Premiered in Cairo 150 years ago, set in an exoticised ancient Egypt and written by a man who refused to visit the country for fear of ‘being mummified’, the beloved opera has left a complex legacy in the country its drama is set

In the middle of downtown Cairo is an anonymous-looking concrete building that stretches along one side of a huge landscaped roundabout. If you peer upwards, you’ll see it labelled, between rows of air-con units, in Arabic and English: “Opera office building and garage.” As monuments to past cultural glories go, it’s not a thing of beauty. But this block marks the site of the Khedivial Opera House – a venue erected in 1869 – and which, on 24 December 1871, staged the first performance of a new opera by the world’s then most famous composer: Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida.

Today, Aida is one of the most regularly performed operas across the globe. Its just-add-pyramids ancient Egypt setting is as beloved by directors and audiences as Carmen’s Spain or Madama Butterfly’s Japan, almost always preserved as a spectacular backdrop for its conventional Italian-opera love story. Yet in recent decades Aida’s overt exoticism has attracted controversy. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said argued that it was just another product of European imperialism – an opera that has had, he wrote in 1993, “an anaesthetic as well as informative effect on European audiences”.