What makes Tosca a gay opera

A German website has been pondering the gender-identity question in Puccini’s ‘shabby little shocker’.

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It operates at the interface between kitsch and art, thus opening the door to camp aesthetics – a semi-ironic perception with a particular fascination for exaggeration and hysteria, for borderline experiences and queerness, which is firmly rooted in the gay subculture of the 20th century. From this perspective, one needn’t take the identifying characteristics in “Tosca” quite as seriously as they appear dramaturgically. The paradox is: one can still enjoy them.

If you take a closer look at the title character, Floria Tosca, you discover right from the start that she is the epitome of a drama queen. A particular highlight of this work is that in a Tosca performance, a real opera singer inevitably embodies the character of a fictional opera singer. This play on the blending of reality and fiction continues throughout the plot, as it becomes clear from her very first appearance that Tosca isn’t always able to clearly distinguish between stage action and real life. For no apparent reason, the title character is literally overwhelmed by emotions. Tosca unfolds a downright neurotic fantasy in front of her lover, Mario Cavaradossi.

First, she conjures up their shared love nest in the countryside in vivid colors. She reassures herself of her passion by imploring the stars, placing herself in the third person: “Ah, you thousand stars in the sky, look down on Tosca’s passionate love!” Immediately afterwards, she experiences an abrupt change in mood. Rapidly emerging mistrust culminates in jealous mania. Mind you, all this for trivial reasons. Yet the real catastrophes, which she has conjured up precisely through her jealousy, are still to come.

It is the full blood-sperm-tears blast to which the audience is subjected: sexual blackmail and torture, manslaughter and insidious murder. And finally, Tosca’s spectacular suicide by leaping from Castel Sant’Angelo, which in previous productions has occasionally led to embarrassing glitches because the stage-technical cushioning of the safety net was not correctly coordinated with the prima donna’s actual weight….

Read on here.

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