Tosca, Cavaradossi, and Angelotti all fear the Roman police captain, Baron Scarpia, who is searching for “enemies of the state” and who lusts for Tosca. Floria Tosca is a beautiful-and jealous-opera singer loved by the painter Cavaradossi, who has agreed to hide his friend and escaped revolutionary ally, Cesare Angelotti, from the police. Napoleon’s army has just met the Austrian army at Marengo, a fact that is background for the political hostility. Playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw had nothing good to say about Sardou’s La Tosca, calling it an “empty-headed ghost of a shocker,” but later suggested-sarcastically-that it might make a fine opera.Īs a realist drama, the time and place of Tosca is very specific: Rome, June of 1800. Puccini and his librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, based their work on a recently produced play by Victorien Sardou, set in 1800, during the Napoleonic Wars. Puccini, somewhere in the middle of that range, was merely matching the musical textures to the dramatic intensity of the story. Admittedly, turn-of-the-century music was taking many directions, some radical and some traditional.
It also disappointed critics, who wrote things like “ Tosca, like all other operas of its type, will be an obscure and uncertain memory of a time of confusion,” and “ Tosca is too artificial, and when the composer wishes to be most intense, there is little save irritating noise.” Of course, Tosca has become anything but obscure, and time has shown the definition of “irritating noise” is not an absolute one.
Premiering in Rome, at the Teatro Costanzi, in 1900, Tosca both confused and delighted audiences. Those qualities and actions are at the heart of verismo opera, of which Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca is a prime example. Jealousy, doubt, sexual extortion, and abuse of political power seem to be universal aspects of both our humanity and our civilization, whether we like it or not.
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