Director Benedikt von Peter sees Verdi's AIDA as a "requiem for utopia" that is under constant public scrutiny. In his production, he uses the entire auditorium of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and transfers the musical architecture of the opera to the spatial structure of the building.
"Amore, sommissione, dolcezza" - this is how Giuseppe Verdi describes his Aida: a woman who stands for pure love, docility and tenderness. She thus joins the ranks of those 19th century female artistic figures who were less real characters than projection screens for chauvinistic male dreams - destined to die for love. Aida's path is also mapped out.
But in AIDA, for the first time, there is an alternative to doomed love: Amneris. Verdi describes her as "molto vivacità" - she fights passionately for her love, embodies life and strength and would be capable of a real relationship. Radames, however, the man between the two women, loses himself in the fantasy of Aida, the "exotic" stranger. Out of love for her, he imagines himself as a hero in the fight against oppression - and fails due to the incompatibility of utopian love and political vision. Aida is destined to die, the rescue of the oppressed remains hopeless and violent.
At the center is a hero who withdraws from reality and is broken by his world-weariness. AIDA is perhaps Verdi's most pessimistic opera - its end, the retreat into a stone mausoleum, marks the death of Aida as well as the death of utopia.
Revival: September 13, 2025
Further performances: September 18, 2025, March 15, 23 and 26, 2026
