Conductor
Jacques Lacombe

Director
Jonathan Kent

Revival Director
Stephen Barlow

Designs
Paul Brown

Floria Tosca
Angela Gheorghiu

Baron Scarpia
Bryn Terfel

Mario Cavaradossi
Marcello Giordani

Cesare Angelotti
Kostas Smoriginas

Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca on which Puccini’s work is based, was originally an illustrative five-act vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt; but in the composer’s hands became bleaker, condensed to its tragic, violent essence. Whilst proving too-strong a meat for many of his critics, the public adored the opera from the outset, and even Sardou conceded that it surpassed the original.
      Set in 1800 during the Battle of Marengo, and premiered exactly one hundred years later in the midst of a bomb scare, Italian political instability resonates across the intervening century in chilling leitmotif. Tosca’s Rome was by all accounts a brutal, passionate city where two or three murders occurred a day – mostly crimes of passion inspired by lust or gold. Her female contemporaries were renowned for their beauty, bravura and unconventional skill at self-defence; an independence characterised by wearing stilettos (a form of knife) as hair ornaments.
      History and melodrama interweave in the tale of Tosca, her lover Cavradossi, and their vicious nemesis, Scarpia. Incredibly, all three have met their demise by the summation of Puccini’s third act: an intimate tragedy played out against the panoply of European conflict. New and old worlds collide over articles of faith, while dramatic tension reigns - not least in the initial misrepresentation of Napoleon’s famous victory as defeat.
      Reprising roles from Covent Garden’s 2006 production, Angela Gheorghiu and Bryn Terfel embody mesmerising opposites. Tosca, a devout, populist entertainer, is pitted against the anachronistic, sadistic police-chief, Scarpia. Like scorpions, they are engaged to the death in hypnotic combat, ineluctably colluding in mutual destruction. Indeed, the satanic Sicilian is characterised in the opera by musical phrasing which features a diminished fifth, the so-called ‘Devil’s interval’, prohibited by medieval pedagogues and later incorporated in Saint-Saens’ notorious Dance Macabre.
      Terfel makes a magically menacing anti-hero drawn from the darkest pages of folklore, touched with repulsive fairy glamour (in its original, specious sense of dissemblance) and possessed of a thrilling voice every bit as sinister as a death knell. By comparison - as detractors are wont to point out - Gheorghiu’s stage presence lacks epic projection, but boy does this siren-sung Tosca convey power. You truly believe her silver-tongued paean on a life dedicated to art and love. Pocket-sized she might be, but beauty and delicacy are subtle adjuncts to the finest aria. The painter Cavaradossi, as the heroine’s dissident lover completes this unholy trinity. In the presence of genius, Sicilian Marcello Giordani could have found himself compromised in the supporting role, but this veteran of the 2007 Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago, resumes his part with sexy swagger, as befits the diva’s flawed inamorato.
      Canadian conductor, Jacques Lacombe, makes a perfectly fine fist of his Royal Opera debut, and the cast (notably Lithuanian bass-baritone Kostas Smoriginas as doomed political refugee Angelotti) are a credit to him. The setting of each act represents a notable Roman landmark: in turn, the Church of St Andrea della Valle; Farnese Palace; and Castel Sant’ Angelo, from the parapet of which, Tosca ultimately flings herself. Sets are monumental and appropriately gloomy, but lack an awe-inspired x-factor. In similar fashion, costumes appear competent, if a mite under-powered.
      The tale of Tosca is disturbingly nihilistic: a trajectory of inexorable calamity, propelled not by personality alone, but inescapable, contemporary context. Everyone of importance in the drama is condemned, and consequently, each component of the opera is subordinate to the near-ritual deaths of its principals. Like vampires, these characters suck oxygen from the atmosphere, consuming energy and life-force. Nothing can be allowed to deflect our attention from their ill-fated moment in the sun, or the void that beckons. Star-billed, Gheorghiu and Terfel irradiate the stage like human candles – burning twice as bright but only half as long.
Caroline Kellett Fraysse