The matinee audience for Aida was all of us: patrons and
benefactors in suits, ties, and walking sticks; musical ladies in wheelchairs;
fabulous gay men arm in arm; stylish girls in heels; new age women in smocks;
little girls in frilly socks. Tourists with
overflowing shopping bags; music students with satchels; speeding staff with
swipe tags; instrumentalists wheeling shiny black cases; probable chorus
singers in stripped leggings; waiters wheeling tables. Also worried women discussing their worrying daughters;
backstage guys festooned with keys; clergy without their dog collars; security
persons with mobile technology; young men with girlfriends and champagne;
foreign speakers speaking languages; elegant souls with circular earrings and
upswept hair; and me, with ice cream, sketchbook, and camera (in my
pocket). All of us, under the eye of
God, here to participate in a colonial epic of country, love and battle: battle
with the other, enslavement of the other, love for the other.
These
singers are magnificent: these large singers, these characters larger than
life, in their glittering costumes, here to display for us how immense our
emotions really are. How convinced they
are about the implacability of the gods. How much they are unable to go back,
as we, in our smaller worlds, could be able to go back, maybe to keep ourselves
from catastrophe, and maybe not. Can anything of the past be changed? Can any of it now be transmuted? The future can, maybe, be changed by holding
back.
Here in the
opera the world holds no forgiveness from gods or kings.Jesus Christ embodies
for everyone the forgiveness of sins: how can any of us live without this? Music students, fashion dwellers, players and
prayers, artists and invalids, all of us the same, here under the eye of God,
needing the libation of forgiveness, forgiveness of self, forgiveness of other:
the divine gift.
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