“Puccini meets Pasolini,” by Paul du Quenoy. (original) (raw)

Tosca is a difficult opera to stage outside of its strictly prescribed time and setting. Based on the French playwright Victorien Sardou’s 1887 play La Tosca, Giacomo Puccini’s opera of love smothered by depravity, which premiered in 1900, is set in three well-known locations in Rome: the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle (now a basilica), the Palazzo Farnese (today the French embassy), and the Castel Sant’Angelo (initially the Roman emperor Hadrian’s tomb, then a papal fortress, and now a museum). The story also unfolds over the course of twenty-four hours in history, June 17–18, 1800, when Rome received news of Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory at the Battle of Marengo, a decisive moment in the contest for control of Italy. Initial reports held that Napoleon had been defeated. In Rome, where invading Neapolitan armies had recently ousted a revolutionary republic based on the French model, this was a cause for celebration—including the grand Te Deum and offstage concert featured in Puccini’s opera. Later dispatches, however, clarified that Napoleon had in fact won the battle, leading to chaos in Rome as his victorious armies approached.

Sardou’s play was extremely popular in its time but fell out of performance a century ago. Puccini’s opera, however, lastingly seized on the play’s dramatic historical backdrop and fictionalized romance between a singer—the opera’s title character—and the painter Cavaradossi, a Roman nobleman with revolutionary sympathies. Baron Scarpia, a police chief and libertine, lusts after Tosca and suspects Cavaradossi has aided an escaped republican consul named Angelotti. First subjecting Cavaradossi to merciless torture, Scarpia then promises to Tosca that he will free her lover after a mock execution if she yields to the police chief’s lustful desires. Tosca murders her tormentor rather than keeping their evil bargain, only to find that the promised mock execution of Cavaradossi unsportingly involved a firing squad with real bullets. In despair over Cavaradossi and cornered for her own murder of Scarpia, she leaps to her death, calling out for God’s final judgment.

Directors have tried to update Tosca for more familiar eras, usually reimagining Scarpia’s debauched authoritarian persona in a fascist milieu evoking Mussolini’s Italy or some blander modern police state with high walls and abusive enforcers. In the Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó’s new production for the Bavarian State Opera, the updated setting is equally specific: the set of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s gory and pornographic 1975 antifascist film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, itself a version of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century novel of the same title, set in the final months of fascist Italy. The curtain opens on a silent pantomime of one of the film’s more bizarre scenes, a mock wedding of two kidnapped teenagers who progress to the altar flanked by nude companions. Cavaradossi, costumed in retro 1970s garb like everyone else in the production, is the film’s director.

While the plot of Tosca proceeds normally, the reimagined Cavaradossi is an obvious stand-in for Pasolini, a communist fellow traveler who, shortly after completing the film, was himself tortured and murdered by what a recently reopened investigation suggests was a Mafia gang with ties to the Italian extreme Right. After the introductory take, the music starts and Cavaradossi aids the escaped Angelotti, in this production a communist revolutionary fleeing under the banner of the Red Brigades, which ravaged Italy with leftist terrorism in that troubled decade.

Scarpia appears as an ostensibly civilized and impeccably suited magistrate who relies on brutality to get his way. The Te Deum scene, normally an elaborate Catholic Mass, here becomes a police interrogation, with suspected communists pummeled by police as the Latin chants go on. The production’s conceit is that Scarpia’s sexualized abuses of power equal those of the corrupt and perverted fascist leaders in Pasolini’s film. It is not a totally senseless conclusion. Scarpia has unapologetic lines in which he admits that he has his way with women he desires and then discards them. He takes pleasure in the suffering of others in a way that could be read as erotic: he barks at Tosca, “Spasms of love, spasms of hate,” expressing identical reactions to those contradictory emotions after she tries to shame his behavior. When she kills him, this production ignores Puccini’s stage directions for her to place candles and a cross on his body as a gesture of forgiveness. Instead, Tosca holds herself upright while ghostlike figures, possibly Scarpia’s previous victims, process to stage front.

Though the production is for the most part visually beguiling, at times the message might be too esoteric. Audience members who do not know Pasolini or his film—which, nearly fifty years since the film’s release, is probably the overwhelming majority of the operagoing public—will be quite lost, and indeed the first act was greeted with savage booing. The action is often distractingly brutal. The theater’s stage elevator allows us to witness Cavaradossi’s torture, which was originally written to happen offstage, not for propriety, but because the scene’s most essential drama is the sexually charged moral struggle between Tosca and Scarpia. And while the Italian Republic has had more than its fair share of ethical scandals, which Pasolini criticized in his lifetime, it is hard to agree that it still perpetuates the worst features of Italy’s fascist past. Even the republic’s episodes of sexual license do not appear to have been a cause for total shame. Last month, Milan’s main airport was named for the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, he of those much-talked-about parties with very young women.

The lithe Italian soprano Eleonora Buratto took on the title role with alluring excitement, pealing off a beautiful middle register with attractive, earthy tones. Her set-piece aria “Vissi d’arte,” in which Tosca asks God why he is subjecting her to such torments, passed with insistent grace and ineffable charm. Cavaradossi is portrayed by Jonas Kaufmann, the state of whose voice is a hotly debated subject in today’s opera world. Once regarded as among the world’s finest tenors, it has darkened with flashes of baritonal resonance. Those came across here. In the part’s defining moments, however, especially the Act II cry of “Vittoria! Vittoria!” when Cavaradossi exults at the news of Napoleon’s victory, the tenor produced a clarion and resonant reminder of past glories. The excellent French baritone Ludovic Tézier voiced a superb Scarpia and was at home with the character, both as Puccini conceived him and as Mundruczó reimagined him for this production. Antonio Battistoni led a busy, if at times disjointed, performance.