Verdi's Aida runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 19 May to 12 June 2027, in Robert Carsen's production.
Aida was commissioned for Cairo. The Khedive of Egypt wanted an opera for his new opera house, Verdi held out for a large fee, and the piece opened there on Christmas Eve 1871 — an Italian grand opera about ancient Egypt, written for Egypt, with a plot supplied by a French Egyptologist. It is the most spectacular thing Verdi wrote and the reason companies own that many trumpets.
The spectacle is also the trap. Behind the triumphal march is a chamber piece about three people: a soldier, the princess he serves, and the enslaved Ethiopian woman he loves, who is the enemy king’s daughter. Verdi ends it not with armies but with two people sealed in a vault singing very quietly, the most restrained finale in the grand tradition. The story about it being written for the opening of the Suez Canal is not true and will not go away; the house opened two years before the opera did.
Robert Carsen’s staging runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Wednesday 19 May to Saturday 12 June 2027 — four weeks falling squarely across the London Season, between Chelsea and Ascot, which is where a house puts the title it knows will sell to people who go to the opera twice a year. Carsen strips the Egypt out and plays it as a modern military state.