Tosca

Introduction

“…never have we heard a piece in which there is so much bell-ringing and shooting as in this one […] gunpowder, bells, organ, torture rack, quint steps, deceptive cadences, a host of melodies more beautiful than the last” – quipped Pongrác Kacsóh in the 8 December 1903 issue of Zenevilág, poking fun at the special sound effects in Puccini’s opera, after calling its most beautiful parts the “sweet children” of the Italian cult of melody. “We must astonish the audience! […] and for this, ideas that are musical by their very nature are required!” – wrote the composer in a letter in 1899. The passion for shock indeed pervades this opera as well, and he does not shy away from sensationalism (Arnold Schönberg, for example, considered the entire torture scene to be just that). In this area, too, one must reckon with strong competition. Thanks to Puccini’s rivals, the premiere was disturbed by several events: there were threats of an anarchist bomb attack (at one of the conductor’s premieres in Barcelona, a bomb really did explode), the latecomers and those left without tickets made an outrageous din, and a few prominent musical authorities also added their share (Mascagni, for instance, timed his entry with cheers and ovations to make it as impactful as possible), while the chance of paid provocation was also present.

The success, however, thanks to the majority of the audience, was not lacking: Tosca’s prayer (Vissi d’arte), the finale of the first act (Tre sbirri… Una carrozza), Cavaradossi’s two hits, the arias beginning with Recondita armonia and E lucevan le stelle, and the duet of the third act (O dolci mani / Amaro sol) were all encored. Even today, with a good performance, the audience would most likely be happiest to do the same. The scandalous figure of the piece was the sadistic Scarpia, whose perverse libido was incited as much by the groans of torture and aggression as by lust: this is already made clear by the fantasy visions at the end of the first act. Particularly exciting is the ritual that takes place between Scarpia and Tosca: for Scarpia, it is a kind of lascivious, perverse courtship game, while for Tosca it is a blood-draining struggle of life and death, sheer hopelessness until the moment she sees the knife. In the end, it is the knife that performs the act. The Scarpia motif, which opens the opera and runs throughout, seems to recall the edge of that knife. Éva Marton, one of the greatest Toscas of all time, recalls with great enthusiasm in an interview Jonathan Miller’s production, which relocated the opera’s setting to the era of Italian fascism, and in which Scarpia appeared as a shoe fetishist. “He destroyed me as a woman as well, not only as a political victim,” said the singer. She also mentions, however, a Wiesbaden production that was staged on an empty set, where instead of the final death leap Tosca “spread her arms against the wall, like a giant fly.” From these two examples alone, it is clear that within a single singer’s career, Tosca is capable of radical transformations.

Zoltán Csehy

“Until now we were gentle, now we shall be cruel”

In the beginning there was Victorien Sardou’s five-act drama – with the French queen of the stage, Sarah Bernhardt, in the title role. The sure-handed master of the pièce bien faite genre presented La Tosca to the Parisian public in 1887: full of tension and action, historical references and pseudo-historical characters with meticulously crafted biographies, tight dialogue, and narratives that recalled the backstory in elaborate detail. And of course, the indispensable grand scene, whose arrival the audience already knows in advance, yet whose unfolding and manner of realization they await with all the greater excitement. And not least: an absolutely female leading role, offering the possibility of stage apotheosis to a great actress. That Sardou’s play was soon turned into an opera can thus be seen, in light of all this, as quite a logical development. Indeed, it may even be considered inevitable, knowing how carefully and eagerly Puccini sought out effective plots that guaranteed success as far as possible.

“Until now we were gentle, now we shall be cruel,” Puccini wrote to his librettists, with this sentence steering them away from La Bohème toward the new operatic subject – and, as it soon turned out, he had not spoken with undue exaggeration. One of the most obvious features of Tosca is precisely its violence, a fact that sufficiently explains why Herbert von Karajan considered it advisable for young conductors to perform this opera from time to time, in order to release their accumulated aggressions. Alongside the almost lascivious brutality, embodied in the opera by Baron Scarpia, there was of course room for plenty else in Tosca: a love lyric tinged with jealousy and dense tragedy, the character of a Roman Baedeker, and genre painting rendered with a fortunate sense of proportion, free of all overgrowth — not to mention the fireproof, waterproof, and shockproof hit numbers. And beyond all this, the diva role also offers the great sopranos, the prima donnas of the opera world, the chance to display a kind of representative and stylized self-portrait. It is no wonder, then, that the gravitational pull of Floria Tosca’s character has been almost irresistibly strong, drawing so many and such varied sopranos to this role and this part over the past 120 years.

Ferenc László

The director’s concept

Any staging is a big responsibility. The piece receives a new look, it becomes a different production. Variety still delights, even thousands of years later. Therefore, it is no question for me that a classical one, authentic to the period should not be followed by a similar one, especially if the previous one was on for a very long time, 34 years. The common denominator in both performances is Puccini’s score, and far be it from me to mean it cynically. Not only because all the notes will be where they were written, which means that the work is not damaged, but we might even show a greater respect to it than before owing to the efforts of the conductor Gergely Kesselyák, who will cleanse it from any negligent performance tradition that it accumulated over the years. Tosca and Cavaradossi, through no fault of their own, are tragic victims of an external historical and power situation, while Scarpia is a distinctly negative character, who does not only fall according to our sense of justice, but according to Puccini’s composition. Thus, the score and the dramaturgical essence remain intact, it must not be distorted. At the same time, many stage details are altered, which results in a different new production.

From my managerial point of view, the history of the Hungarian State Opera must be important as some organic entity. For example, what has all taken place within the walls of the Ybl Palace in the past 138 years? The building has just reopened almost five years of restoration, and it was just then, in March 2022 that the international cooperation, which would have given us a new Tosca, fell through. I immediately had to step up lest the autumn premiere be cancelled, that is why we are here to talk about it. Puccini virtually presents a guidebook of Rome based on the work by Sardou, the three locations might be walked around within an hour. However, not all is real: Attavanti’s side chapel does not exist in the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, and Palazzo Farnese has not become renowned for having been the centre for the secret police, either. In fact, it has housed the French embassy for almost a hundred years. It is also true, Castel Sant’Angelo at the Vatican used to be a prison and a place of execution, but even in Puccini’s time it already functioned as barracks. All this does not really matter. The characters in Puccini’s operas might be flesh and blood people or fairy-tale-like, abstract figures, it is not the decorations surrounding them that are important but the extreme emotions that connect or separate them. This gives us the opportunity to redesign the production. The locations could even be included in a Budapest guidebook from the 1950s: the destroyed Regnum Marianum Church, the darkening Opera House, 60 Andrássy Avenue (today’s House of Terror Museum), or the pedestal for the Stalin statue raised in place of the church, where Kádár and his comrades waved cheerfully even at the moment of my graduation from. Moreover, a most unpalatable but well-documented moment of the communism in Hungary is Comrade Rákosi’s 60^th birthday, which was celebrated at the Opera House. Tosca takes place in an oppressive system where the chief of police can do anything without fair hearing, trial, judgment, and pardon, without a minimal control: in this any of us can recognise the Hungarian dictatorship of the 1950s.

In the old operatic tradition, even dying was beautiful and aesthetically fitting, without upsetting the audience, whereas what else could be the purpose of Tosca if not exactly this? Different times require different tools, because we do not follow our predecessors, but rather aim at the same goals as them. Compared to films, the implementations cannot be as radical within a theatre, simply because of the great distances. And compared to some contemporary prose performances we will be less rude, if we consider the late Nitsch’s horrible installations, ours will be quite mild. We do not use violence and blood for itself, but the score of Tosca really demands brutality as it contains the signs of symbolic and natural violence. The “soul” of Scarpia stuck in a wartime existence, the essence of his being will be represented by a tank, which is both a place and a symbol of torment. Those who strive for political power do not select of their means here, either, even if it is their own former comrades-in-arms that need to be disposed of. Projections of the soul and mind also become visible through moving images, and in its own way I intend this to be a large-scale performance along with Krisztina Lisztopád, who was already responsible for the entire scenery, the costumes and props in our production of Hunyadi László. Love, jealousy, enthusiasm, revenge, or calculation: nothing has changed in the hearts since the beginning of creation... All-in-all, we also reinterpret death through Tosca, as it has not simply got a radical physical aspect – but let the performance tell the rest.

We can relate to this 120-year-old opera today, in 2022 only if we entrust ourselves to it, if we are willing to go on a spiritual-sensual adventure – the genre of opera is capable of attacking our every pore with all means, and you shouldn’t withdraw but let it affect you. This Tosca is of the same line intended as an icebreaker just as it happened when László Vámos’s decorative Otello was replaced by Stefano Poda’s interpretation inspired by contemporary fine art, or, when Viktor Nagy’s classical Aida was followed by a stirring performance by the Mohácsis. In the past ten years there have been many of these perspective-changing premieres, in the place of András Mikó’s authentic Don Carlo, the modern world of the Spanish Steps by Frank Hilbrich can be seen. Puccini’s La bohème, on the other hand, was not replaced to its exceptional character, but we also added a modern, world-renowned staging to the repertoire by Damiano Michieletto. In this sense, tradition is not an operatic category, Mahler even went so far as to describe it as disintegration. It can actually case much harm if we consider the opera oeuvre with the circumspection and analysis in the style of our great-grandfathers. We cannot carry out our own intellectual work if we do not pore over the classical pieces, and if the audience – as opposed to prose theatre where they already understand and accept a lot of things – treat live opera as a video player, they will mummify it. Of course, I am not saying that classical approaches should not happen, I did it myself in the case of Hunyadi. I am not saying either that all innovative formulations are successful and of high quality – now, at the time of our conversation, I can only hope for Tosca to do well. Just as more and more new training methods are used in sports to achieve the same goal today, the raison d’être of the operatic mission is simply unquestionable. And it is not a question of aesthetics: János Szikora’s Die Frau ohne Schatten was also touching although it took place in an underground garage, or The Gold and the Woman also functioned well with Csaba Káel’s animal tale concept. Naturally, if you have someone like Puccini or Strauss standing next to you with their score as “co-creators”, it is not only an enriching experience, but a large part of this great responsibility is also taken care of through music.

For lack of a better word, I call it “storytelling” when the score unfolds like a fold-out storybook, and the gaps between the layers can be filled in any way, obviously within certain limits. Both the plot and the music of Tosca offers such possibilities. Sometimes we stumble upon puzzles – why the title character doesn’t get confused when she finds the police inside the church instead of the painter, or why the beaten up Cavaradossi is interested more in accidentally hearing of Napoleon’s victory at Marengo with a sudden “Vittoria” exclamation instead of his own life and that of his lovers –, at other times we are amazed at how many clues are given to the differences on stage by the music itself! Puccini is almost Wagnerian in a sense of Gesamtkunstwerk apart from writing the libretti himself. Yet sometimes he provides longer stage instructions than those for tempi and character, and even these are changed all the time, piled and elaborated on using curlicued expressions – and these theatrical concepts are 120-year-old notes. Giacomo Puccini is indeed a modern composer, if he were alive today, he would also require video signals, perhaps even holograms. His masterpieces cannot be exposed to the disadvantage of taking everything literally except for the music. It would deprive his creations of the renewal with today’s tools, and at the same time from remaining and living on as masterpieces.

Many people might see the 1956 revolution in the production, but let’s underline that there is no such thing, the performance is not about revolution, it has absolutely nothing to do with it. Tosca is a desolate piece in a way that death and self-sacrifice are meaningless, while the Hungarian revolution wasn’t like that by any means. It has to do with the period, the 50s, and thus even the anti-religious aspects of it of this many-layered piece can be shown, because from the beginning it is a drama of crime, politics, and love. (The theatre can also restore what cannot be done today: the layout of the high altar of Regnum Marianum Church is recreated, whereas in reality it has never happened.) But there is no redemption, no big realisation at the end of Puccini’s Tosca. Somehow all the characters go on until the end of the piece, but the system does not collapse, it does not change, only the people do. In essence, there is not even hope for it. I deeply believe that the original message of the work cannot be different: avoid this kind of world, be careful and may totalitarianism never return.

Szilveszter Ókovács

The conductor’s thoughts

Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca has an incredible flow that lasts from the first note to the last one, and what makes it clear that the composer wrote it in such a way that every single moment follows the previous one logically. In the case of Puccini, it is quite evident that in his mind he even envisaged the play with a precise knowledge of stage and theatre. Tosca is one of the most performed operas. This goes hand in hand with the fact that it is most exposed to the dominance of the performance tradition, which comes at the expense of fidelity to the score. In general, it is a matter of rhythmic inaccuracy, unnecessarily inserted pauses, which for the most part do not serve the purpose of dramatic expression, but – generally due to the lack of sufficient rehearsal – to prevent the performance from falling apart. We are in a fortunate situation as now we are given the opportunity to discover the score again and not give way to the “usual” out of sheer convenience or to play it safe.

It is not an easy task, because the performance traditions of the last one hundred and twenty years are deeply embedded in us, in the muscles of the conductors, in the throats of the singers, and even in the ears of the audience. Puccini states at the recitative parts whether he wants us to handle it freely, but when Scarpia questions Cavaradossi, for instance, there is no indication in the score for a slowdown, there is no sign that this part could be played freely. The composer gives an exact indication of tempo and rhythm for the greatest possible tension, so it is not worth deviating from it. It is certain that even if the prosody seems strange at first there is a specific authorial idea behind it. Instead of “straightening it out”, we must look for what Puccini might have seen on his inner, “audiovisual stage”. The composer was an incredible genius, so every deep analysis concludes that it is much more meaningful and effective to do what is written in the score than what we would do out of habit. With the current production, we are therefore trying to remove the dust that has accumulated on the work, and everyone is of the same mind. Szilveszter Ókovács’s new directorial concept, which takes the singers out of the usual situations, inspires me a lot and, paradoxically, even helps us handle the score even more faithfully. Thus, in the performance you experience now, there will be some unusual tempi and musical solutions, which may shock. But I hope that the power of Tosca will grow from the fact that Puccini’s musical intention is realised more precisely.

Gergely Kesselyák