How much feverish love, torture and murder can you pack into one opera?
Plenty, if Giacomo Puccini's "Tosca" is any indication.
And you can add in a little sexual coercion and suicide, too.
Oh, the joys of feel-good entertainment.
One of the most beloved operas in the repertoire, "Tosca" is that special gem that serves as an ideal entry into the fascinating, saucy and sometimes unpredictable world of opera. In that it shares a status with Georges Bizet's popular "Carmen."
Audiences, new and old, will get the chance to experience this taut, three-act tale of two lovers and how they are set upon by a sadistic police chief when the Sacramento Opera opens a three-performance run of "Tosca" at the Community Center Theater on Friday.
The opera stars Marie Plette as Tosca and Dinyar Vania as Cavaradossi in a production directed by Mark Streshinsky. The opera will be sung in Italian with projected English supertitles.
"In many ways this is the perfect first opera because the conventions that have surrounded opera for centuries just do not exist in this show," said Sacramento Opera conductor and artistic director Timm Rolek. "I think this is due to the fact that 'Tosca' is a very realistic opera."
The opera is based on the dramatically fervent, but now forgotten, 1887 hit play of the same name by the French playwright Victorien Sardou.
Puccini used the play as a foundation and made "Tosca" into an opera that is not your run-of-the-mill "stand and deliver" work. The story takes place in less than one day, the opera includes some of the most powerful and stunning duets in the repertoire, and there is plenty of psychological drama swirling within. Ultimately, the opera's immediacy is what gives it its mass appeal.
But unlike "Carmen," "Tosca" seems more timely and more user-friendly in an age when TV shows such as "24" are on prime time.
Here are 10 things you should know about "Tosca." Some will be self-evident, others new. And all of them prove that there is nothing ordinary about this opera.
Kill 'em all; let God sort 'em out later.
Within the 24 hours of this opera's plot, all of its major players will be dead. Usually an opera will dispatch one major character, sometimes two. But "Tosca" offers a tasty trio of death. The evil Scarpia will be stabbed, the well- meaning Cavaradossi executed, and his lover, Tosca, plunges to her death to show her love for him.
Location, location, location.
Tosca is set in Rome circa 1800, in three buildings that still stand today. The church of Sant'Andrea della Valle, the Farnese Palace (now the French Embassy) and the Castel Sant'Angelo (once a mausoleum and prison). All three are popular tourist destinations in Rome.
Jack Bauer would be proud.
Like the hit show "24," this opera takes place over a 24-hour period, which greatly adds to the power of the drama. Keeping the story to a short time frame is a convention that screenwriters have used in Hollywood, from "High Noon" to the recent Al Pacino release "88 Minutes."
Money talks.
Who made the most money off this opera? Not who you would think. Usually it's the composer, librettist or music publisher. But the initial big money winner with "Tosca" was playwright Sardou. Sardou started raking in big bucks from the premiere onward because of a contract rider that gave him 15 percent of the opera's proceeds, said Rolek.
Seven years before "Tosca" premiered, Rolek said, Sardou had bet on the show doing well and forced anyone interested in using his play to give in to the onerous contractual terms. So, during the first eight years of the opera's run, it was Sardou who lugged money bags to the bank.
Maria Callas = God.
If any one singer can be associated with one role, it might be the charismatic and mercurial soprano Callas and the role of Tosca. Between 1946 and 1955, Callas performed the role 55 times. One of the definitive recordings of "Tosca" is the 1953 EMI Walter Legge recording by the La Scala Theatre Orchestra with tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano and baritone Tito Gobbi. In this recording, "the Callas" gives about as electric a performance as has been given by a soprano in the history of recorded opera.
Call arts critic Edward Ortiz at (916) 321-1071
