The thing that gets me about Aida is that it feels truly tragic. The love between Aida and Ramades is truly a love that cannot be. They are a slave and a conquering warrior. In their scene together outside the temple when they both profess their love and their desire to be together. Neither of them have a way that will bring them happiness. If Ramades was victorious once again against the Ethiopians, would Pharaoh really grant him the boon of being with Aida rather than Amneris? Would Aida even be able to be happy knowing that her time with Ramades was purchased with her people's blood?
I think she could, honestly. I think I spend so much time thinking about characters with an outsized sense of duty and personal responsibility that when I run into characters who don't, it can be tricky to wrap my head around them. Aida and Ramades both want so desperately to be happy. They both feel this call of duty, but they struggle with it. They would much rather have personal happiness. They want to be together. It's interesting. A little hard for me to wrap my head around, but interesting. They sing about how they want to run away together, to some foreign land where they could have their love and it almost feels like a surprise to me when it turns out they both mean it.
I say all this because, despite the fact that I think both Ramades and Aida wish that their duty did not exist, they are ultimately pulled by it. In the moment after it is revealed that Ramades has inadvertently revealed the Egyptian army's plans to Aida's father, you can tell that they've broken him. He's a broken man. And when Aida and her father try to bring him with them back to their home, he follows, but he follows because there is nothing left for him to do. He follows because they take his hand and lead him. Would he have been able to be happy as Aida's husband and a prince of Ethiopia if they'd made it back? I'm not sure he'd be able to.
I think it's almost a relief for him when the soldiers come and he tells them to flee, leaving him behind. Even as he loves Aida, I don't think he would've been able to run with her and be the same.
And then there's Amneris. Lovely, petty, so perfectly human Amneris. She's desperately in love with Ramades. She's naive. "You're killing an innocent man!" she screams at the priests as they seal Ramades away in the tomb like he hasn't done everything that they accuse him of. Her love blinds her.
In the production I saw, the actress playing Aida looked younger than the one playing Amneris. It feels like it should be the other way around. Amneris is the one that feels like a child not quite grown up while Aida has had maturity thrust upon her.
In a way, I think dying together in the tomb was the happiest ending Ramades and Aida could hope for. For all that I think it's kind of stupid how they sing about how romantic it is to die together, I don't think it was really possible for them to live together either. At least for those final moments together in the tomb, it's just them and there's nothing of the world that keeps coming between them.
