About the Work:
When Puccini started writing Tosca, he’d already composed four operas, including the popular La Bohème. In “a marked change from the late Romantic sentimentality” AM of that work, Tosca was an exploration of “the dark side of human emotion.” AM It “premiered in 1900 at Rome’s Teatro Costanzi to a temperate critical reception.” AM
Puccini first came across Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca in 1889, two years after its premiere. He didn’t start writing his opera based on the play until 1895, largely because of waning interest in the play, which may have been stirred by Sardou’s admission that he disliked Puccini’s music. AM Eventually Giulio Ricordi, Puccini’s publisher, convince the composer to complete the opera. AM
“Puccini creates coherence between story and music with themes that recur in association with characters and concepts. The opera begins as the orchestra states the low brass-laden three-chord motive outlining the sinister interval of a tritone (B flat major, A flat major, E major) that we come later in Act One to associate with the villainous confessor and executioner Scarpia. An expansive, major-mode theme, orchestrated for strings, is introduced in Act One as Tosca’s and Cavaradossi’s love music, and returns in Act Two, when Tosca enters Scarpia’s chamber and as Cavaradossi is led from the torture chamber to Tosca, and in Act Three, as pantomime music as Cavaradossi writes his farewell to Tosca.” AM
Although the continuous swaths of sound in Puccini’s score avoid the sharp delineations between recitative and aria of earlier nineteenth century Italian operas, arias still function to uncover the emotions of the central characters in Tosca. Tosca utters her Act Two supplication Vissi d’arte in a soaring melodic idiom, reinforced by a rich harmonic language and orchestral palette.” AM
“The cello melody that accompanied Tosca’s first entrance and meeting with Cavaradossi in Act One, here accompanies Tosca’s prayer, illustrating the extent to which love is Tosca’s true religion. In Cavaradossi’s Act Three aria, E lucevan le stelle, the orchestra sings with him at key utterances in desperately empty octaves.” AM
“Puccini also upheld here the tradition of monumental end-of-act finales. The Act One finale (Tre sbirri...una carrozza) is a cleverly crafted juxtaposition of diagetic and non-diagetic music in which the Latin chorus of working-class believers singing the Te Deum and the intermittent utterances of the godless Scarpia mesh musically on different planes of realistic perception. The Act Two finale, which grows out of Tosca’s and Cavaradossi’s duet, is a tragic rush as Sciaronne, Spoletta, and a chorus of soldiers chase Tosca to her death. The E minor tonality that accompanied Scarpia’s death at Tosca’s hands in Act Two, here accompanies her own demise, and binds Tosca and Scarpia beyond their earthly entanglement.” AM
Notes:
The 1953 recording of Tosca, featuring Maria Callas, is in the Grammy Hall of Fame.
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