Alastair Macaulay: Is Tosca really a masterpiece?

The former NY Times chief dance critic reviews last night’s ROH revival of Puccini’s warhorse for Slipped Disc. The more he sees this opera, the more doubts he has.

by Alastair Macaulay

Puccini’s Tosca will be 125 years old next year. Jonathan Kent’s production, new in 2006, returned to Covent Garden repertory on Monday night for a group of five performances with one cast this month. (It will return in July, with two other casts and one other conductor, for eleven more showings.) Puccini’s score is fragmentary, and can be jerky, but American conductor Karen Kamensek – physically tiny – made it cohere skilfully.

She brought particular focus to the three chunks where Puccini is at his most musically and dramatically complex: in Act One, the Te Deum (offstage cannon fire, church organ and congregation, all overlapping with the villainous Baron Scarpia’s erotic and political machinations); in Act Two, the cantata (when Scarpia interrogates his prisoner, the artist Cavaradossi, while religious music – led by Cavaradossi’s lover, the singer Floria Tosca is sung in concert offstage); and in Act Three, the slow march at the Castel Sant’ Angelo (in which soldiers formally enter and prepare to execute Tosca’s lover, the painter Cavaradossi, while she maintains a running commentary about his performance of what she thinks is a make-believe death).

On Monday, it was marvellous to feel how all the separate layers of these scenes registered. Kamensek caught the inexorable pulse of these passages, while keenly realising such internal details as the tiny string portamenti, which lend their own texture and commentary. In such sequences, opera – showing how the public and the private intersect – is poignantly overwhelming and undermining at the same time.

Even so, and even though it’s over fifty years since my first Tosca (in this very opera house), I’m increasingly inclined to resist much about this warhorse. Its many admirers are right to call it a masterpiece. But a masterpiece of what kind? Really Tosca is about manipulative theatricality rather than of seriously convincing drama. It flamboyantly brandishes Christianity in all three acts, but really just for theatrical effect. (None of its invocations of God are as a fraction sound as sincere or touching as Minnie’s Bible reading in Puccini’s own La Fanciulla del West.)

When the determinedly secular Baron Scarpia, in church, calls out, “Tosca, you make me forget God!”, it’s just a standard melodramatic ploy. (It’s derived from Victor Hugo’s “Nôtre-Dame de Paris”, where the far more interestingly conflicted character Frollo genuinely thinks he doesn’t want to be tempted away from Christianity by the helplessly attractive Roma dancer Esmeralda.) As for Tosca’s renowned aria “Vissi d’arte”, it’s a display of religious passive aggression. (“God, I’ve done good things and done charitable deeds, so why do you repay me this way?”) Her belief in God then allows her to commit both murder and suicide.

Religion is just one of the triggers employed in Tosca; art is another. But I’m less moved by – I have less belief in – Cavaradossi’s painting than I do with Marcello’s in Puccini’s La Bohème; and Tosca the singer is more of a harried professional than a dedicated musician. In Kent’s superficially glamorous production, Paul Brown’s designs for each act feel like several separate zones tacked together; Mark Henderson’s lighting is no help here. (And the stars in the night sky above Rome in Act Three are absurdly large.)

All three of Monday’s lead soloists had telling moments. The Lithuanian soprano Ausrine Stundyte was touching in Tosca’s moments of greatest frailty, but under pressure her voice proved both squally and underpowered. The Italian Gabriele Viviani has the authority to carry the role of Scarpia; but his voice, too, tends to lose firmness in the most proclamatory passages. Best was Marcelo Puente as Cavaradossi: although this Argentinian tenor’s voice becomes slightly tight at top and bottom, he often weds words and melody to gorgeous effect. Nothing all evening was more touching than, as Cavaradossi prepared for death, his quiet statement “Io lascio al mondo una persona cara”: I leave to the world one person dear to me. In such lines, Puccini’s understanding of human sentiment still flies to the heart. Manipulative, yes; but here I confess myself successfully manipulated.

press photo: Marc Brenner/ROH