Giacomo Puccini sees the play Tosca by Victorien Sardou in Milan in 1889 with the top actress of the moment, Sarah Bernhardt. The sensational effects of Victorien Sardou's thriller theater about the Roman diva and her beloved artist who in Rome around 1800 become victims of the authoritarian regime of police commissioner Scarpia, fascinate the composer. He sees the play again in Firenze and decides in November 1895 to compose an opera based on it. The Roman setting and atmosphere seem to offer him a wealth of musical opportunities.
The brutal murder of Pasolini and the shadowy role of the young Giuseppe Pelosi form an important subplot in Rafael R. Villalobos's staging of Tosca. It is less far-fetched than it seems at first glance, at least if it is worked out as consistently and with such logical boldness as this director does. He anchors his direction to motifs that appear in the opera: Rome, sadomasochism, resistance to a dominant regime, freedom of the artist. The artist Pier Paolo Pasolini, as an openly representative figure of the homosexual scene, became a victim of homophobic hatred in 1975 on the beach of Ostia. In the director's view, this is an equally gruesome crime of sadistic abuse of power as the cruelty to which Cavaradossi and Tosca fall victim in historical Rome.
In each act, the references to the gay world are therefore unmistakably present. Yet they mostly do not prevent one from appreciating the essence of the veristic, passionate drama of Puccini's Tosca. In the first act, in the church Sant' Andrea della Valle, where Cavaradossi paints the portrait of Maria Magdalena and the Te Deum is sung, you cannot escape the altar boys and immediately the tendencies of "transgressive" behavior by the sacristan. Before the beginning of the second act, director Rafael R. Villalobos presents an additional scene in the loggia with a long dialogue between Pasolini and his friend, which can be interpreted as a kind of manifesto of his attitude as an artist and gentle man, a stark contrast with the brutal and frightening nature of the second act. Thanks to the acting skills of the Scarpia and Tosca performers, the tension is built to a chilling crescendo, especially from Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore, the moment when Tosca has made her decision that Scarpia's kiss will be his death kiss. In this act, the gay scene is sometimes presented with too much eagerness and too explicitly, but it still fits with the chosen vision. The final image of the third act of Tosca's "dying" is such a poetic image that it can barely leave one unmoved. In that sense too, it remains faithful to Pasolini, especially with the quotation: "I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who is homesick for faith". This quotation and indeed other historical facts are often – again meaningfully – projected as a kind of "subtext" between the scenes.
A successful total spectacle
The fairly abstract set with an evocation of church arches depicts the interior of the church in the first act. The painting that Cavaradossi is working on is lowered into it and the image of the Madonna is by no means absent. In Scarpia's palace hall, the arches are filled with nude portraits. In the third act, especially the lighting makes the ominous emptiness even more threatening. Leah Hawkins plays her diva image well from her appearance in the church. Her acting performance is particularly convincing, her vocal performance somewhat less so. With too much force, the voice occasionally becomes marred with an ugly throat sound or vibrato, and the famous Vissi d'arte could have had more nuance. But as a dramatic soprano, she provides a moving interpretation right through to the chilling finale. Same story with Lucio Gallo. As Scarpia, the cruelty suits him perfectly, but the vocal power shows some wear here and there. Stefano La Colla is a convincing Cavaradossi with his brilliant tenor voice, who bids farewell to life and love with touching tones in E lucevan le stelle. Conductor Jordan de Souza encourages the orchestra toward refinement and detail to realize Puccini's particularly richly colored orchestration, making the performance an absolutely impressive total spectacle.