In addition to composing what probably should now be called the original Aida, Giuseppe Verdi wrote 25 operas, many of which are as popular today as when he died in Milan in January 1901 at 87. He was rich and admired — a poor boy who'd become a gentleman farmer and popular patriot — as well as a complicated genius who formed friendships that lasted decades and nursed grudges with equal fervor. He did not suffer fools gently. It is entertaining to imagine him strangling Elton John with a feather boa for concocting that brain-dead piece of Disneyfied junk now blighting Broadway.

This summer, with much of the music world feverishly marking the centenary of the composer's death, Verdi's Aida is making the rounds even more than usual. Set in Egypt, it was also first performed in that country in 1871, commissioned by Ismail Pasha, the Khedive, to celebrate the opening of Cairo's new opera house. Opera lovers need no reminder of its delights: the fabulous sets (unless you're in Germany, where elephants and pyramids are verboten by sternly modern directors), the affecting story of a slave girl and a princess vying for the same general in time of war and, of course, the music. There's a good deal more than the triumphal march: rousing ensembles, thrilling duets, arias both melodic and dramatic.

Connoisseurs lie in wait for the tenor to choke on the opening aria's high B flat or the soprano to miss the floated high C at the end of Aida's O, patria mia. (They usually oblige, and if you're sitting in the arena of Verona, where Aida will be performed 14 times this summer, expect olives and corks to fly through the air along with vigorous boos.) If you've never bothered with opera, Aida is one that just might turn you into a fan.

Verdi's own life would make a dramatic libretto. In his late 20s he nearly went mad after losing his first wife and two infant children to illness. Recovering, he wrote Nabucco, whose chorus of captive Israelites dreaming of their homeland became the theme song for the liberation of Italy from the Austrians in 1859. He married again, choosing the prickly diva Giuseppina Strepponi, and then, in late middle age, fell deeply in love with Teresa Stolz, his Milan Aida. He lived a life as multi-dimensional as his operas.

They float free through time and space into our own world, never mind that the protagonist is wearing tights and capes or the suffering leading lady is singing from inside a sack. Is there anything more heartbreaking than Rigoletto, the misshapen jester, crying against the cruel fate and the inhuman clods who have conspired to ruin his daughter? Or the sorrowful yearning of La Traviata's Violetta on her deathbed? Once witnessed, is it possible to forget the brilliantly conceived encounter between the reactionary King Philip of Spain and his glamorously visionary subject, the Marquis of Posa? The forces animating Verdi's characters — love, hate, honor, duty, jealousy — are with us still. He was not convinced of man's essential goodness, but his keen insights into human nature assure his operas will be around at the next millennial celebrations — even if we are not.