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.

La Traviata Revisited

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The production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata the global audience will view on March 11, 2017 has been acknowledged as one of general manager Peter Gelb’s successful importations. Director Willy Decker’s interpretation travelled to the Met in late 2010 bearing the prestige of the full-blown Regietheater (director’s opera) concept that was the darling of critics and public at its 2005 Salzburg premiere. While some New York reviewers saw this Traviata as a Eurotrash challenge to the performance practice of the fourth-most-frequently-programmed title in the repertoire, many applauded the Met’s determination to train a contemporary lens on to a canonical nineteenth-century narrative.

Decker emptied the stage of whatever might distract from his reading: that the protagonist is stalked by two implacable foes, her illness and the patriarchal society that engulfs her. Banished were the picturesque mock-ups of nineteenth-century France indulged in previous editions, notably in Franco Zeffirelli’s two extravagant Met antecedents; the luxurious ballroom, the charming country hideaway, the splendid gambling house, and the dying woman’s bedroom were jettisoned in favor of a bare, curved wall, a bench, a few boxy modern sofas, and a giant clock. Violetta exchanged her long gowns for a short red dress and white slip.

Franco Zeffirelli production: 1998

Willy Decker Production: 2010

The dumb show enacted at the start prefigures the end. As the conductor gives the downbeat, Violetta enters, staggers slowly across the stage, doubled over in pain, and then collapses into the arms of her aged doctor, an incarnation of death whose recurring presence haunts the action. When the final notes of the mournful prelude fade away, the chorus of menacing merrymakers, male and female dressed alike as men in dark business suits, is propelled by the feverish rhythm toward the lone, frightened woman in red. A moment later, she morphs into the dissolute party girl. Decker’s La Traviata has become a high-profile addition to the company’s slim stock of illuminating rereadings.

The composer based his story on La Dame aux camélias (The Lady of the Camellias), Alexandre Dumas, fils’ clamorous stage success. La Traviata alone, among Verdi’s nearly thirty operas, depicts a woman of his own time. By in large his heroines are drawn from the hyperbole of Romantic melodrama and of grand historic events—Lady Macbeth, Joan of Arc, Abigaille in the court of Babylon, Leonora in medieval Spain, Aïda in Ancient Egypt to name only a few. The country house where Violetta renounces her dream of love and the Parisian bedroom where she dies are locations familiar to Verdi’s contemporary audience.

As the composer charts the transformation of his protagonist from the carefree, pleasure-seeking courtesan of Act I, to a woman seeking true love, finding it, losing it, then regaining it moments before her death in Act III  he demands various and distinct registers of expression. Like the famed stage and screen actresses, Bernhardt, Duse, Nazimova, Garbo, who coveted the role of Dumas’ Marguerite Gautier, sopranos of all stripes have embraced the theatrical and musical challenges of Verdi’s Violetta, high coloraturas, lyrics, spintos, and even heroic dramatics. Few have succeeded in meeting all of its claims.

This comment on La Traviata features a single artist, the Catalan Montserrat Caballé, at three turning points in the libretto. The first demands the mastery of florid singing, the second of declamation, and the third of legato. Caballé is that rare soprano proficient in the range of expressivity demanded by Verdi’s evolving protagonist.

If Caballé’s portrait of the consumptive demi-mondaine was abetted neither by her looks nor by her acting skills, her voice and passion made Violetta come alive. Here is her “Sempre libera” with tenor Carlo Bergonzi, excerpted from a commercial recording. Profligate in the emission of resplendent high notes, fluent in the embellishments, Caballé captures the frenzy of the young woman in a spectacular coloratura display.

Violetta’s Act II idyll is brutally interrupted when she comes face to face with the reality that, given her past, society will not allow her happiness. She bids an anguished farewell to the bewildered Alfredo, pouring out a flood of tone in her plea that he love her as much as she loves him. This is one of the moments in the score where Caballé, a full spinto, deploys vocal resources unavailable to the light coloraturas who often sing the part. Here is her "Amami, Alfredo" drawn from the same recording.

In Act III, the dying heroine draws comfort from a letter sent by Alfredo’s father, all the while knowing that the end is upon her. Here, Caballé’s extraordinary breath control and her legendary piano singing sustain the long legato phrases of “Addio del passato,” ending in an ethereal final note. This 1974 aria is drawn from a live performance.

Staging Cavalleria and Pagliacci Now

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The last of the six new productions of the Met’s 2014-15 season, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, opened on April 14,  2015. In general, critical response to these recent investitures has weighed heavily on the side of disappointment. Not one of the lately unveiled stagings can be said to have enjoyed the enthusiastic consensus of reviewers. Briefly then: The reception of The Death of Klinghoffer was mostly positive, that of Le Nozze di Figaro, cool at best. The notices of Iolanta/Bluebeard’s Castle were mixed; those of The Merry Widow and La Donna del lago, negative; and those of Cavalleria and Pagliacci, primarily so. And only Mozart’s treasured comedy and the Mascagni/Leocavallo hugely popular double bill were reinvestitures of core repertoire favorites that often find themselves subjected to particular scrutiny, especially when they propose significant rereadings of the work.

In our previous post, we tracked the controversy over departures from conventional settings of the core all the way back to the 1951 Pagliacci. We argued that the heated operatic debate of the present day had its origins in the reception of a last-minute addition to Rudolf Bing’s inaugural season.

Not surprisingly, given that the April productions are new, staging was front and center in the reviews of Cav/Pag. And since the productions they replaced were signed by Franco Zeffirelli, the comparison with the Zeffirelli aesthetic, beloved by many of the public and detested by almost all critics, would inevitably come to the fore. “In the beginning, say 1970, there was Franco Zeffirelli. He turned Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, the eternal verist twins, into a pair of kitsch spectaculars. Audiences applauded the scenery” (Financial Times, April 15, 2015).

Zeffirelli’s long association with the Met began with his ecstatically received 1964 Falstaff and ended with his much derided 1998 La Traviata. Between the two, there were ten others, including his 1970 Cav/Pag. Managements have been wary of angering  Met patrons by shelving his sets with nonchalance. Only La Bohème and Turandot survive. As Peter Gelb put it some years ago:  “I promised the Met subscribers when I first came on board—well, I didn’t promise anything, but I did say that there were two iconic Zeffirelli productions, Bohème and Turandot, and that the other Zeffirelli productions are going to be replaced. A lot of these things are just sitting there like lead weights, so there is a lot of catching up to do” (New Yorker (Oct. 22, 2007).  He has been good to his word. The Zeffirelli Falstaff, Tosca, Traviata, and Carmen are history.

And now so too are Cavalleria and Pagliacci. Zeffirelli deployed much of the action of Cavalleria on a monumental church stairway that filled half the stage; realistic housefronts with balconies and views of the hill town framed this meticulous slice-of-life rendering of a bright, colorful Easter Sunday in Sicily. 

Eschewing the slightest hint of the picturesque that floods the Zeffirelli version, even in the religious procession, the David McVicar/Rae Smith production drains the stage of the specificity of the quotidian, of color and light.

 Cavalleria rusticana (model), Metropolitan Opera, 2015

Displacement here is not of place or date--the action transpires as is prescribed in a Sicilian village circa 1880--but of time. The artistic team turns day into night (some have observed that the darkness signals not mass on Easter morn, but midnight mass). A revolving platform repositions again and again a patriarchal community of subjugated women and swaggering, predatory men, the better to give  relief to the drama of individual betrayal. Santuzza, victim and ultimately avenger, is repeatedly set apart from the black-clad villagers whose codes she has broken.

Many of those glad to bid farewell to Zeffirelli’s obsessive pictorialism, including reviewers who missed few opportunities to put him down, were disappointed by its replacement, spare or not. The Times was irritated by the over-active platform, the New Yorker found the staging “relentlessly grim,” the Observer thought that it “bombed on just about every level.” Only the Wall Street Journal gave a thumbs up. With caveats about the lighting and the male dancers who mimed Alfio’s horses, we thought the show compelling in its abstraction, particularly as it transformed the lengthy genre scenes of village life into comments on the opera’s social/sexual politics.

For Pagliacci, McVicar and Smith moved the action forward from 1865 to 1950 and from Calabria to Sicily. We are alerted that the two operas take place in the same southern Italian town square by the imposing stone walls that enclose both narratives. There, the unity ends.

As it happened, the square, neon lights, and stalled truck of the McVicar/Smith Pagliacci turned out to be more naturalistic than Zeffirelli’s rocky outcroppings, stunted tree, and big sky. 

Pagliacci, Metropolitan Opera, 2015; Patricia Racette, George Gagnidze

The new version added a three-man vaudeville team. The intervention of the trio into the prologue (one of several inventions) violated the expository, deeply human and complex import of the baritone’s aria. While the press, in general, was amused by the antics, for us the slapstick of the play-within-a-play went too far in making the critical contrast between farce and melodrama. For this post, we have chosen two clips that demonstrate the power of music and text when the performer rather than the production is the primary site of meaning.

Lawrence Tibbett sings “Si può?” (If I may)” in this scene from Metropolitan (1935), the fifth of six feature films he made between 1930 and 1937. Tibbett, who had a successful career in Hollywood simultaneously with his Met stardom, is captured here at his extraordinary prime, reaching out to the audience with gestures as subtly inflected as his phrasing and the colors of his voice. The charisma of the singer and the purpose of the character are perfectly joined.

Giovanni Martinelli sings “Vesti la giubba” in this 1926 Vitaphone short. The aria is forever associated with Enrico Caruso, the tenor who holds the Met record for performances of Pagliacci. Martinelli became the company’s Canio after Caruso’s premature death. As you will hear, he favors an unusually slow tempo. Sustaining astonishing tension with astonishing vocal energy, the tenor gives the tragic density of the short piece its full due.