The Discovery Period

There was a time in the early days, when I was just getting introduced to operas, when they were all about equal to me. For sure, I knew a little about Barber of Seville, and I’d listened to a CD of Verdi’s Opera Choruses, and I knew my parents had once gone to New York City to see La Traviata. Pagliacci had a clown, and Rigoletto had a guy with a deformity of some kind. And that was about all I knew about operas back then.

So I would choose any opera at all for Friday night – anything that the New York Met had online, at least. I had no preferences, and no rule-outs or red flags. So I selected according to how familiar their name sounded, and not much else. I watched Barber, and I watched Traviata, and Pagliacci, largely out of curiosity. Didn’t get to Rigoletto for many months, for some reason.

With this setup, I came home from work one Friday evening, very tired, and very frustrated. Work was not going smoothly; clients were acting up, money was short that week, and I lived alone. The prescription in such a depressing situation, for me, was to cue up an opera, prioritizing the ones I’d heard mentioned frequently, and settle in for a well-deserved relaxing evening with fine music to calm the world.

I chose Puccini’s Tosca.

Friday Gets Even Worse

It started well, with a painter named Cavaradossi working on a mural after-hours in the church, and thinking about his girlfriend (Floria Tosca), who is a famous singer. The first five minutes or so of Tosca are serene and comforting, and I imagined that I’d made a good choice for a relaxing Friday evening.

Then things start going south. The painter’s friend, Angelotti, appears in the church, terrified, because he has escaped from prison and is being hunted down by Baron Scarpia and his cruel henchmen. He hides, with the painter’s help. Now both are guilty.

Further, as Scarpia closes in on Angelotti, the fugitive runs out, and hides in a well, and then when all hope is gone, he kills himself. So, one jailbreak, one abetting of a fugitive, and one suicide.

Floria the girlfriend shows up and helps the painter Cavarodossi hide from Scarpia, somewhere outside the church. But the brutal Scarpia gets Floria to come to his house for dinner, and blackmails her into bringing in Cavarodossi, whom he stashes in a nearby room.

The tension was getting a little high at this point; I was no longer sure this was the enriching aesthetic experience that I needed after a tough week at work.

It really wasn’t, because Scarpia wants to have sex with Tosca, and when she refuses, Scarpia orders that her boyfriend be tortured painfully in the next room, and we can all hear that happening, out in the audience.

So now you have the blackmail, the attempted rape, the unlawful imprisonment, and the painful torture.

Almost too much for me, and far too much for Floria Tosca. She gives in and promises Scarpia whatever he wants, that very evening, as long as he agrees to free her guy Cavarodossi. She sits with this ogre Scarpia at dinner, and this is really quite upsetting to anyone with a subscription to the New York On-Demand operas, because they might be watching an old production (1985) that has Cornell MacNeil singing Baron Scarpia, and he is one of the most frightening, evil-looking Scarpias one can imagine. (That production also has a young Plácido Domingo doing Cavarodossi the painter, so that is a plus, among the multitude of minuses in the story.)

Scarpia has to be cute; he doesn’t just let Cav go free. Instead, he confers with his sidekick and all agree that the prisoner Cavarodossi will undergo a “fake execution”, for credibility purposes, before he is allowed to walk away with Floria.

Then as they finish dinner together, and the beastly Scarpia is about to make his move, Floria holds him close, runs him straight through with a steak knife, and states triumphantly “This is Tosca’s kiss!”

Fine, she wins that one, and in most productions she lays this guy out on the floor surrounded by candles, or otherwise calls attention to his grisly demise, while she sings.

Utter immoral duplicity, avenged with a knife murder. At least Cavarodossi isn’t still screaming, offstage.

For relief, I was about to pack up and go back to my troublesome office, where things were relatively happier, calmer, and more hopeful than on the terrifying set of the famous Tosca.

It was about 9 PM in my house, and yet I felt like I was staying up all night in the jail with Tosca and Cavarodossi, awaiting his “fake execution”, while they sang mournfully.

Finally at daybreak, they shoot him, and Tosca realizes it isn’t a fake, so she leaps to her death.

So there we have the grim, slow, leadup to capital punishment, an effective firing squad, and a second suicide.

We could tot up all the catastrophes, all the human suffering on display, and count how many points of unfathomable grief are presented in Puccini’s Tosca, but I am not going to do that. It’s too sad, just writing about it. After that fearsome evening, I cannot remember how I recovered, but it might have had something to do with controlled substances, or maybe I watched Donizetti’s banal farce Don Gregorio.

Hop the Fence

You might imagine that I’d sworn off Tosca forever after that experience, and I should have, but for some reason (which I cannot fathom) I watched a second recording of this bloodbath some months later, and I was again revolted.

Finally enough? No! Because I was in the habit of buying a ticket to whatever Chicago was showing, so I sat in the balcony at the Lyric and went through all that pain a third time, and I cannot defend a decision like that.

But two things had changed during those months.

First, I had noticed a rather nice piece of church music, where Scarpia sings with the believers, at the end of Act 1. In fact, discussing the absence of any positive traits of Tosca with another operagoer, I was told that this one chorus piece is so good, it’s worth seeing the whole opera, just for that.

Not credible, not possible.

Second, I was by that time aware that the specific way that Floria leaps off the high battlements of the prison, can vary from one production to another, and it’s entertaining to see how they pull it off in each version of the opera.

(In the old New York production, she kind of looks downward and then hops vertically, just as if she’s aiming carefully for a soft pillow or trampoline. In Chicago, it was easy to see that something other than Tosca fell past our viewpoint – maybe a bag of extra program leaflets, or tomorrow morning’s laundry. I forgot how they did the other one and I refuse to watch it again, even to satisfy curiosity.)

Scarpia Sings to God?

What about the nice choir piece in the church? Hard to say, because I don’t have what it takes to endure another showing of Tosca, not now, and probably not ever. It’s awful, and I already have enough problems and worries, as we all do – no need to fight my way through that house of horrors again.

But here’s the deal – I am willing to fast forward to the church scene, and listen, just so I know what I am talking about, and then snap it off before the bloody murders and self-harm resume.

Here we go.

Okay, here’s one from 2023, at the Arena de Verona (where they recorded an astonishing La Gioconda for me in years past).

Yes indeed. This is enjoyable – the choir and a formation of clerics are singing the Te Deum, and Scarpia is singing about how he loves Tosca the woman. It is a solid, grand, heavenly piece of music.

Plus, in the Verona production they are using their extraordinarily wide stage and both its wings to show a massive religious procession, an array of nuns, a children’s choir, a vast face of St Michael, a 20-foot-tall crucifix, and a small army with cannons and smoke. Tiny Scarpia is down in the middle of this huge tableau somewhere, faking his devotion to God.

But it lasts just 2 minutes, leading up to the curtain at the end of the first act. And no, one could not love Tosca the opera just because of this song. Not at all, and partly because to find that one song on a video, you have to jump around through many, many minutes of Scarpia’s declarations and Tosca’s exclamations, set to the puzzling sort of music that Puccini has on offer.

Not good for me. I’m done with this thing.

Sonya Yoncheva Punts

Wait, no I’m not. I have to zip to the end to see how she jumps, of course!

Oh dear. Well, I suppose you can do it this way, too.

She climbs high in her raging grief, steps to the precipice, shouts at Scarpia, raises a cross, and … The lights black out.

And that’s the end of Tosca.