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida, the use of blackface is explicitly mentioned in the “Set arrangements for the Opera Aida, compiled and adjusted according to the stage production of the Scala Theatre [Milan, translator’s note]”. These were the staging notes for the set of Aida published by Giulio Ricordi in 1873, two years after the opera’s premiere in Cairo. In the Cast of Characters, we learn that Amneris, the Egyptian princess who is Aida’s rival for the affections of the warrior Radamès, has an impetuous and impressionable nature, but she is not assigned a specific skin color. Aida instead is described thus:
Aida – Ethiopian slave, with reddish-dark olive skin, 20 years old; love, submission, sweetness are the main qualities of this character.
Amonasro, her father, is also described in a similar way in terms of skin color:
Amonasro, king of Ethiopia and father of Aida. Reddish-dark olive skin, 40 years old; indomitable warrior, full of love for his country; impetuous, violent character.
Ricordi’s 1873 staging notes for the Scala production are very clear: both Aida and her father must appear to have dark skin. However, as we will see, the instructions on the exact skin color, which was supposed to be “reddish-dark olive”, are rooted in nineteenth-century racial theories of Italian anthropologists about the “Ethiopian race”.
Opera is at the heart of Italy’s artistic tradition, and as such it is also a very important cultural export. The “blackface” debate is often viewed in Italy as an “American” issue; some commentators see it as a “toxic” discourse imported from the United States that has no relevance in Italy. In short, some believe that prohibiting blackface makeup is more acceptable for the Metropolitan Opera than it is for an Italian opera house, because America has a “racial problem”, while Italy does not appear to have one, and therefore can continue to be virtuously “faithful” to Verdi’s text. But Aida is in many ways an African opera, right from its very origins, and must be seen in the context of European (including Italian) imperialism in Africa. It also reconnects to the nationalism of Risorgimento memories.
The postcolonial critic Edward Said has drawn attention to the African and imperial dimensions of Verdi’s “Egyptian” opera. Said re-defined the term “Orientalism” for modern scholarship, introducing a new way to read the texts of the Western canon from a postcolonial perspective. Said argues that novels such as Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad or Kim by Rudyard Kipling “invent” an imaginary Africa or India made for the use and consumption of the European reader and spectator. Said devoted himself to music studies in the latter part of his life, and he wrote about Aida in his classic work, Culture and Imperialism, where he explored the political-historical context in which Verdi composed the opera.
Aida was commissioned by Khedive Ismail of Egypt for the inauguration of the Cairo Opera House. The Khedive offered Verdi 150,000 gold francs as compensation for his work. For Said, the opera is a European Orientalist version of ancient Egypt, which acts as a mere exoticizing backdrop to the story. Verdi’s friend Camille du Locle, who had just returned from a voyage en Orient (“voyage to the East”), sent him an operatic plot developed by the renowned French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette. The set design was largely based on works by French archaeologists who participated as academic experts in Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt. The archaeological volumes of Napoleon’s Description de l’Egypte structure this archaic and timeless vision of an ancient Egypt, “liberated” and “purified” from the traces of subsequent Muslim, Ottoman and Arab cultures. Mariette not only prepared the outline of the libretto, later developed by Antonio Ghislanzoni, but also designed the costumes and sets for the opera. Verdi then had the trumpets made for the triumphal march, closely following the archaeological reconstructions of ancient Egyptian instruments.
Said argues that this opera by Verdi, commissioned by the Viceroy of Egypt, was produced for a rising economic and social class, both Egyptian and European (Cairo at the time had a large European population), that aspired to modernity, but which nevertheless remained subject, almost a vassal, to British and French colonial powers. The plot of Aida does not end with the triumph of the pharaoh. It warned Egypt against extending territorial claims over the Horn of Africa (including Ethiopia)—a region where Italy, France and England had expansionist aims. Thus the staging of Aida becomes a European “theater of power and knowledge”, while the real setting of nineteenth-century Egypt has simply disappeared.
Verdi’s vision of a musical work with a completely autonomous artistic value is thus questioned by Said, who contextualizes it within historical circumstances. Aida is considered the quintessence of the grand opera tradition of nineteenth-century Europe. It was actually produced for a theater that was neither in Milan, nor in Paris, nor in Vienna, but in Cairo, a crossroads of faiths, empires, and of Egyptian, Ottoman, Arab, Muslim, and European civilizations. These traces are present in the work, despite Aida’s attempt to evoke a timeless and ancient Egypt that Europeans preferred to remember as the “true” and “authentic” one. On the contrary, Cairo, like the rest of the country, was rapidly transforming. British imperialist aims mixed with the expansionist aspirations of the Khedive and the emergence of a merchant class that had strong ties both with Europe and with the Arab world. In the words of Said, “Aida’s Egyptian identity was part of [Cairo’s] European façade” and is based on “an aesthetic of separation” between the European and Arab city, on whose border the Opera House was built. Said defines the work as “an imperial article de luxe purchased by credit for a tiny clientele whose entertainment was incidental to their real purposes”—that is, increasing their wealth through trade with Westerners. “It was” – concludes Said – “an imperial spectacle designed to alienate and impress an almost exclusively European audience.”
At the same time, however, it is well known that Verdi considered the real premiere of Aida to have taken place at La Scala, and not in Cairo—indeed he never set foot in Cairo. For an Italian seeing Aida for the first time in 1872 in Milan, the opera would have evoked patriotic feelings for the Risorgimento as much as that it might have evoked an Orientalist vision of the Egyptians or of Africa.
Building on Said’s reading, opera historians recall that in 1861 Khedive Ismail led an expedition of 14,000 men to suppress a slave revolt in Sudan. The conflicts caused by Egypt against territories in Sub-Saharan Africa may have contributed to the artistic decision to create a work about the conquest of Ethiopia by the ancient Egyptians. The opera was produced during the rise of nationalism in Egypt that was built on “intra-African imperialism”. Racial stereotypes against Black Africans also existed in Egypt, and the construction of Egyptian national identity was partly based on perceptions of these racial differences.
Let us return to the notes for the 1873 production of Aida at La Scala. The characters of Aida and Amonasro needed to have darker skin than the Egyptian characters, becoming “what Egypt is not”. Indeed we could even go beyond Said to argue that it is not Egypt that is being Orientalized by Verdi’s exoticizing music, but the imperial victims of Egypt, namely, the Moors and Ethiopians, and above all the women, who are being othered here. Aida is thus doubly orientalist, both towards the Egyptians and the Black Africans in the opera. The critic Frantz Fanon’s reflections are relevant here; he observed that the Black subject “becomes” black through the visual operation of the white gaze, that is, he acquires his racial identity through the European other (it is no coincidence that the title of Fanon’s first book was Black Skin, White Masks). Even today, the character of Aida often appears in blackface makeup on stage. This is in part due to a “philological” approach to staging that continues to reproduce the same racial dynamics that permeated the work in 1871. Opera producers do this without understanding that these dynamics have evolved, and the representation of the different Ethiopian and Egyptian nationalities in the work must be addressed with greater historical sensitivity. If we want to present Aida as a universal opera, which the contemporary viewer can relate to the social structures and characters of their own time and place, then we must read it “flexibly”, as a text that takes seriously both the point of view of the audience, and also the relationship that the audience inevitably establishes between the drama and their own environment.
There is a final aspect to consider with regards to the original stage directions published by Ricordi in 1873. As we have seen, these require that the skin of Aida and Amonasro be of a “dark-reddish olive” color. This is not actually a reference to black skin, but to Italian anthropological theories of the so-called “Ethiopian race”. In the 1800s and early 1900s, as the historian David Forgacs recalls, Ethiopians were not considered exclusively Black, but either white or of Semitic descent. In the words of the anthropologist Aldobrandino Mochi in a lecture given in Florence in 1902, they presented “an extensive ethnic scale that goes from the lowest N**** type to the high Semitic type”. Ethiopians had to have “reddish” skin in the opera, because according to the anthropological theories of the time, they considered themselves a separate race, as the anthropologist Alberto Pollera stated in 1922:
As is well known, the Abyssinian is aware he is not black, and does not admit of any discussion on this point. If one were to tell an Abyssinian that he is black, he would be seen to commit a bloody insult against him. Nor do they wish to admit that they originate from the cross between Semites and blacks, and they claim their complexion is red, so as to distinguish themselves from whites, blacks, and other races.
Italian perceptions of the Ethiopian race would soon change. The premiere of Aida took place in Cairo on 24 December 1871. In February of that year, Rome had become the capital of Italy. Just a few years afterwards, the commercial and geographical expeditions of the Horn of Africa took place. The first Italian colony, Eritrea, was founded in 1890, followed by Somalia. Italian attitudes towards Africa wavered between orientalist imaginings and emerging fantasies of conquest. The representation of Sub-Saharan African populations began to undergo a slow process of “blackening”, which would lead to the racialization of Ethiopians as an inferior people, to be dominated and subordinated. The racialization of Ethiopians would serve as an ideological justification for Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Therefore the presence of “blackface” in Aida has roots in the colonial and racial relationship of Europeans with the African and Arab world. To adopt blackface is an artistic choice steeped in history, and not a simplistic “faithfulness” to Verdi’s vision.
Neelam Srivastava is Professor of Postcolonial and Comparative Literature at Newcastle University, England. He works on the cultural history of Italian colonialism, Indian postcolonial literature and anticolonial thought. She has published as an author Secularism and the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives (London: Routledge, 2008) and, co-edited, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2023) and The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization, and Postcolonial Print Cultures (Open Book Publishers, 2022).
Calibano is the new magazine of the Rome Opera House. Created as a space for in-depth analysis and debate around topical issues raised from the performances on the theater’s program and realized in collaboration with the publishing house effequ, the editorial project involves, every four months, the publication and distribution in Italian bookstores of a monographic volume dedicated to an opera title and a related theme, through the commissioning of essays, short stories and reviews by authoritative signatures.
You can buy Calibano on the effequ website at this link, in bookstores and at the Rome Opera House shop.
*The cover image was created by Simone Ferrini, Ortica video e grafica, using a Text To Image software
