It’s been a year of firsts as far as Tosca is concerned: the Royal Opera House having begun the present season back in September with its first new production of the work in almost twenty years, Glyndebourne now launches the season of summer opera festivals with its first ever Tosca.
Like Oliver Mears for Covent Garden, Ted Huffman sets it in the 1940s, though his version is less of a sensational War-time thriller laden with violence than a sombre study of fascist-era politics and tyranny. Whereas Mears still utilised a Roman setting, albeit a notably less glamorised one than encountered in traditional stagings of this opera, Huffman jettisons Rome almost entirely with his more generalised scenography. The church interior for the opening Act is particularly austere, though there is a fairly seductive head of St Mary Magdalene on the canvas that Cavaradossi is working on. The nervous, hectic scurrying around of Angelotti and an anonymous fellow prisoner, and of the congregation later on, establish a tense, fearful atmosphere, all the more so when that tied-up sidekick is beaten in the church, a visual analogy for the bound and tortured Christ, also sentenced for imagined political crimes.
Act Three is set in a dark, barren place like a crater, where a handful of prisoners are shot by guards during the prelude, before Cavaradossi eventually meets the same fate, presumably recalling the massacre of Italian civilian resistance fighters by the Nazis in the Ardeatine Caves just outside Rome in 1944. Tosca falls victim to the soldier’s bullets too, rather than dramatically hurling herself from any parapet, but in going forwards to meet them a sense of her agency and tragic heroism is preserved. It also enables her to die in the presence of Cavaradossi’s corpse, not apart from him, which may serve for some as a conclusion of cathartic solace after a fairly passionless account of their relationship in this production. But it registers as a somewhat sentimental end to Huffman’s rigorously unromantic, clinical examination of the cold-blooded exercise of power in this opera where he is otherwise careful to downplay the melodrama for which the work has often been criticised. (The audience seemed to buy into the production’s cool stance too, not prompted to interrupt its flow with applause after any of the famous arias.)
Vladislav Sulimsky’s Scarpia is bald-headed but bearded, and so doesn’t resemble Mussolini, though he looks thuggish enough. There is also a sideswipe at the present denizen of the White House, when his dinner of a hamburger and chips is brought on, said to be a favourite repast of this president, enabling him to make sinister threats to Tosca with ketchup to hint at the blood his henchmen are drawing from Cavaradossi in the torture chambers below. More provocative and telling, however, in this second Act which he dominates, Scarpia has his dinner with his fellow officers and their wives, so that his showdown with Tosca is semi-public, as though his murderous regime has become normalised and accepted in this society, and Tosca’s personal and artistic manifesto in ‘Vissi d’arte’ is met by them with philistine indifference, just as nobody seems to stir in the previous Act when that unnamed prisoner is beaten in church. It adds a frisson of dramatic excitement as we wonder how the scene will eventually empty so that she can deliver her decisive, fatal blow against Scarpia, although this is arguably unnecessary since the sinister tension is all already in Puccini’s score. Sulimsky has a similar snide edge to his singing as Ruggiero Raimondi in this role, though not quite the menace, and therefore sounds a touch too soft, though his performance is otherwise compelling.
Vocally the other two principals impress for their efficiency and commitment. Although slightly squally in the first Act and brittle in the third, Caitlin Gotimer – making her UK opera debut – flourishes in the title role throughout the second, soaring in that famous aria over the orchestra and elsewhere imparting as clean an attack on her lines as her assault on Scarpia. Matteo Lippi has a throaty, almost baritonal heft as Cavaradossi which, if not typically Italianate in its lustre, is urgent and elegant, ‘Recondita armonia’ and ‘E lucevan le stelle’ both calmly despatched. Where Federico De Michelis’s Sacristan is curt, but still encompasses humanity, Didier Pieri and Michael Ronan embody the sly inscrutability of their master, Scarpia, as the police agents Spoletta and Sciarrone. Kristian Lindroos is an aptly disturbed Angelotti.
Robin Ticciati brings a cinematic quality to the performance with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, offering vivid detail and colour on a localised scale in the music that characterises the drama and contrasts with the prevailing gloom on stage. Intriguingly Ticciati manages that through a sometimes broad, striving way with the score which, like the production, avoids melodrama but builds its own tension, clinched by the resounding wall of sound from the Glyndebourne Chorus and Children’s Chorus in the climax of Act One. Without the epic, tragic grandeur of more traditional stagings, this won’t be a Tosca to everyone’s taste, but it has a gripping, hard-hitting momentum which casts this staple of the repertoire in a new, darker light.
Further performances to 30 August (with some different cast and conductor in August)
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