"Amore, sommissione, dolcezza" - these are the attributes that Giuseppe Verdi ascribed to his title character Aida: a woman who stands for pure love, docility and tenderness. Aida thus joins the ranks of those female art figures of the 19th century who were less real beings than objects of longing and projection surfaces of chauvinistic male dreams and inevitably found their destiny in dying for love. Aida is also mapped out on this path. But unlike Verdi's previous operas, AIDA has an alternative to doomed love: Amneris. Verdi characterizes her in his index of characters as “molto vivacità”: Life pulsates with Amneris. She fights for her love like a lioness, with her a tangible relationship would be possible. However, Radames, the man between Aida and Amneris, can't decide on a realistic life. He loses himself in fantasies of Aida, the "exotic", distant woman. Out of love for this female angel, Radames becomes a hero in his dreams in the fight against oppression and suffering, which, however, also exists in exotic, other worlds, that is, far from one's own reality. Before the eyes of the public, Radames stages his heroism and at the same time suffers from the failure of his own claim to be able to reconcile utopian love and political utopia. Because his dream character Aida is destined to die anyway, and the rescue of all prisoners and oppressed is both hopeless and in turn associated with violence. A hero who is far removed from reality and suffers from his own world-weariness is at the center of an opera, which is perhaps Giuseppe Verdi's most pessimistic. Because it ends with the flight from the world and with the complete retreat into a stone mausoleum. In the end, Aida's death also stands for the death of utopia.
In this sense, director Benedikt von Peter understands Verdi's "Grand Opéra" AIDA as a "requiem for utopia", which is constantly being followed by countless pairs of public eyes, and in his production he fills the entire auditorium of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Benedikt von Peter has attracted attention in recent years with his directing work and often unusual spatial solutions, including Verdi's I MASNADIERI at the Frankfurt Opera, Handel's THESEUS, FIDELIO and IDOMENEO at the Komische Oper Berlin, LES DIALOGUES DES CARMELITES and PARSIFAL at the Basel Theater as well as at the Hanover State Opera Luigi Nono's INTOLLERANZA 1960, LA TRAVIATA and DON GIOVANNI. Benedikt von Peter has received several awards for his productions in recent years: for CHIEF JOSEPH at the Heidelberg Theater he received the Götz Friedrich Prize in 2007, for INTOLLERANZA 1960 in 2011 the German Theater Prize DER FAUST. From 2012 to 2015 he was the head director of music theater in Bremen. In 2014 he was awarded the Kurt Hübner Prize for his productions at the Theater Bremen (including THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY, LA BOHEME, MAHLER III, MEISTERSINGER) and for the overall performance in the music theater section
