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Puccini, Tosca: new production:  Soloists, Chorus,  ballet and orchestra of the Opera di Roma, Gianluigi Gelmetti conductor.  Rome 15.1.2008 (MM)


There are always compelling reasons to make a quick mid-winter trip to Rome, but probably none more important than to see the new production of Puccini's Tosca that inaugurated the Opera di Roma's 2008 season.  The Opera di Roma has staged more than seventy editions of this, the most Roman of all operas, with about a thousand performances over the past 108 years.  Thus, since its prima assoluta in Rome on January 14, 1900, they have had enough practice to get it right.  And that they did, well almost, at the gala opening night on January 15, 2008.

This newest edition was staged by Franco Zefferelli, now 85 years old, and he was true to form as the maestro assoluto of gigantic opera.  Famous are his many super-sized productions at the huge Arena di Verona -Aida , Carmen, and most recently a Trovatore, to name a few.  Memorable was the heroically sized Otello at the Metropolitan Opera maybe 20 years ago, and the more recent, oversized La Boheme in the same house with over 300 people on stage for the Café Momus scene.

This new Roman Tosca was huge too, about as huge as it could be in the ample, if finally limited,  confines of the Rome Opera, and made more gigantic still by means beyond mere physical size.  Zefferelli utilized huge, heavy stage elevators to raise a very large chorus to stage level and into the Basilica Sant'Andrea delle Valle for the famous Te Deum.  Facing forward and unmoving, this chorus thrust its massive sound directly outwards, against which Scarpia avowed first his lust for Tosca and finally his humility in front of God.

Three big singers dominated the stage with super-sized voices and big opera singer presences.  It was an international cast  with the Tosca of Austrian soprano Martina Serafin, the Cavaradossi of Spanish tenor Marcelo Alvarez (the era of Spanish tenorial hegemony continues), and the Scarpia of ubiquitous Italian baritone Renato Bruson.  Zefferelli's challenge was not to mold these singers into his conception of Puccini's characters but to impose their generic renderings of these roles onto the spectacular scenic tableaux of Rome that he created, even allowing them at times to move forward onto the black stage apron to do their thing directly to the audience, scenery be damned.

Conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti took this considerable stimulus to generate a musical reading that fully enveloped the gigantism.  Though Puccinian tempos were observed, sometimes on the slow side, Sig. Gelmetti fully elaborated the not too deeply hidden hysteria in Puccini's score in full-throated orchestral sounds.  The result was riveting indeed, strangely stealing the thunder from Strauss' Electra as the prototype of twentieth century operatic aberration.

Both Sigi. Gelmetti and Zefferelli know that to scratch the surface of Tosca makes Rome, not Tosca, its protagonist.  For centuries,  Rome has struggled to reconcile its weighty, restrictive Christian presence with its permissive pagan atmospheres, and to protect the solidity of its traditional ecclesiastical structures from the new social and political ideas that continuously arrive from a more progressive Europe.  The Roman actress Tosca is trapped in these conflicts, jealously enthralled by the patriotic artist Cavaradossi and at the same time infatuated by the power of Scarpia, the head of ecclesiastic Rome's secret police.

Zefferelli played with the massive weight of past and present Rome in the execution of Cavaradossi atop the Castel Sant'Angelo.  The scene opened as expected with the imperial eagle proudly placed above highest ramparts.   The huge stage elevators then raised this massive structure to reveal a dark prison beneath holding Cavaradossi, who soon moved onto the black stage apron to deliver the showpiece of the opera, e lucevano le stelle complete with a hokey vocal choke on the last phrase.

The effect was brilliant, the ovation was appropriately  gigantic and well deserved indeed.  The excited crowd demanded that the show be stopped and the aria repeated.  Sig. Alvarez slipped off-stage to grab a sip of water while the clarinet player (this aria is actually a duet for clarinet and tenor) took his equally well-deserved bow.  Though Alvarez seemed a bit winded vocally the second time around he pulled himself together for his final duet with Tosca, tenorial splendor at its peak.

Less Italianate was the Tosca of Marina Serafin, vocally a dramatic soprano rather more than an Italian spinto.  Serafin's sound is in fact very big but it seems to be produced with remarkable ease, without the visceral push that defines the spinto.  The result is a quite beautiful if not vocally thrilling lyricism that nonetheless served the over-the-top musical front emanating from the pit.  Though this Tosca seemed more a musical means than a dramatic force,  her final leap did indeed set a new standard for cheap operatic thrills.

It would be illuminating to see an operatic Scarpia as a powerful, sexual symbol of authority rather than as the usual dirty old man. Renato Bruson is a master of this role and still vocally secure, though at more than seventy years of age he can no longer enrich this neurotically erotic opera with the sexual and vocal force needed to confuse Tosca.  To see a Tosca endowed with these more complex overtones check out Carmine Gallone's 1945 film Davanti a lui tremava tutta Roma where Scarpia is the Nazi commandant of Rome (the Tosca is Anna Magnani to the voice of Renata Tebaldi).


Michael Milenski

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