Tosca - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Tosca

Melodramma in three acts
Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
after the drama LA TOSCA by Victorien Sardou
World premiere on January 14, 1900 in Rome
Premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on April 13, 1969
In Italian with German and English surtitles

3 hours / two breaks

The literary model for Puccini's "Torture Opera" (Oskar Bie) was provided by Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) with his successful play LA TOSCA, which premiered in Paris in 1887 with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. After Puccini 1889 had experienced the piece on a tour in Milan, he was immediately enthusiastic about the material. But the TOSCA plan will initially remain six years, until Puccini, probably inspired by another performance of the Sardou drama in Florence and Luigi Illica's work on a TOSCA libretto for the composer Alberto Franchetti (1860-1942), interested in the Finds substance. After a "conspiracy" between Puccini, Illica and Ricordi, the publisher manages to persuade Franchetti to abandon his TOSCA project and leave Puccini the composing rights.

As in all of Puccini's operas, TOSCA also shows how human attention and culinary pleasure can be mutually dependent when the artist's artistic intentions become the benchmark of interpretation. The outcry as well as the resignation are the essential conditions of Puccini's human attention: The compassion he composed is not content with abstract gestures, but aims at restlessness, at change. The "little things" that Puccini termed modern understatement his object become "big ones", if we just want that. The connection between Puccini's direct and indirect influence on Zola, Hauptmann and Gorki's choice of material and his compositional style suggests that he is given the label of verismo as Verdi's successor. As you know, he was a great admirer of Wagner, but anything but an epigone. Rather, he created a very personal connection from some achievements of both. Using all the refined refinements of harmony and all differentiations in instrumentation, he nonetheless released his voice from the orchestral interweaving and at the same time gave her a much more broken, more sensitive sound accompaniment in the orchestra than the radical laconic Verdi. This is also the aesthetic theme of TOSCA. The musical gesture is as brutal as it is tender, intelligent as well as sentimental, as precise as dreamy. Puccini desperately wants to have truth in life, accuracy of the musical details, social attention, the poetic sound of the seemingly ordinary, the heroic with calculus, the contrast between dedicated passion and cool distance.
The police chief Scarpia, the singer Floria Tosca and the painter Cavaradossi claim freedom in every personal variant: as dynamic-subjective power claim (Scarpia), as a rebellious ethos aimed at change (Cavaradossi), as a private, simple and at the same time limitless love (Tosca).

In a time of epochal upheavals, such attitudes gain exemplary meaningfulness. Depending on how we and Puccini understand at this time, TOSCA remains a horror romance or becomes the theme of the theme of "freedom". Anyway, each of the contrary partners pays this love triangle with death. Her dying does not claim salvation, but is bitter, horrible, definitely.

Götz Friedrich's 1987 recapitulation of Boleslaw Barlog's straightforward and scenic staging from 1969 takes Puccini's intentions to the word - the reciprocal conditionality of human attention and culinary pleasure is inspired by music as a starting point for scenic interpretation.

Subject may change.

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