Spasimi d'ira, spasimi d'amore!
Formative-album replay: Tosca (1953 EMI recording). I think of it as one of the great scenes in musical history, and I think of it fairly often: the time a peeved Ravel schooled a young pupil who had the gall to criticize Puccini as old hat. The elder composer apparently promptly stopped whatever he was teaching at the time to sit down at the piano and play through nearly the entire score of Tosca for his impertinent student (the conductor and composer Manuel Rosenthal, the source of this priceless lore) to illustrate Puccini’s harmonic and dramatic genius, which starts in this case with the startling tritone high dive of its opening three chords and rumbles through its final, funereal timpani. He converted Rosenthal on the spot.
It’s a story that only increases my admiration for all parties, both Ravel—admittedly not the first person you’d imagine to rush to this particular barricade—and Puccini, who hardly needs such a defense but is none the worse for such an off-brand endorsement. That Ravel chose Tosca, the Italian verismo master’s most relentless, least reputable great work, only sharpens the point: Puccini knew exactly what he was doing, and game recognizes game.
I had the great good fortune of seeing Maria Ewing and Placido Domingo in Ian Judge’s production at L.A. Opera back in 1992, and it was a high point of my (admittedly limited) opera-going—the kind of performance I can still viscerally recall in many of its particulars but most especially in the feelings it evoked in the room that night (lust, disgust, avarice, ambivalence, fleeting tenderness). The feelings evoked by this 1953 album, which contains every note of the opera’s hour-and-49-minutes, are at least as or more vivid, in large part because in Callas, as in Ewing, the role had one of its definitive interpreters.
But also, I think, because this is Puccini’s most prescient demonstration of what I can only now think of as cinematic composing. (Tosca premiered in 1900, five years after the Lumière brothers screened some short films in Paris, but at least a decade before early silent film could be plausibly said to have been an influence on Puccini.) It is not just his use of repeated motifs for characters, images, and settings, or the effulgent scenic painting he does, that makes it all come to life in the mind’s eye as one listens. It’s also his use of a kind of Eisensteinian montage, of ironic or dramatic juxtaposition, to make points that go beyond theatrical subtext or foreshadowing into a realm of multiplicity that resembles nothing so much as film. There are many moments to choose from, but the most justly famous is the climax of the opera’s first act, when the tyrant Scarpia not only hits on the actress Tosca in a church, with oily but undeniable charm, but then joins the choir in the “Te Deum,” unrepentantly celebrating his lustful and murderous plans for Tosca and her lover, Cavaradossi, as the choir sings holy praise.
This collision of thunderous piety and full-throated villainy still feels smashingly bold, and it is typical of this opera. The second act’s long negotiation scene among Tosca, Scarpia, and Cavaradossi, in which the latter is tortured until she confesses, has so many ups, downs, and sudden reversals it would be dizzying if Puccini did not exert such firm control on the music. Amid the rising-and-falling arcs of drama is threaded this haunting minor-key death march, which is not tied to any particular character or plot element but seems simply to signify the deliberative onset of tragedy, the nets closing around all the lead characters alike:
I was also gobsmacked on this relisten by the choice to have the doomed lovers, Tosca and Cavaradossi, as they meet one last time near the opera's end, pledge their sweet devotion in unison. I’ve heard so many opera duets with tightly interlocked harmony that this just knocked me over—it starts at 3:30 here but then the orchestra drops out 10 seconds later, and two hearts beat gloriously as one:
Throughout, the musical and dramatic material of this ruthlessly streamlined adaptation of what was a rather elaborate French melodrama still manages to come quite thick and fast; this seemingly ADD-fueled eventfulness is surely the source of much of the elite dismay with the work, from Mahler and Britten’s stunned distaste to that of critic Joseph Kerman, who memorably tagged it a “shabby little shocker.”
But it’s hard not to notice that the work’s dense, alluring texture derives as much from its arresting story beats as from its rich layers of diegetic self-reference and, again, ironic montage: The choir’s “Te Deum,” yes, but also the celebratory cantata we hear being performed outside throughout the second-act torture talks, or the clanking offstage shepherd’s song that opens the third act with heartrending innocence. That the show’s romantic leads are a painter and an actress, and their talents are elements in the story—he compares the blending of beautiful images he creates to “subtle harmony,” and her emotions are evaluated for their authenticity in relation to her stage work—only adds to the story’s intertextual tangle. It's all too much and exactly right.
Obviously operas are meant for the stage and for all the senses, but with Tosca Puccini packed so much into the music, it can all come through the ears alone.
It’s a story that only increases my admiration for all parties, both Ravel—admittedly not the first person you’d imagine to rush to this particular barricade—and Puccini, who hardly needs such a defense but is none the worse for such an off-brand endorsement. That Ravel chose Tosca, the Italian verismo master’s most relentless, least reputable great work, only sharpens the point: Puccini knew exactly what he was doing, and game recognizes game.
I had the great good fortune of seeing Maria Ewing and Placido Domingo in Ian Judge’s production at L.A. Opera back in 1992, and it was a high point of my (admittedly limited) opera-going—the kind of performance I can still viscerally recall in many of its particulars but most especially in the feelings it evoked in the room that night (lust, disgust, avarice, ambivalence, fleeting tenderness). The feelings evoked by this 1953 album, which contains every note of the opera’s hour-and-49-minutes, are at least as or more vivid, in large part because in Callas, as in Ewing, the role had one of its definitive interpreters.
But also, I think, because this is Puccini’s most prescient demonstration of what I can only now think of as cinematic composing. (Tosca premiered in 1900, five years after the Lumière brothers screened some short films in Paris, but at least a decade before early silent film could be plausibly said to have been an influence on Puccini.) It is not just his use of repeated motifs for characters, images, and settings, or the effulgent scenic painting he does, that makes it all come to life in the mind’s eye as one listens. It’s also his use of a kind of Eisensteinian montage, of ironic or dramatic juxtaposition, to make points that go beyond theatrical subtext or foreshadowing into a realm of multiplicity that resembles nothing so much as film. There are many moments to choose from, but the most justly famous is the climax of the opera’s first act, when the tyrant Scarpia not only hits on the actress Tosca in a church, with oily but undeniable charm, but then joins the choir in the “Te Deum,” unrepentantly celebrating his lustful and murderous plans for Tosca and her lover, Cavaradossi, as the choir sings holy praise.
This collision of thunderous piety and full-throated villainy still feels smashingly bold, and it is typical of this opera. The second act’s long negotiation scene among Tosca, Scarpia, and Cavaradossi, in which the latter is tortured until she confesses, has so many ups, downs, and sudden reversals it would be dizzying if Puccini did not exert such firm control on the music. Amid the rising-and-falling arcs of drama is threaded this haunting minor-key death march, which is not tied to any particular character or plot element but seems simply to signify the deliberative onset of tragedy, the nets closing around all the lead characters alike:
I was also gobsmacked on this relisten by the choice to have the doomed lovers, Tosca and Cavaradossi, as they meet one last time near the opera's end, pledge their sweet devotion in unison. I’ve heard so many opera duets with tightly interlocked harmony that this just knocked me over—it starts at 3:30 here but then the orchestra drops out 10 seconds later, and two hearts beat gloriously as one:
Throughout, the musical and dramatic material of this ruthlessly streamlined adaptation of what was a rather elaborate French melodrama still manages to come quite thick and fast; this seemingly ADD-fueled eventfulness is surely the source of much of the elite dismay with the work, from Mahler and Britten’s stunned distaste to that of critic Joseph Kerman, who memorably tagged it a “shabby little shocker.”
But it’s hard not to notice that the work’s dense, alluring texture derives as much from its arresting story beats as from its rich layers of diegetic self-reference and, again, ironic montage: The choir’s “Te Deum,” yes, but also the celebratory cantata we hear being performed outside throughout the second-act torture talks, or the clanking offstage shepherd’s song that opens the third act with heartrending innocence. That the show’s romantic leads are a painter and an actress, and their talents are elements in the story—he compares the blending of beautiful images he creates to “subtle harmony,” and her emotions are evaluated for their authenticity in relation to her stage work—only adds to the story’s intertextual tangle. It's all too much and exactly right.
Obviously operas are meant for the stage and for all the senses, but with Tosca Puccini packed so much into the music, it can all come through the ears alone.
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