Radamès in denial

Aida is one of the most entertaining and least demanding operas in Verdi’s canon; with its Egyptian pageantry, its rousing tunes, and a tale of doomed love that balances on the knife-edge separating tragedy and silliness, it has delighted audiences around the world since its première in 1871, and its popularity shows no sign of waning. It thus came as something of a surprise to find that Benedikt von Peter, for his oddly brilliant new production at the Deutsche Oper, had managed to use Aida as the foundation for a psychologically immersive and subtly unsettling realisation that challenged not merely the standard narrative of the opera, but the very conventions of the genre itself.

This was not a staging that merely airlifted the story out of Egypt, only to drop it in some similarly exotic setting; nor was it content simply to mask the…