Tosca

Tosca, opera in three acts by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa) that premiered at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome on January 14, 1900. Based on French playwright Victorien Sardou’s popular play La Tosca (1887), the opera is about political intrigue and romance in the days of the Napoleonic wars. (See French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.)

Background and context

In 1889 Puccini, barely 30 years old, set his sights on Sardou’s play, a wrenching melodrama of love and hate, passion and death, set against a backdrop of revolution. It had been written for French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was perhaps the only person who could have managed the role’s intense dramatics successfully. Critics deplored the play’s violence, but the public loved it, and Puccini was determined to base an opera on it.

Puccini’s publisher, Giulio Ricordi, secured the rights for another Italian composer, Alberto Franchetti, instead. Franchetti and the librettist Illica began work but ceded the project to Puccini for reasons that remain unclear. At first Giacosa resisted working on the libretto, because he disapproved of the story and knew it would be difficult to set into verse. Sardou insisted on retaining the right to approve any libretto, and Puccini spent time with him in 1899, arguing for his own dramatic preferences. Ricordi was unhappy with the relatively small proportion of lyrical numbers in the third act and tried to persuade Puccini to add more. Ultimately, Puccini prevailed, and the completed opera was novel in its avoidance of grandiosity and its small number of stand-alone arias and ensembles.

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The opera’s action plays out against specific locations in Rome, and Puccini made sure that his music would be firmly grounded in realism. For the “Te Deum” in Act I, in which Scarpia launches into a passionate and vengeful monologue while a religious procession passes in the background, Puccini wrote to a priest he knew in Rome to obtain the correct version of the plainchant melody, which he knew varied from region to region. He also tracked down an expert in church bells to identify which bells were rung for early services and what the pitch of the largest bell at St. Peter’s Basilica was. As background for the same passage in which these occur (the prelude to Act III), Puccini also obtained an appropriate folk song for the shepherd who is heard in the distance.

Premiering the opera in Rome was logical given its setting. However, Puccini had not calculated how Rome’s volatile political climate might react to an opera in which revolution, political suppression, and criminal abuse of authority figure prominently. There were threats of violence, including even suggestions of a bombing. When the opening-night curtain rose to the shouts of an angry audience, the worst was feared, but it soon became clear that the fury was directed at late arrivals. The opera was an immediate success with the public, if not with critics of its extreme melodrama, and it continues to be frequently performed. Its best-known selection is the soprano aria “Vissi d’arte,” which Puccini added at the last minute after his singer complained that her character had no suitable numbers.

Cast and vocal parts

• Floria Tosca, a Roman opera star (soprano)
• Mario Cavaradossi, a painter (tenor)
• Baron Scarpia, Roman chief of police (baritone)
• Cesare Angelotti, a political prisoner (bass)
• Sacristan (baritone)
• Spoletta, a police agent (tenor)
• Sciarrone, a police agent (bass)
• Jailer (bass)
• Shepherd boy (soprano)
• Cardinal, judge, scribe, officer, sergeant, soldiers, executioner, police agents, ladies, nobles, citizens.

Setting and story summary

Tosca is set in Rome between noon of June 17, 1800, and dawn of the following day.