Aida

Liceu opens the season with an exceptional cast led by Anna Netrebko and Anna Pirozzi in the role of Aida, together with Yusif Eyvazov and Piotr Beczała as Radamès. A luxurious opening to bring to life one of Verdi’s most monumental operas, presented in a striking production by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, who transforms Aida into “a visual ritual in which beauty and conflict are in constant dialogue”.

This production, originally created for the Salzburg Festival, avoids the usual grandiloquence and places Verdi’s drama in a universe of great symbolic force. Neshat, with her poetic and committed vision, transforms Aida into a story that engages with contemporary tensions: identity, exile, oppression and the fragility of power. The opera thus becomes a mirror of the present, in which aesthetics combine with a subtle yet piercing political reading.

Often interpreted as a love story set in an idealised Egypt, Aida reveals a deeper conflict: the collision between the sacred and established power. Aida, an enslaved Ethiopian princess, and Radamès, an Egyptian hero, love each other in secret and challenge a system that condemns love as dissent. Their story, doomed from the beginning, exposes a rigid structure in which law and religion are confused in order to justify repression.

Neshat’s stage interpretation intensifies this tension with a visual beauty that does not renounce criticism. In the final tomb, Aida and Radamès find one last space of freedom: death becomes redemption, an act of emotional and spiritual liberation that transcends the violence surrounding them.

With the musical direction of Antonello Manacorda, and with Ekaterina Semenchuk and Ksenia Dudnikova as Amneris, as well as Artur Ruciński and Igor Golovatenko in the role of Amonasro, this Aida opens the Liceu season as a great total spectacle: emotion, reflection and a visual force that invites the audience to experience opera as a ritual and contemporary experience.