Aida
Aida debuted in Cairo in 1871 and soon after became a favourite mainstay at La Scala ever since. Staged by Franco Zeffirelli, who has worked on various Aida production at Le Scala since 1963; Zeffirelli brings Aida back for the fifth time, ready to re-interpret an opera that he worked on many times in his life, up to the "chamber" version created for the minuscule theatre of Busseto. In this real pocket stage, the man of theatre and cinema director invented a triumphal march without triumph, a choral scene without masses, in which the audience's eye was following a procession at which it could only glimpse, and, as Aida , whose splendour it could only imagine.
For both La Scala and Zeffirelli, Aida is thus charged with a double challenge, to continuity and reinterpretation.