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"I live for art. I live for love. Why am I repaid with this suffering?"

Tosca by Giacomo Puccini

A melodramma in three acts

Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica after Victorien Sardou's play La Tosca
First performance: Rome; Teatro Costanzi, January 14, 1900
Performed in Italian with English supertitles above the stage

June 19, 26, July 1 & 4, 2009
7:30pm Curtain
June 21 & July 12, 2009
2:00pm Curtain

 

Opera Spotlight
by Michael Egel

No other opera by Giacomo Puccini aroused as much varied response to its first performance as did his Tosca which was first performed in June of 1900.

Audiences encored the tenor aria “E lucevan le stelle” and the composer himself was called to the stage six times at the conclusion of the performance for what many in the press denounced as a “shabby little shocker.” Puccini’s own best advocate, Signor Riccordi, also felt troubled by the fact that the great villain Scarpia dies too early in the score to sustain drama into the last act. Amidst both the lavish praise and outright hostility towards the score, the great conductor Toscanini assumed the podium for even more successful performances later that year and put the subject to rest. Tosca soon became a staple of the standard repertory.

It was in the late 1880's that Puccini saw the play La Tosca by the French playwright Sardou and starring the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. But Puccini would spend the next decade occupied with other projects, such as the opera that became his first real success, Manon Lescaut and embroiled in a public feud with fellow composer Ruggero Leoncavallo (I Pagliacci) over the rights to the story that became his masterpiece, La bohème in 1896. With those projects finally behind him and with some in the Italian music scene already calling him the rightful heir of Italian music to Giuseppe Verdi, Puccini struggled with several ideas for his next operatic setting. The story of a She-Wolf, settings of American plays and tales from the Far East seemed to occupy his thoughts. Even the play Liliom by the Hungarian writer Ferenc caught his eye – interestingly enough, this play later became the basis of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel.” But eventually Puccini decided that La Tosca, a play of pure melodrama and suspense, was as operatic as it came and would be the perfect basis for his next composition.

After essentially stealing the rights to set the play to music from a rival Italian composer, Puccini put in place his favorite librettist team, Illica and Giacosa and work began in earnest. Puccini admired the work that these men did with the text in readying it for a musical setting, even going so far as to admit that their product was better than the original.  Puccini’s score combines moments of terse and violent exchanges with his characteristic facility for writing memorable melodies and the resulting opera is a kind of one-two theatrical and emotional punch that is a hallmark of the verismo era in opera. In many ways, Tosca is the culmination and pinnacle of the verismo period.

One of the few operas to center on an actual singer, the heroine Floria Tosca is a celebrated diva in love with the painter, Mario Cavaradossi. Set in and around Rome on June 14, 1800, the plot revolves around the battle of Marengo fought and won on that single day. Rome is occupied by Napoleonic forces and local revolutionaries and freedom fighters, including Cavaradossi himself, find themselves up against the chief of police, Baron Scarpia. One of opera’s most monstrous villains, Scarpia has set his sights on possessing Tosca and will stop at nothing to get her. This antagonistic relationship between Tosca and Scarpia is the basis for the drama of the story and is primarily contained in the second act.  Created as a verbal and vocal duel between heroine and villain, the power struggle is musically characterized by Scarpia’s longer and menacing phrasing and Tosca’s rapid-fire and terse retorts to his malevolent advances. A brief respite comes in the short but beautiful aria “Vissi d’arte” but the tension escalates again and the climax comes with the sudden and grotesque murder that ends the act.

Tosca has been an important artistic vehicle for some of the last century’s greatest performers including Enrico Caruso, Tito Gobbi, Franco Corelli, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Claudia Muzio, Birgit Nilsson, Maria Callas and Leontyne Price. The title role is one of the most coveted and difficult roles in the soprano repertory requiring a spinto soprano voice capable of a variety of vocal extremes coupled with musical and dramatic histrionics.