Tosca

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“Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore,
non feci mai male ad anima viva!
Con man furtiva
quante miserie conobbi, aiutai…”
(“Vissi d’arte”, Tosca)

Against the backdrop of the evocative Baths of Caracalla, Giacomo Puccini's most dramatic opera goes on stage. With a new production with a scenographic project by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas, it inaugurates the opera programme of the Caracalla Festival 2024, the summer season of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma.

One of the audience most favourite titles, Tosca was composed in 1889, based on a libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica inspired by Victorien Sardou's historical drama, and performed for the first time on 24 November 1887 at the Théatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin in Paris.

"There is a drama that, if I were still in my career, I would set to music with all my soul, and that is Tosca", as the great Giuseppe Verdi said about Puccini's masterpiece, characterised by continuous coups de théâtre and a rapid evolution of the melody, keeping the audience in a state of almost hypnotic tension.

With extraordinary modernity, the opera portrays the events taking place in Rome on a single day, 14 June 1800, at the time of the fall of the Roman Republic, the Restoration of the Papal States and the revolutionary echoes from France. Reconstructing the historical tensions, the Tuscan composer represents an extraordinary fresco of persecuted love around the three main characters, the singer Floria Tosca, the painter Mario Cavaradossi and the police chief Scarpia, finding, with imagination and courage, a completely new musical language.

On stage, some of opera's greatest voices, such as Carmen Giattanasio and Sonya Yoncheva (Floria Tosca), Saimir Pirgu, Vittorio Grigolo and Arsen Soghoman (Cavaradossi) and Claudio Sgura and Roberto Frontali (Scarpia), accompanied by the Orchestra of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma conducted by Maestro Antonino Fogliani, with the direction of Francesco Micheli.

Photo: The public at the Baths of Caracalla, ph. Yasuko Kageyama - Opera Roma