Puccini's Tosca is so popular that the opera seems to be in perpetual rotation -- I think I have seen it at least 8 times in my 35 years of opera attendance. When properly performed with excellent singers, the show is compelling and, of course, the music ultra-dramatic (melodramatic, I suppose you could say) with exquisite melodic passages about every ten minutes. The Des Moines opera production, performed at the Blank Performance Hall at Indianola, Iowa was beautifully crafted and, apparently, spared no expense as to cast, scenery, and costumes -- the show was so traditionally mounted, so utterly without pretense or high concept, that the opera seemed to me paradoxically post-modern. Sometimes, the most avant-garde approach to an old war-horse like Tosca is to present it without artifice, without irony or camp, that is, without winking at the audience and cleaving closely to the intentions of the composer. Tosca was first performed in 1900 and the Des Moines Opera production shows that the show can be gripping and, even, resonant when performed straight, no chaser.
Contemporary critics called the opera "nasty" and thought it depraved because of its subject matter. Indeed, the opera has a certain noir aspect to it. The voluptuous singing and elaborate sets are in service of a sordid story of murder and torture. After Napoleon's departure from Rome, the authorities round up revolutionaries, apparently emboldened by the French conqueror's supposed democratic sympathies (which were an illusion), torture and, then, execute them. (Aspects of the opera presage Rossellini's Rome - Open City -- there's a Gestapo aspect to the bad guys.) Floria Tosca, a singer, is involved in a love affair with Caravadossi, a painter. Cavaradossi provides aid to a revolutionary who climbs out of the sewer in the church where he is painting an image of Mary Magdalene. The villain Scarpia is arresting revolutionaries and knows that Cavaradossi is tangled up with the subversives. Scarpia lusts after the beautiful Tosca and stirs up her jealousy -- she is fickle, courageous and defiant, and not too smart -- implying that the painter who is now hiding with the rebel is courting another woman. As Scarpia expects, Tosca knows where Cavaradossi is hiding, goes to him, and, thereby, reveals his whereabouts and the location of the revolutionary. The rebel commits suicide and the painter is captured. Scarpia, then, indulges in some nasty sexual harassment -- he has Tosca's lover tortured within her ear-shot. She can only save her boyfriend by agreeing to give herself to Scarpia. Tosca agrees to surrender to him if he writes her a note guaranteeing safe passage out of Italy for the couple, Floria and Cavaradossi. Scarpia also agrees to stage a fake firing squad execution of Cavaradossi with the plan that the painter, feigning death, will come back to life after the soldiers depart and flee with Tosca. As Scarpia approaches Tosca lecherously she stabs him to death with a small dagger -- "this is Tosca's kiss!" she cries as the blade sinks into his heart. The next morning, Cavaradossi faces the firing squad. But Scarpia has lied about feigned firing squad. The bullets actually pierce Cavaradossi and he falls dead. Tosca is beset by thugs set on revenging Scarpia and she climbs to the parapet of the Castello San Angelo and flings herself off the top of the fortress. The climax comes with shocking speed -- it's all over in a couple of minutes without any lengthy arias; the music roars briefly at the audience and, then, everyone is dead.
The first act's set epitomizes the no-irony aspect of the production. The action takes place in a baroque church and the set has replicated this location in voluptuous, even, alarming detail -- there are towering square pilasters with gilded Corinthian capitols, wall-size paintings, a baptismal font from which the harried rebel drinks like a dog, a terrazzo floor, and even a small chapel in a niche that is sectioned-off with a wrought iron fence or grill. It's elaborate and gasp-inducing -- the set is concealed behind a scrim and only revealed a few minutes into the act. Puccini has a propensity to layer his musical settings, invoking a disconnect between the different strata -- at the end of the first act, the stage fills up with ecclesiastics, altar boys with censors, worshipers and a Prince of the Church who carries an elaborate monstrance, elevating the host to solemn music as Scarpio, like Richard III, soliloquizes as a basso profundo, on his evil plot to "have the head" of the concealed rebel. Tosca teases her boyfriend and there's an erotic edge to their byplay -- she's self-consciously fickle an attractive affectation that is the very trait that Scarpia will use to trap her and Cavaradossi. The second act is far more sparsely decorated -- it's Scarpia's headquarters, a table piled with food, some candelbra, and a red-tinted torture chamber off-stage. The third act represents the parapet of the San Angelo fortress with an avenging angel seemingly in bas relief looming over the right side of the set -- the profile of St. Peter's basilica is visible over the castle wall and, as the dawn advances, the sky brightens. Puccini likes dawn scenes -- there's one in Turandot and, also, La Boheme -- and he lavishes his most inventive music on those episodes. The dawn in Tosca sounds almost like aleatory music, little spurts of woodwind, clicking percussion, bells ringing in the distance. In general, the orchestration is ultra-expressive, a bit like Strauss in Elektra or Salome but with better melodies.
The singing was exquisite: Laura Wilde brought a Wagnerian timbre to her singing. She is attractive and actually can act in addition to her majestic voice. Brian Michael Moore was splendid as the doomed Cavaradossi -- he has a spectacular tenor voice and, when he hits the high-notes in his arias, its like the brassy sun flooding the landscape with radiance. It seems as if his voice is on the verge of shattering in its upper register so there's a thrilling edge to his singing. Scarpia, played charismatically by Norman Garrett, as is the case with many villains, has all the best lines and "outherods Herod" in the role. He dominates the action and, when Tosca is about to commit suicide, her mind is on Scarpia, not her boyfriend Cavaradossi -- she shrieks something like "I'll see you Scarpia before God", promising, I think, heavenly vengeance, but there's a slight suggestion that, maybe, the villain has excited her more than would be seemly.
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