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'Aida,' with a twistFor Director, opera's power is intimacyBy Kenneth LaFave How triumphal is the Triumphal March? Just how "conservative" is the music so often called Verdi's most conventional? And how grand is the opera most people hear in their minds when the term "grand opera" comes up? Stage director and designer Bernard Uzan asks these questions and more of Verdi's Aida as he prepares it for production by Arizona Opera. His answers are not always the expected ones. Aida, full of pomp and elephants, looms large in the minds of most operagoers. Uzan sees it as smaller. The Triumphal March may not be that triumphal, the score's so-called conservatism hides an unusual approach to theater, and as for the grandness of it all ... "Aida has a strange reputation to he a grandiose opera," says the French-born Uzan, artistic director since 1988 of L'Opera Montreal. "It is strange because, besides the first act and the Triumphal March, it is very much an intimate opera, with the relationships between characters of first importance, and very well defined musically. That is not always true of Verdi." Indeed, Uzan finds much of Verdi counterintuitive to his theatrical sense: "In pieces like Trovatore and Simon Boccanegra and Attila, the libretto is not so great and you need a dictionary to understand what's going on. But Aida is great, Otello is great, Falstaff is great, because the stories are told magnificently and clearly." A man of the theater before he came to opera, Uzan began his career as an actor in Paris, then moved to the United States. He became a naturalized citizen and founded Boston's French Theatre in America. The company produced drama in French and toured America. "I directed Moliere and Sartre and Beckett, but I also drove the car and printed programs and did the lighting," he recalls. "That's what you do in the theater." Then, in 1982, Sarah Caidwell of the Boston Opera called Uzan and asked him to stage a Faust. After that, Uzan the man-of-the-theater transferred his dramatic sense to the lyric stage. In addition to staging three or four of Montreal's seven annual productions, Uzan guest-directs half a dozen or more operas annually around the globe. Aida is for him one of Verdi's most mature pieces, a gateway to the ripeness that is the Shakespeare operas. It has one sticking point, however: "One of the problems for me is that it is a static opera. It is static because a lot of what the characters are singing is on the inside, for themselves. You have three people on-stage singing things to themselves, so when you stage it, you can't have them singing to each other." This stasis is actually an innovation, a deliberate attempt on Verdi's part to throw open the conventions of opera. It begins with the opera's most startling moment, the very first. Instead of opening with a large chorus or some other scene-setting ensemble, Aida opens with the tenor singing the aria Celeste Aida! (Heavenly Aida!), proclaiming the devotion that will eventually doom both lover and beloved. Radames, the tenor, is a soldier of Egypt in love with the Ethiopian princess Aida. The famous Triumphal March - one of those "when you hear it, you'll recognize it" pieces - celebrates the defeat by Radames of Aida's father, the Ethiopian king. "It is not so 'triumphal,' is it?" Uzan asks. By defeating Aida's father in battle, Radames has won the day for Egypt, but lost it for him and Aida. The naturally intimate nature of the drama, apart from trumpets blowing battle cries, has led many directors to add spectacle, sometimes in excess. Livestock has been a particular favorite with which to adorn Aida. Elephants are the mammals of choice, although Arizona Opera's 1991 Aida used camels. Uzan's Aida will be animal-free. "We will have the monumental feeling without the animals. It's a large, three-dimensional set, not just drops floating. There will be massive columns and statues, though not like those at the Phoenix Art Museum. "I suggest the operagoer make a day of it at the museum's Egyptian exhibition and then go to the opera at night."
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