3 immortal pieces from the opera AIDA by Verdi – with the best interpretations from YouTube (Hits, Best of)

With “Aida” Verdi created one of the absolute highlights of opera history and offers the music lover everything opera can do. The popularity of the work is unbroken: Mass scenes like the Triumphal March thrill the general public, intimate scenes like the farewell of Aida and Radames touch the lover and opera fan.

 
 
 

Celeste Aida

Aida, the daughter of the Ethiopian king Amonasro is a slave at the Egyptian court. The Ethiopian warriors attack Egypt to free Aida. Radames dreams of returning to his secret love Aida wreathed in laurel from the fight against the Ethipians.
Verdi offers considerable difficulties to the role of Radames. The role is “lirico spinto”, i.e. a youthful heroic tenor. Radames must be able to sing both the great heroic arias and the lyrical piano passages. Right at the beginning, poor Radames must sing the great aria “Celeste Aida”, without warm up. Some tenors regard Celeste Aida as Verdi’s most difficult tenor aria.
The tenor voice must be able to withstand sharp trumpet sounds and keep up with the warmth of the woodwinds. He must also be confident in the high notes. The aria, another difficulty, starts unaccompanied by the orchestra. The aria alternates several times between the poles of battle (“un esercito di prodi, da me guidato”) and love (“Celeste Aida”). The love passages must be sung with much legato and sometimes in beautiful pianissimo.
 
Listen to Jussi Björling an excellent interpreter of this role. Let’s listen to the Swede, described by many as the best Verdi tenor of the 20th century.
Se quel guerriero io fossi…Celeste Aida (1) – Björling

Aida’s great of the Nile aria

O Patria mia is a melancholy aria sung in the mood of a full moon night on the Nile. The beginning is in a gloomy mood, for Aida fears she will never see her fatherland again. She slowly awakens from this mood until “l’ultimo addio”. A nostalgic oboe cantilena introduces the theme of the homeland. Images of her fatherland are evoked. Desperation manifests itself in the repeated repetition of the “mai piu”. In “che un di promesso” the voice becomes more intense and the next o patria is accompanied by an intense orchestra sound. At the end, “non ti vedro” again takes up the mood of the beginning, this time with wonderful high notes and accompanied by the oboe. The aria ends with a beautiful high pianissimo C.
Let’s listen to Leontyne Price. Fischer describes her voice as follows: «As an actress on stage, Leontyne Price remained clichéd in gestures from old opera days. The thing she was great at was her phenomenal voice material and its artistic use. The often described guttural sound of afro american singers could not be found in her voice, but she possessed what the English language calls «smoky». She sang with two clearly separated voice colours: The extraordinarily lush middle range and the deep range, reminiscent of an alto, had that smoky character, the fluent high range sounded bright and clear, and remained unstrained to the highest regions.» (Fischer, Grosse Stimmen).
O patria mia – Price

O terra Addio – Aida’s great finale

Radames has been enclosed within the walls of the pyramid. He hears a sigh and notices Aida, who had crept into the vault. Aida and Ramades experience their farewell to the world together.
Verdi was well aware of the significance of this scene, which on the one hand forms the lyrical conclusion after the expressive preceding scene, but could also have been Verdi’s artistic swan song, if the Shakespearean dramas Othello and Falstaff had not unintentionally crossed his path 20 years leater in a miraculous way. For this grandiose scene he uses mainly muted strings and harps, which tenderly accompany the exquisite melody of the singing voices. The end of the duet is cross-faded by the voices of the priest choir and ends.
The duo Björling/Milanov offers an exciting ending.
O terra addio (1) – Milanov/Björling