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Tosca in the MET HD Series
by Kathryn Bumpass |
Mark your calendars for Sunday, December 1. That's when our local presentation of the Met Live in HD brings us an encore performance of Puccini's Tosca, at 2pm, at the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center. Tickets are still on sale.
A romantic liaison between two artists, a painter and a singer, a charged political background, and a brutal antagonist who desires to kill the one and bed the other – it's Puccini's tale of sex and violence, one of his most frequently performed operas, Tosca. Even in its own time Tosca was regarded as an unusually violent story, the more so because its most dramatic moments – an attempted rape, torture, murder, execution by firing squad and suicide — all take place on stage.
The opera is based on a play, La Tosca, written in 1887 by the French playwright Victorien Sardou. Puccini saw a performance in 1889 and immediately set about getting permission to use the story for an opera. The librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica had an imposing task before them — turn a very wordy play into a suitable text for an opera. Not only did they succeed, they produced an unusually compact and concentrated libretto, which served Puccini well.
The story is set against the background of the Battle of Marengo, fought in June 1800. Napoleon had established a republic which was challenged by Austrian troops. The French and the Austrians fought on June 4, 1800. Ultimately the French were victorious. The four main characters in Tosca have some connection with historical figures but are essentially fictional.
The main characters are Tosca, a singer, her lover the painter Cavaradossi, Scarpia, the chief of Rome's police, and Angelotti, a political prisoner whom Cavadarossi seeks to protect. Tosca is an unusually strong female character for the time, passionately in love with Cavadarossi, repulsed by Scarpia, capable of violence in defense of her – and Cavadarossi's – honor.
Cavaradossi is a heroic as well as a romantic figure. He loves Tosca with a burning passion. He also aids and defends his friend Angelotti of the republican partisans — even when tortured he refuses to divulge Angelotti's hiding place. Scarpia is brutal, sadistic, and a man of scarcely controlled sexual appetite.
The first part of Act I essays the passionate romance between Cavaradossi and Tosca, but soon the brutal Scarpia enters, searching for the elusive Angelotti and determined to punish Cavaradossi, whom he suspects of hiding him. He also unveils, for the first time, his designs on Tosca.
Angelotti escapes, but Scarpia's henchmen follow him to Cavaradossi's villa, where, despite their best efforts, they cannot find his hiding place. Cavaradossi is detained and tortured to make him reveal the hiding place. In the meantime Tosca has been summoned to Scarpia's apartments, where she hears Cavaradossi's screams of pain. To stop the torture of her lover, she reveals Angelotti's hiding place. But this is not enough.
Discovering that he sides with his political enemies, Scarpia orders Cavaradossi to be executed. Now Tosca intervenes again. Desperate, she bargains for Cavaradossi's life. Scarpia agrees to a mock execution of Cavaradossi, after which Tosca and her lover will escape by means of a safe conduct he writes under her watchful eyes.
His side of the bargain now fulfilled, Scarpia moves to collect Tosca's part of the agreement. She is repulsed and feels helpless. But as Scarpia reaches for her, she sees a knife on the table and a way out of her perilous situation. She grasps the knife and plunges it into Scarpia's heart, killing him. She then flees to the Roman ramparts, where Cavaradossi's execution is to take place.
In a tender scene the lovers are reunited briefly. Tosca unfolds the plot of the mock execution to Cavaradossi and prompts him in acting his part as the victim. The supposed mock execution proves to be a hoax, though, and the painter is shot dead. Shouts are heard in the distance, crying out that Scarpia is dead and that Tosca has killed him. Rather than be captured by Scarpia's forces, she leaps from the ramparts to her death.
The violence of this story, the realism with which many of the plot's lurid details are conveyed, and the powerful singing style required of the principals have all connected this opera with the Italian movement verismo. Puccini is often cited as one of the proponents of verismo in Italian opera, and Tosca as one of the clearest examples of this genre.
Whatever its aesthetic position, Tosca is a compelling and riveting opera, and one of Puccini's most popular. Join your fellow opera lovers on Sunday, December 1 at 2pm, at the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center, to experience it.
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