Tosca Giacomo Puccini Performed in Italian with English Supertitles Single tickets on sale Aug. 11 (Sept. 2 in Fairfax) This is Tosca's kiss! Tosca, a headstrong and celebrated operatic soprano, loves the handsome painter Mario Cavaradossi, whose political activism places him in the crosshairs of the evil Baron Scarpia CONDUCTOR: PETER MARK STAGE DIRECTOR: LORNA HAYWOOD

Full Synopsis

ACT II. Scarpia anticipates the pleasure of bending Tosca to his will. Spoletta returns and did not find Angelotti.  However, he did bring Mario to be interrogated.  Tosca enters just as Mario is being dragged into another room to be tortured.  Unable to bear the sound of her lover’s tortured screams, Tosca reveals Angelotti’s hiding place.  Mario is carried back into the room, turns on Tosca for speaking and is dragged off to prison.  Scarpia bargains with Tosca for Mario’s life.  If she were to yield herself to him, he would allow Mario to live.  She protests claiming that she has dedicated her life to art and love. Spoletta interrupts them, announcing that Angelotti killed himself. Tosca agrees to Scarpia’s proposition.  He pretends to order a mock execution, after which Mario would be freed.  Tosca grabs the knife from the table and kills Scarpia.

ACT III. Mario awaits execution and bribes the jailer to convey a farewell to Tosca. He becomes overwhelmed with memories of their love.  Tosca runs to him and tells him of her deed.  He caresses the hands that committed murder for his sake and the two hail their future together.  Tosca coaches Mario on faking his death.  The firing squad fires at Mario and departs.  Tosca praises Mario for his performance, but when he does not move she realizes that Scarpia did not order a fake execution after all. Hearing Scarpia’s police approaching to arrest her, she leaps over the parapet to her death.

About the Composer

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
Giacomo Puccini was the heir to Italy’s cherished opera icon, Giuseppe Verdi: he became the last champion of the great Italian Romantic opera tradition, in which lyricism, melody, and the vocal arts dominated the art form.

Puccini came from a family of musicians who for generations had been church organists and composers in his native Lucca, Italy, a part of the Tuscany region. His operatic epiphany occurred when he heard a performance of Verdi’s Aïda: at that moment the 18 year old, budding composer became inspired toward a future in opera. With aid from Queen Margherita of Italy that was supplemented by additional funds from a great uncle, he progressed to the Milan Conservatory, where he eventually studied under Amilcare Ponchielli, a renowned musician, teacher, and the composer of La Gioconda (1876).

In Milan, Ponchielli became his mentor, astutely recognizing his extraordinarily rich orchestral and symphonic imagination, and his remarkable harmonic and melodic inventiveness, resources that would become the hallmarks and signature characteristics of Puccini’s mature compositional style.

Puccini’s early experiences served to elevate his acute sense of drama, which eventually became engraved in his operatic works. He was fortunate to have been exposed to a wide range of dramatic plays that were presented in his hometown by distinguished touring companies: works by Vittorio Alfieri, Carlo Goldoni, the French works of Alexandre Dumas’, father and son, as well as those of the extremely popular Victorien Sardou.

In 1884, at the age of 26, Puccini competed in the publisher Sonzogno’s one-act opera contest with his lyric stage work,  Le Villi, “The Witches,” a phantasmagoric romantic tale about abandoned young women who die of lovesickness; musically and dramatically, Le Villi remains quite a distance from the poignant sentimentalism which later became Puccini’s trademark.  Le Villi lost the contest, but La Scala agreed to produce the opera for its following season. But more significantly to Puccini’s future career, Giulio Ricordi, the influential publisher, recognized the young composer’s talent to write musical drama, and lured him from his competitor, Sonzogno.

Puccini became Ricordi’s favorite composer, a status that developed into much peer envy, resentfulness, and jealousy among his rivals, as well as from Ricordi’s chief publishing competitor, Sonzogno. Nevertheless, Ricordi used his ingenious golden touch to unite composers and librettists, and he proceeded to assemble the best poets and dramatists for his budding star, Puccini.

Ricordi commissioned Puccini to write a second opera, Edgar (1889), a melodrama involving a rivalry between two brothers for a seductive Moorish woman that erupts into powerful passions of betrayal and revenge. Its premiere at La Scala became a disappointment: the critics praised Puccini’s orchestral and harmonic advancement from Le Villi, but considered the work mediocre; even its later condensation from four acts to three acts could not redeem or improve its fortunes. 

Ricordi’s faith in his young protégé was triumphantly vindicated by the immediate success of Puccini’s next opera, Manon Lescaut (1893). The genesis of the libretto was itself an operatic melodrama, saturated with feuds and disagreements between its considerable group of writers who included Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Luigi Illica, Giuseppe Giacosa, Domenico Oliva, Marco Praga, and even Giulio Ricordi himself. The critics and public were unanimous in their praise of Puccini’s third opera, and in London, the eminent critic, George Bernard Shaw, noted that in Manon Lescaut, “Puccini looks to me more like the heir of Verdi than any of his rivals.”

For Puccini’s librettos over the next decade, Ricordi secured for him the illustrious team of the scenarist, Luigi Illica, and the poet, playwright, and versifier, Giuseppe Giacosa. The first fruit of their collaboration became La Bohème (1896), drawn from Henri Murger’s picaresque novel about life among the artists of the Latin Quarter in Paris during the 1830s: Scènes de la vie de Bohème.

The critics were strangely cool at La Bohème’s premiere, several of them finding it a restrained work when compared to the inventive passion and ardor of Manon Lescaut. But in spite of negative reviews, the public eventually became enamored with the opera, and it would only be in Vienna, where Mahler, hostile to Puccini, virtually banned La Bohème in favor of Leoncavallo’s treatment of the same subject.

After La Bohème, Puccini proceeded to transform Victorien Sardou’s play, La Tosca (1887), into a sensational, powerful, and thrilling musical action drama, improving on his literary source and providing immortality to its dramatist.

His next opera was an adaptation of David Belasco’s one-act play, Madam Butterfly (1904). At its premiere, the opera experienced what Puccini described as “a veritable lynching,” the audience’s hostility and denunciation of the composer and his work apparently deliberately engineered by rivals who were jealous of Puccini’s success and favored status with Ricordi. Nevertheless, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly quickly joined its two predecessors as cornerstones of the contemporary operatic repertory.

Puccini followed with La Fanciulla del West (1910),“The Girl of the  West,” La Rondine (1917),  the three one-act operas of Il Trittico – Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi and Il Tabarro (1918), and his final work, Turandot (1926), the latter completed posthumously by Franco Alfano under the direction of Arturo Toscanini.