Verdi's Egyptian spectacle: On the colonial subject of Aida

Abstract

In June 1867 Ismail Pasha, the new Viceroy of Egypt, arrived in Paris to represent his country at the Exposition universelle. The Egyptian pavilion, erected on a large corner of the Champs de Mars, featured a marvellous collection of architectural spaces that included a pharaoh's temple, a mediæval palace ‘richly decorated in the Arabic style’, and a modern-day bazaar showing all manner of merchants and artisans at work. If the temple, designed by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, was intended to display artefacts from the most remote corners of Egypt's history, other spaces transported spectators directly to the present, offering what one French commentator called ‘a living Egypt, a picturesque Egypt, the Egypt of Ismail Pasha’. An enormous panorama of the Isthmus of Suez, created by the Suez Canal Company with the help of M. Rubé, set designer from the Opéra, drew long queues of paying customers. Elsewhere visitors could gaze at authentic Egyptian peasants, or Bedouins on white dromedaries, all the races governed by the Viceroy ‘personified by individuals selected with care’, as the critic Edmond About put it. Most dazzling of all was the exhibit within the refabricated royal palace, where the Viceroy himself was the featured attraction: poised on a divan in a bedroom painted to look exactly like the place of his birth, he smoked a hookah and daily received guests from the best Parisian society. The whole sumptuous spectacle, About would conclude, ‘spoke to the eyes as well as to the mind. It expressed a political idea’.