Tosca: Set and Gesture

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In the years surrounding the advent of the twentieth century, when staging/direction became a hot topic in operatic debates, Tosca became the hottest item, at least at the Met, in the raucous tug-of-war between the traditionalists, at one extreme, and the devotees of European Regietheater, at the other. And when Peter Gelb kept his early promise to drive Franco Zeffirelli’s beloved dinosaur into extinction, the tug-of-war devolved into a pitched battle. Zeffirelli’s Tosca, newborn in 1985 and still kicking in 2006, was supplanted in 2009 by Swiss Luc Bondy’s severe riposte to his predecessor’s opulent decors and astounding scenic gestures. Bondy’s parry was drowned in boos that reverberated in furious notices. The noisy reception of those seated in the orchestra and the galleries, and even on Lincoln Center Plaza staring at the giant screen, could not be ignored. The audience was quick to exercise the prerogative of booing that is the signature privilege of operagoing (see our article, “Boo Who?” in the New York Times, September 26, 2009). 

The Tosca pendulum has swung once again. This year’s new production, directed by David McVicar (it can be seen “Live in HD” on January 27, 2018), returns to a conventional evocation of Roman sites and to the conventional gestures of the well-worn melodrama. Principal among the familiar trappings is, arguably, the knife with which Floria Tosca stabs Baron Scarpia to death, a moment fans await with anticipation at every performance. When and how will the soprano eye and wield her weapon?

No Tosca is better remembered at this riveting juncture than Maria Callas who, on November 25, 1956, performed the murderous act before an extraordinary public. Millions of spectators were witness to her gesture when she appeared live on U.S. network television. The Callas Tosca was so newsworthy that Ed Sullivan, host of the most popular variety show, allotted a full sixteen minutes to the Greek-American singer and Canadian baritone George London for the Act II duel-to-the-death of the antagonists. The video clip below preserves the crackling encounter of these two singing-actors, as compelling today as it was more than a half-century ago. Tosca has agreed to the police chief’s proposal to free her lover in exchange for sexual favors. To steady her nerves, she drinks a glass of wine; her hand grazes a knife; she understands what she must do; she hesitates, then plants the weapon in his heart. Callas is in her most incisive voice as Tosca hurls her fury at the dying Scarpia.

Eight years after the Ed Sullivan segment, in 1964, near the end of her operatic career, Callas sang Tosca in a Zeffirelli production mounted for her at London’s Royal Opera. Her baritone was longtime colleague Tito Gobbi. Here, again, are the final moments of the Tosca-Scarpia clash. The lascivious Scarpia, writing the deceptive safe-conduct pass for Tosca and her lover, eroticizes his quill pen. Callas has further refined her resolve to attack her nemesis. She sees the knife, stares fixedly at the blade, and at the last moment, she turns to deliver the fatal blow.

The power of these familiar bits of stagecraft, executed with so much conviction and originality by Callas, George London, and Gobbi, put to shame Luc Bondy’s directorial eccentricities: Scarpia kissing a statue of the Virgin on the mouth in Act I; three prostitutes ministering to Scarpia’s pleasures in Act II; Tosca remaining onstage at the end of Act II rather than making her stunning exit, in tandem with Puccini’s musical cues.

Due in large measure to the widely publicized feud between world-class divas Callas and Renata Tebaldi, opera in general and Tosca in particular enjoyed a high media profile in the late 1950s. The title role figured prominently in the repertoires of both stars. Tebaldi, costumed as Tosca, made the cover of Time (November 3, 1958) in celebration of her Met opening night in the Puccini work; Callas had her own Time cover (October 29, 1956) just prior to her New York debut.

We have chosen Tebaldi’s rendition of Tosca’s famous aria. “Vissi d’arte (I lived for art)” offers a contemplative interlude amidst of the unremitting tension of Act II. Why, the distraught heroine asks, has God so unjustly rewarded her devotion and good works? Among the legendary interpreters of Tosca was Maria Jeritza. She owed her 1922 meteoric ascension to New York stardom to a stunning invention: she sang “Vissi d’arte” face down on the stage floor. In 1975 it was Magda Olivero’s turn. She tracked the arc of the music: first bent backwards over a divan, she stood and reached her full height as the climactic phrase attained its peak, then fell to her knees as she begged for Scarpia’s mercy (see our posts of September 9 and September 16, 2014). Still, most sopranos rely on minimal gesture and let Puccini do his work. This is Tebaldi’s way. She intones the broad swaths of the composer’s melody with the famously warm timbre that serves the fervor of Tosca’s prayer. The clip that follows is drawn from a 1959 U.S. television program.

World War II and the Met Roster. Americanization: 2. Regina Resnik

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The Met careers of Regina Resnik and Astrid Varnay, the latter the subject of the previous post, followed remarkably similar trajectories. Resnik made her company debut at the age of twenty-two, younger by less than a year than Varnay when she first appeared on 39^th street. The two dramatic sopranos had large, dark voices, uncommon musical sophistication, and keen interpretive gifts. Forced to replace Europeans absent during the war either by choice or necessity, general manager Edward Johnson called on Resnik and Varnay often, perhaps too often, too soon.

A recent graduate of New York’s Hunter College, at the tender age of twenty Resnik had already essayed Lady Macbeth, one of opera’s most demanding roles, in a Broadway theatre, and soon after, in Mexico, she had taken on Leonore in Fidelio. Unlike Varnay, she came to the Metropolitan through the company’s Auditions of the Air (now the National Council Auditions), a portal through which most successful American singers have passed since 1935.

This is Resnik’s winning rendition of “Ernani, involami” heard by radio listeners in 1944. By any measure, Resnik had an extraordinarily precocious talent, a mature instrument, a grasp of the requisite style, and the requisite technique. Note the subtle shifts in dynamics, freedom in the upper register, strength in the middle, and a real trill, all serving the expression of Elvira’s impatience and rapture.

Like Varnay, Resnik made her acclaimed Met debut as a replacement for an ailing star, in her case the Yugoslav Zinka Milanov. She capped her first season, 1944-45, with performances of Fidelio under the direction of Bruno Walter. During the next few years she was tapped for a world premiere (Bernard Rogers’s The Warrior) and a Met premiere (Britten’s Peter Grimes), along with assignments in the operas of Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, and others.

In the 1950’s, both Resnik and Varnay joined the many other Americans who made careers in Europe as the U.S. fulfilled its destiny as an “exporter of talent.” As Resnik put it in a 1987 interview with Bruce Buffie, “From 1953 to 1960 in Bayreuth was the big time of the American singer. Astrid Varnay was American—Hungarian mother, but half American—and George London and Steber and myself and Jerome Hines. You can go on and on; there was a very big American presence, especially people going in to sing Wagner. In ’53 I made my debut as Sieglinde, and then it was still a very mixed bag of Europeans and Americans, even though in that very season it was George London’s first Amfortas, Steber’s first Elsa and my first Sieglinde. But until 1960, the Americans came up very fast in the Wagnerian circles. They had big voices. Then in 1960 I had switched to mezzo, and was now singing Fricka. Wieland Wagner walked into the rehearsal for his brother’s Ring, Wolfgang’s Ring. He took a look around in the rehearsal and said, ‘Well, well, well. It still looks like the war.’ I said, ‘And what does that mean, Herr Wieland?’ He said, ‘All the Gods are Americans, and the Niebelungs are the Germans.’ Now I’ll tell you why he said that. I was Fricka, Jeromeines was Wotan, Thomas Stewart was      Hines was Wotan, Thomas Stewart was Donner and Gunther, Claire Watson was Freia and Astrid Varnay was Brünnhlde. We were musing over everything that was going on, and it was very apparent, because the way we were seated in rehearsal, not that the Americans sat with the Americans—it just happened that way. He walked in and there were the Americans on one side!” 

Both Resnik and Varnay were underappreciated by Johnson’s successor, Rudolf Bing. An erstwhile Leonore and Aïda, Resnik was miscast as Musetta and Rosalinde; soon after, she made the transition to the mezzo repertoire. Bing unaccountably relegated her to secondary roles, leavened by the rare Amneris. In May 1960, on the Met’s national tour, Resnik sang comic character parts. Later that summer, attendees of the 1960 Salzburg Festival heard her in Don Carlo. As she traverses the shifting landscape of Eboli’s “O don fatale”—the explosive opening section in which the princess curses her beauty for the transgressions to which it has led her, the dolorous middle section in which she vows to retire to a convent for expiation, then her vow to save Carlo in the urgent finale—Resnik proves her right to a place among the world’s leading dramatic mezzos.

Arabella 1: Angels in Vienna

The Met’s 2014 revival of Arabella comes a decade after its last. This latest edition reminds us of the beauties of Strauss’s opera, once dismissed as a pale derivative of Der Rosenkavalier. Malin Byström’s substantial voice prevailed (I attended the April 7 performance) over the sometimes unfriendly orchestration and in spite of conductor Philippe Auguin’s heavy baton. In Act I, the soprano’s volume came at the expense of the float she happily found for the lyric passages of Acts II and III. Michael Volle’s attractive voice betrayed his years of service, yet not so much as to compromise his compelling enactment of Mandryka. At every turn, in posture and phrase, Volle conveyed the character’s idealism, his confusion, his sense of being out of place, his belief in the power of love.

Opera is full of love at first sight. No coup de foudre is more persuasive than the encounter of Arabella and Mandryka, The meeting of these soulmates emerges in contrast to the comedy of manners and the farcical critique of materialism inscribed in Hugo von Hofmannstahl’s scenario. Prior to Act II, Mandryka becomes obsessed by a photograph of Arabella; she is intrigued by the stranger just outside her hotel who looks at her with “large, serious, steady eyes.” The first words of Act II are Mandryka’s as Arabella descends the stairs to the ballroom: “This is an angel, come down from Heaven.” Arabella, who has been courted by the most eligible bachelors of 1860s Vienna, understands at once that this is “the right man,” “der Richtige.” He brings far more than wealth—he brings his aura.  Only minutes later, in one of the score’s most moving passages, the widower Mandryka evokes his dead wife, an angel for whom, he says, he was too young and not good enough. At the opera’s end, he rejoices in having found his new angel.

A recording of the ecstatic Act II duet of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Josef Metternich won many converts to Arabella. The soprano never sang the opera in the theatre, reportedly because she found the role uninteresting. You would never know it from this excerpt.

In the mid-1950s, Arabella was in the air. Aside from the Schwarzkopf album of highlights, there were two compilations that featured Lisa Della Casa. More than twenty years after its Dresden world premiere, the Met presented the U.S. premiere in February 1955. I saw it there a few weeks later. I expect I will never hear the Act II duet performed with more heart than I did that night. If you wish to judge for yourself, the matinee broadcast of the 1955 Arabella is available on Amazon. The betrothed couple is played by Eleanor Steber and George London, artists matched in their fervor and, so rare, in the weight of tone suited to the text. They are both at their peak, Steber having acquired great warmth in the middle register to go along with a phenomenal top by turns silvery and expansive. The massive voice of London, more bass than the lyric baritone to which we have become accustomed, reaches the top notes with adequate ease. As they fill out the most taxing, long-breathed phrases, Steber and London conjure the illusion of holding nothing back, all the while holding much more in reserve. Hilde Güden’s unrivaled Zdenka caps the Act I duet of the sisters with the high C of yet another angel. The opera is given in English translation, as it would be in three subsequent revivals. Conductor Rudolf Kempe abets intelligibility, applying his supple, light manner to Strauss’s sometimes raucous orchestral barrage.

Two years after its 1955 Met premiere, when Arabella returned to the Met, George London was joined by Lisa Della Casa. Della Casa was already widely known for her interpretation of the title role. With a voice somewhat less dense than that of Steber, she infused the score with her distinctively cool/warm timbre and personality and made for a particularly alluring “Queen of the Coachman’s Ball.” Here she is with Annaliese Rothenberger, a Met Zdenka on twelve occasions, in a 1963 performance from Munich.

More on the performance history of Arabella in my next post.