Pomp and circumstance at the foot of the Pyramids as Aida gets ready to party all night with Radames photo: Sherif Sonbol Meeting a myth By David Blake Going up to the Pyramids plateau, not necessarily as a tourist, not as a conferee to view the mythical monuments but as a member of an expectant audience there to view Aida, is daunting. Aida's presence at this hallowed site has to do with more, after all, than either opera or politics. The theatre itself has been scooped and flattened out of the area backed by the Pyramids and it is in this arena that the creature whose name means more to more people than any other opera is due to manifest herself. Aida's fame crosses borders, religious and social. She is global. Yet because her creator, Verdi, first promised her to Egypt as an opera -- he was commissioned by Khedive Ismail to write the piece for the opening of the new opera house in Ezbekiyya -- she has become, in the subsequent century plus, a special event in Egyptian life. Hers is a presence as unaccountable to Egypt as it is dear. Yet she retains a particular rapport with Cairo, a city that keeps a special place in its heart for the strange annual visitor people have slotted so fondly into their national history. As you leave the flat lands of Cairo and begin to climb up the hill that takes you to the very feet of the Pyramids, the surrounding sky is a mass of light blinking, stretching far away in all directions like a group of interweaving galaxies. This sky and the city below never stop moving. You can hear its heartbeat like a ship at sea. The journey has been difficult. Cairo has enough problems already -- the stress of an ever growing population wreaks everyday havoc on the roads. An Aida visitation brings near chaos to the already over-strained avenues. The traffic snarl-up, appropriately -- inevitably perhaps -- reaches operatic proportions. It can be no fun for commuters. But visually the scenes on the streets approaching the Giza heights are cinematic. Brilliant flashes of colour illuminated by the streaks of headlights from becalmed buses expose the unrepentant small mobs of sightseers waiting for passing VIPs. Opera is important and nothing makes this more apparent than a performance of Aida. It is an opera that makes demands on everyone: on performers, on front- and back-stage staff and on the audience, and not only because its length is far beyond what is generally thought endurable, let alone reasonable. In our media-ridden world its position has become strangely unassailable. It is a peculiar status to be achieved by something that is sexless, classless and without obvious allure for a world that increasingly values violence and the quick-fix image. Yet Aida has become a kind of high priestess, has moved almost beyond music. Fame has settled around Verdi's creation like dust on the furniture. You can sweep it away, but only in the sure knowledge that it will return, thicker than ever. Aida makes money as a show. Verdi saw to that. He produced the ideal star vehicle and it lends itself perfectly to everything that goes to make the star -- money, glamour, hype. Every performance is an adventure, though none more so than nights like tonight, when our heroine makes her first appearance and the demands are greater than ever. And you can count on Cairo to do its best to meet them. One only hopes that Verdi, as cussed as he could be, would be pleased. In recent years it had come to look as if Aida was acquiring a blue-chip status, that she was becoming no more than a confidence trickster, a power-dressed super-executive capable of pulling a profitable deal out of the unlikeliest looking hats. But there is nothing of that sort in the air tonight. The mood is serious. Cairo appears to understand the strange orchidaceous plant that Aida has become. It is an understanding that the opera reciprocates. And as our journey takes us into the shadow of the looming pyramidal presences we finally approach our vantage point. We are placed high, though not perilously so, while out below, in every direction, Cairo is a landscape of velvet. Even its galaxies are dim. Is it all a bit of a farce, this Aida fixation? The answer comes almost immediately as out of the holes in the surrounding air comes the music that surrounds this myth like veils, the soft circular creeping syllables of the Prelude to Aida whom you are now finally meeting. Related: Bye-bye Budapest, hello Aida Aida returns to the Pyramids Sympathy symphony
