Giuseppe Verdi Verdi and Giuseppina decided to adopt Carlo's great-niece Filomena Maria Verdi, then seven years old, as their own child. She was to marry in 1878 the son of Verdi's friend and lawyer Angelo Carrara and her family became eventually the heirs of Verdi's estate. "Aida" was commissioned by the Egyptian government for the opera house built by the Khedive Isma'il Pasha to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The opera house actually opened with a production of "Rigoletto". The prose libretto in French by Camille du Locle, based on a scenario by the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, was
Société d'Études du Canal de Suez Société d'Études du Canal de Suez The Société d'études du Canal de Suez (more correctly the Société d'études de l'Isthme de Suez) was a society set up in 1846 by the Saint-Simonist Prosper Enfantin in Paris to study the Isthmus of Suez and the possibility of a Suez Canal. In the 1820s, the Saint-Simonists got caught by the idea of creating a canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. In 1833, Enfantin and some of his followers travelled to Egypt hoping, amongst other matters, to further this idea. He did not succeed in getting the Khedive Muhammad Ali Pasha