Episode 98 Sonja Frisell

Sonja Frisell ©Peter Schroeder

Now-retired opera stage director Sonja Frisell capped her astounding career in 2017, when at age 80 in Muscat, Oman, with the touring Rossini Opera Festival of Pesaro she restaged Jean Pierre-Ponnelle’s 1987 production of a little known one-act opera, L’Occasione fa il Ladro (“Opportunity makes the thief”). She had been a protégé of Ponnelle, so who better?

But it was in 1989 when the Metropolitan Opera debuted her production of Verdi’s Aida with its hieroglyphics and torchlight temples designed by Gianni Quaranta, that she left her mark. It was a production that lasted 34 years, having been retired in the 2023 season. I attended one of the final performances and can testify to its lasting durability. It never lost its originality. Nor did it appear like a postcard from Cairo.

It was like nothing ever presented on the Met’s stage. It wasn’t just the glorious triumphal scene celebrating the Egyptian victory over the Ethiopians, but every scene, where every movement had meaning. This was not just a spectacular opera; it was an opera produced by a director who from her youth studied all-things Egypt, despite her mother’s admonition that such was not suitable for a young girl. As you’ll hear, she taught her mother (and father) a thing or two!