Aida, an Ethiopian princess forced into slavery, is in love with Radamès, the Egyptian general who has fought against her people; he loves her in return, but her origins inevitably render that love an act of disobedience. War, homeland, religion, family, and political hierarchy seem to dictate who they are and what they must do, while love offers them – in principle, at least – a law higher than all the rest. That is one of the reasons why Verdi’s Aida proves a particularly eloquent choice to open the Liceu’s 2026–27 season, framed beneath the motto "(De)sacralise". In its curtain-raiser, the Barcelona opera house poses a tension between ritual and transgression, between the sacred and the human, between order and that which overwhelms it; it summons Aida as a mirror of conflicts tied to warfare, human displacement, the instrumentalisation of power, and the vulnerability of those subjected to it.
Traditionally, power structures assume monumental form in Aida: temples, armies, ceremonies, and hierarchies that swallow the protagonists whole. Since its 1871 premiere in Cairo, Aida has readily been identified with that aesthetic idiom – occasionally tinged with exoticism in the score itself, featuring showpiece passages for flute or bassoon. The opera now returns to the Liceu, bringing its tally to 468 performances since its 1877 theatre debut – the highest figure among all operas staged at the house – in a striking production directed by Shirin Neshat. The Iranian artist, whose oeuvre has explored themes of identity, exile, and violence, transforms that tradition through a staging of magnetic austerity, in which video art plays a central role. Religious fanaticism, political power, and authoritarian rule are concentrated into a single scenic device that seems to encompass everything, even when it splits apart: a massive concrete cubicle rotates on its axis, turning successively into a stage, a ceremonial hall, a prison, and, ultimately, a tomb.
“Large-scale conflict – monumental or mass-scale, yet never entirely external nor solid at its core – mirrors the internal conflict inevitably held within it”
The structure serves not merely as a set, but as an engine that positions bodies and dictates what they may do, where they may stand, and what may befall them. Yet the cubicle – that stage within a stage – is also a screen, and as such reflects more than just an external dimension alien to the viewer. These images alternate between beauty and desolation, peace and aggression, unsettling and confronting us precisely because they refuse to conform to our algorithmic convenience. Through shock, as Tarkovsky observed, the eye is prepared – at best – to become receptive to good. The Iranian artist likewise avoids sermonising by splitting the projected and the staged, inviting the audience to discover within themselves – on the screen of their own gaze – not so much contrast or contradiction, but correspondence. Close-ups, movement, and the open vistas of cinematic language – the sea horizon with a tiny, lost boat, displaced bodies, scenes of brutality – collide with the closed architecture of the opera house, where those same bodies are subdued, locked away, or put to death.
Neshat uses the architecture of power as a vessel essential to the narrative: the very space that enables order is also the one that generates violence; the architecture intended to protect or commemorate introduces the prospect of the abyss as something no less real. Yet the power of Aida lies not solely in that clash between individuals and monolithic structures. Indeed, that large-scale conflict – monumental or mass-scale, yet never entirely external nor solid at its core – mirrors the internal conflict inevitably held within it: power structures cut straight through the most intimate bonds. First in what appears to be a classic love triangle – between Aida, Radamès, and Amneris, the Pharaoh's daughter enamoured of him – heightened in complexity by the intervention of Amonasro, Aida’s father. Psychoanalysis sought to illustrate how the ambiguity of parent-child bonds bears upon the erotic drive: Amonasro requires his daughter to extract military intelligence from Radamès, weaponising her love to reclaim lost power.
“Resisting the trap of reducing the character to a diva cliché, Netrebko’s timbre retained a deeply moving vulnerability, even in the most intense passages”
Aida is therefore faced not with a single law to transgress, but with competing allegiances that simultaneously summon and repel one another. Her tragedy assumes a dimension that should not be reduced to the psychology of star-crossed lovers. Power does not reside solely in the Pharaoh or military repression; it circulates embedded within their interpersonal relationships, conditioning even what they hold most intimate and precious: holding an identity is accompanied, moreover, by the genuine dread of being stripped of it. Neshat’s staging brings this circulation into plain sight by translating it into violence inflicted upon bodies. Prisoners are stripped, subjugated, and ultimately executed; the forces of order beat, torture, and assault across the full screen. Uncanny, dreamlike images from the outside world are projected across the walls of the rotating cubicle, yet they are not merely a dream or a nightmare… for they unfold within its interior as well, in the reality of a stage that in some sense is also our own. One of the most unsettling moments arrives when, following the proclamation pardoning the captives and as one of the opera’s iconic – and triumphant – melodies rings out, the promise of clemency culminates in a mass execution, punctuated by the dry clatter of a machine gun.
The tension between beauty and cruelty found an answering echo in the musical direction of Antonello Manacorda, who delivered a restrained, refined reading, attuned more to the intimate, chamber-like nuances of the score than to its conventional bombast. The Liceu Orchestra responded with precision, even if at certain points one might have wished for slightly more bite to coax out the full dramatic tension of the plot. The Liceu Chorus sounded thoroughly convincing, anchoring the collective scale of the tragedy in contrast with the solo voices’ dramatic struggle. Anna Netrebko’s Aida captivated the auditorium through her ability to marry vocal breadth with meticulous attention to phrasing. Resisting the trap of reducing the character to a diva cliché, her timbre retained a deeply moving vulnerability, even in the most intense passages. Ivan Gyngazov proved solid and assured as Radamès right from the opening aria, whilst Ekaterina Semenchuk elevated Amneris well beyond the status of a mere antagonist: her authority, her desire, and, ultimately, a sorrow akin to that of the doomed lovers rendered her yet another victim of the violence coursing through the work.
CODA (Can anyone love outside of power?)
Love appears, initially, as the great passport: that which safeguards human dignity against externally imposed identities. It promises a hallowed place – "Somewhere", as the lovers in West Side Story will sing – where homeland, class, creed, or authority cease to matter; where Aida can shed the mantle of the slave and Radamès that of the general, becoming simply two individuals who recognise and complete one another. Yet loving the wrong person – loving the enemy, loving outside the law – does not simply amount to inventing a different, superior law. This opera, like so many others, germinates in the soil of a fantasy: desire as a force capable of suspending the boundaries and conventions the world deems definitive and exclusionary. Still, there is no denying that the yearning to escape what governs us is fundamentally coloured by the very structures from which we seek liberation. Seen thus, love acts not merely as resistance to power, but also – in reverse, if you will – participates in it. Desire may operate as a legitimate bid to rewrite history and heal the wound… yet one must ask whether that bid does not advance by subliminally feeding it, by virtue of being an intrinsically conditioning imperative, more often than not contrary to our own will.
Incompatible with the status quo, passion-love kindles the promise of reconciliation with what remained fractured within us. It is not the sole strategy human beings deploy: the pursuit of wealth, influence, or fame likewise partakes in the fantasy of immortality, as a means to bind up the wound inherent to finite, contingent existence. The lovers pursue that reconciliation along a seemingly alternative path – that of transgressing the law – which leads to another way of being: it is in the tomb that this fantasy finds its most symptomatic reality. The massive concrete cubicle that served as stage, temple, prison, and execution ground becomes the realm where the lovers dissolve into each other. The sepulchre aims to be a space of liberation and transcendence as well: a symbolic counter-image of the pyramid. The visual metaphor is powerful and delicate, yet challenging to realise on stage in this production: not because of any failure of plausibility – theatre constantly demands that we accept such conventions – but because of the friction between two competing ways of representing the body. Shirin Neshat’s staging has taught us to watch it suffer and perish, reduced almost to carrion, while the music now asks us to partake in its spiritual disappearance.
“Love may offer the experience of ecstasy and even kindle a sense of reconciliation, but it offers no guarantee that the wound has genuinely healed”
The delicate music with which Verdi brings the opera to a close seeks to sublimate precisely these conflicts, translating the lovers’ death into a form of ecstasy: a union which, unfolding far from the world that kept them apart, appears at last complete. Without doubt, Aida partakes in a fantasy akin to that of Tristan und Isolde, even if articulated through an entirely different musical language. Let us return to the uncomfortable question. Why should that experience of transcendence be equated with liberation? Romanticism, battered in our own times and perhaps mourned, embraces the romantic exception because it assumes the shape of an awakening open to all possibilities, set against institutions that view us merely as subjects or soldiers. Love may offer the experience of ecstasy and even kindle a sense of reconciliation with that which had fractured us; but it offers no guarantee that the wound has genuinely healed. Seeking an exit from monumental oppression may remain another form of obedience to that which drives us to flee. Does not treating death as the triumphant fulfilment of that fantasy attest to its pathological nature? Nobody desires from a vantage point unburdened by and detached from their own history, even when they believe they understand it.