Puccini: Tosca [Royal Opera House, 2011] - Gheorghiu, Kaufmann, Terfel [2012]

I shopped around a good many performances of Tosca before settling on this one, and it does not disappoint. This Royal Opera House version has a good balance between traditional production values (the setting is Rome in 1800, like it says on the tin) and fresh, naturalistic acting by an excellent cast. It doesn't take any gimmicks to rejuvenate this war horse, just love and attention to detail and top-quality singing. In his brief introduction, the enthusiasm of Tony Pappano, the conductor, leaps across, and he has obviously communicated it to the orchestra: the playing shimmers and sparkles, the ensemble is flawless, and as an spectator you can just forget about any logistical problems and allow yourself to be carried along effortlessly by the drama.Bryn Terfel is a great artist, not too vain to show Scarpia for what he is: a failure, the wreckage of a man, but no less terrifying for that. Jonas Kaufmann has to be simply one of the best Marios ever, putting Alagna and even Domingo in the shade. Angela Gheorghiu in the title role seems sometimes to let her undoubted beauty of both looks and vocal tone carry her through at the expense of acting: she is too restrained in Act II, seeming to regard the prospect of being raped by Scarpia with some equanimity, before managing to stab him to death without getting so much as a drop of blood on the knife or her flawless white dress. Let's face it, most Toscas are too restrained, and/or too haughty - when will we get one who has an urchin's wildness under her diva veneer, as the play called for? But that's by the by.However good the performance, I have to admit I can never see this opera without wishing that it was just a little bit better than it is. Puccini and his librettists rushed their work and couldn't agree on what they were trying to achieve, much as movie adaptors of novels tend to in our time, and the opera is stuck half in and half out of the chrysalis of Sardou's mechanical melodrama, not quite fulfilling the enhanced emotional potential of the characters and the story. This is especially obvious in Act III, where the iconic final leap from the battlements can't make up for the fact that we expected the characters to grow further, and they regress instead.However, all the claims that this opera is `decadent', that it wallows in passivity and futility, that its message is `the illusory nature of happiness', seem to me to be wide of the mark. This is what critics have been saying for a century, either to dismiss Tosca or to assert its place in a tendentious 'story of western culture' in which Romanticism inevitably has to decline into decadence, nihilism, etc. so that a sterilised, intellectually straitjacketed High Modernism can take over. Performers and audiences, however, have stayed happy Romantics and do not experience the opera as a gloat over doomed puppets. Rather, it comes across as an affirmation, a moral victory for the lovers who, although apparently destroyed by a cruel world, achieve an apotheosis not much different from those of The Flying Dutchman, Aida or Swan Lake. It is this joy snatched from terror that makes people endlessly return to see it. Now that post-modernism has relaxed the stranglehold of the highbrow, middle-brow opera-goers can surely reassert their love for it without shame. And point out that rather than being a decaying fruit, Tosca was in some ways ahead of its time: musically, in its anticipation of film music; dramatically and morally, in its depiction of totalitarianism. (Susan Vandiver Nicassio's book 'Tosca's Rome' has some interesting discussion of this.) In Scarpia's Act II monologue, just as in Orwell's 1984, Mao's China, the files of the East German Stasi, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is made clear that the totalitarian state and its representatives cannot tolerate any relations among its citizens based on trust, sympathy, and, especially, sexual love, rather than power. Mario may have sheltered a political subversive, but his real offence and Tosca's is against Scarpia's proto-fascist code that coercion is better than consent, that struggle is all. Scarpia's horrible bargain with Tosca is designed to prove that love - foolish, fallible, human love - is no match for power. Yet he gets more than he bargained for: although the lovers cannot escape his plot, he loses, even in his own terms. And Tosca's and Mario's triumphant moments of defiance and subversion are what stay in the audience's mind.Some criticism of Tosca seems to stray dangerously close to the totalitarianism that the opera condemns. The recurrent opining that Puccini should have had the `courage' of his convictions and openly relished the sexual sadism of Scarpia, that Scarpia is a `strong' character to be contrasted with the `weak' Mario (who is actually degenerate enough to think about love-making rather than politics just before he dies, and to admit to despair in the face of death! What a disgrace to the Party!), that Tosca secretly prefers Scarpia or is better matched with him (even the great Tito Gobbi fell prey to this tripe) ... all this, I should say, shows that the opera's message that consensual sex is an entirely different thing from coercive sex, and is worth it however vulnerable it makes you, is not as obvious and anodyne as you might think; indeed, that it was lost on a large proportion of twentieth-century intellectuals, and is, perhaps, only now coming into its own, thanks partly to the rise of women opera critics and directors. I relished hearing Catherine Malfitano, a great Tosca in her time and recently the director of a production at the English National Opera, explode the `charismatic Scarpia' nonsense and elevate Mario as the real though all-too-human hero of the opera. https://audioboom.com/boos/126231-eno-operacast-catherine-malfitano-talks-about-directing-tosca What she tells us, the miraculous Jonas Kaufmann in this performance shows us, beyond any doubt!Perhaps it's not too late to retrace our steps from the lunacies of the twentieth century and recreate the tradition of tuneful, taut, emotionally cathartic and obsessional operas like Tosca. Until they come, we are left with the great stalwarts of the Romantic repertoire, well served by DVDs like this one, that may bring them to a whole new audience.

Oh I wish Angela Gheorghiu was not the Tosca on this DVD. I find her characterisation lacking in any kind of emotional depth, only coming alive in her confrontation with Scarpia in Act two. I felt exactly the same when I saw this in the opera house and my main reason for attending was for Bryn Terfel. Kauffman was not the tenor on that occasion. Terfel was brilliant and mesmerising and though Miss G took the final bow at the end the applause was far less than that for Bryn. I had treated myself to seats in the stalls for this and wondered how those in the amphi could hear her voice which I find small and from comments in the interval from other patrons it was clear I was not alone in my opinion.However on a DVD this smallness of voice does not show itself and of course she has a lovely tone and exquisite phrasing and well aware that my aversion for her is my own personal reaction. Kauffmann is simply superb, what a voice this man has and he seems to be able to sing Puccini and Wagner and others with equal beauty and facility.But I return again to Bryn Terfel. I freely admit I am a huge fan of his and could watch him in anything and I think he is a stunning Scarpia and delighted to have this DVD on my shelves

I've always been a Bryn fan and follow the poor man everywhere including his Faenol Festivals he used to host in North Wales. I did inisist I wasn't a stalker when I shook his hand at his Bad Boys Tour in St David's Hall few years back! With his huge voice and menacing looks I always knew he would make a good Scarpia. Tosca is my favourite opera and with such a star studded cast I had to see it live on 1 of the only 2 performances and I have waited patiently for the CD to come out. Jonas Kaufman with his wonderful baratonal warmth in his tenor voice is fabulous too. Gheorghiu has that frailty and vulnerability in her voice that Callas had. I know I am supposed to be reviewing the DVD but I haven't got it yet and hoping to have it for Xmas!