Opera Review: Tosca, The Metropolitan Opera, New York City

Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca is based on an 1887 French play by Victorien Sardou and was first performed in Rome in the January of 1900.

Yet this opera favourite is intimately connected to its setting – the Rome of 1800. The city’s inhabitants wait to hear the outcome of the Battle of Marengo, while, against the background of various Roman monuments, political strife leads to a series of personal tragedies.

Unlike the Met’s Rigoletto, which I reviewed a few weeks ago for this blog, this Tosca is traditional in its appearance and costuming, as we journey from the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle to the Palazzo Farnese and, ultimately, to the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo.

Act II of the Met's production

This season sees a rotating cast of 9 taking on the opera’s lead characters. I saw Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska in the title role, with Italian tenor Roberto Aronica as Cavaradossi and Italian baritone Marco Vratogna as Scarpia.

Monastyrska is charming in Act One, as Tosca flirts with Cavaradossi and struggles to contain her unfounded jealousy, but really comes into her own in her scenes with Vratogna, as she tries to free her lover from torture and protect herself from Scarpia’s advances.

Rather than the steady descent into tragedy that many operas follow, what I love about Tosca is how close we come to a happy ending. Even though we know that their escape will fail, in this production there was something so touching about the lovers’ reunion that you almost start believing with them.

What’s more, with Scarpia dead - the ‘bad guy’ defeated – Cavaradossi’s death, and then Tosca’s, feels unfair rather than unavoidable, provoking an emotional response much more similar to losses we might have experienced in our own lives.

The performance felt like a little slice of Rome over Thanksgiving weekend in New York City – filled with passion and dramatic in its staging, but still somehow relatable enough to be genuinely affecting.

What do you think the Secret Victorianist should see next? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

"We'll Always Have Paris": The Met's La Bohème and Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème

Some texts have an afterlife which is entirely reflective of the spirit in which they were written. One of these is Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1851).

The other week I attended the New York Metropolitan Opera’s wonderful production of Puccini’s La Bohème, the world’s most popular opera, which premiered in 1896 in Turin. In preparation for the performance I decided to read Murger’s work (on which the libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa was based), even though every programme blurb is likely to tell you the adaptation is ‘loose’ at most.

A scene from the Met's production

Murger’s ‘novel’, which I read in translation, is more of a series of short stories set in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Characters recur, some with greater frequency than others, but timing is more nebulous and the plot hard to define. In the opera, Rodolph and Mimi’s relationship – its inception and conclusion – bookends the story. It is important in Murger too, but not central, and many of the features of Mimi’s story in the libretto (e.g. her profession and her death) are taken from an additional and minor character in the novel – Francine.

This is interesting. It suggests a dichotomisation of women in the opera – timid, initially chaste Mimi contrasted with worldly Musette – which is not the case in the text, where if anything the resourceful women trading on their beauty seem more sensible than their permanently broke and utterly deluded lovers. The stage world of great loves and tragedy is instead a constant comedy of bed-hopping and betrayal, where death is a constant feature, but life most always go on.

Rather than plot, what was lovely to see brought to life in the opera were details of the Bohemian life, which come up again and again while reading Murger’s vignettes. There is the cold, furniture sacrificed to open fires, near-continual drunkenness, tenants eluding the landlord, and strong emphasis on (male) friendship - which is more central than romantic love in the original.

This production did a great job of transporting the audience to Paris – whether the city’s bustling streets, or a quiet garret, set against a darkening skyline. When the curtain falls you’re suddenly back in New York, bereft of the idiosyncratic Bohemian life of the Latin Quarter. Finishing the novel is a similar experience. Characters and a way of life, with which a succession of stories has made you oddly familiar, fade away. If nineteenth-century Paris were a destination I could choose to visit, I’d have no hesitation in heading back for more.

Do you know of any other NYC events with a nineteenth-century link the Secret Victorianist could attend? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!