This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Aida was commissioned by Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, and premiered on December 24, 1871, at the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo, with a libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni built from a scenario the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette supplied. The plot follows Aida, an Ethiopian princess enslaved in Egypt, torn between her love for the Egyptian commander Radames and loyalty to her father Amonasro, the Ethiopian king; when Radames unknowingly reveals Egyptian military plans to Amonasro, he is condemned as a traitor.
The commission sat inside a specific moment in Egyptian and European relations: the Khedive wanted a work announcing Cairo's new opera house, built the previous year, as a serious venue on the European operatic map, and an ancient Egyptian subject fit the occasion twice over, flattering both Egyptian antiquity and Europe's fascination with it. Verdi never traveled to Egypt to compose the piece and worked from historical material Ricordi and Mariette supplied at a distance in Italy, part of why later scholarship, including Ralph Locke's, reads the opera's Egypt as a European construction rather than a document of it.
Aida has remained one of the most performed operas in the standard repertory since its premiere. It has also returned to Egypt itself as outdoor spectacle: a 1987 production at the Giza pyramids built the largest stage ever raised there, forty three hundred square metres, for sixteen hundred performers across eight nights before twenty seven thousand spectators, and further stagings followed at the Hatshepsut temple in Luxor in the 1990s, a history that has kept the opera's own imagined ancient Egyptian religion in front of audiences far longer than any scholarly account of it.