‘Sardoodledom’ was the disparaging term invented by the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw for the late nineteenth century’s ‘well-made play’ genre of drama, which Shaw often found too contrived and too thin on characterization to be taken seriously. The word was a play on the surname of the French playwright Victorien Sardou, whose work Shaw encountered in his lesser-known métier as a theater critic, and indeed there might be something to it. Wildly popular in his lifetime, Sardou’s dramas are barely remembered today. Their only lasting artifact in the cultured public’s consciousness lies in the world of opera, where several of his plays were adapted for music drama. The most famous case was the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s adaptation of Sardou’s La Tosca (1887) for an opera titled simply Tosca, which premiered in 1900 with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa.
The title character of the play and opera is herself a singer, a fictional soprano whose love for the revolutionary painter Cavaradossi leads to their destruction in Napoleonic Rome at the hands of Scarpia, the city’s vicious and sexually depraved police chief. Sardou had a particularly strong interest in the disunited Italy of that era. His grandfather had served as a military surgeon in Napoleon’s Italian campaigns, and two generations later, the playwright assembled a large collection of books and images to inspire his literary efforts, which led him to write at least six plays set during the French Revolutionary era. With the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt starring in La Tosca’s premiere, it emerged as the most popular of those works and held the dramatic stage until the 1920s. The play is virtually never performed today, but Puccini’s opera has endured as a solid part of the standard repertoire and was Palm Beach Opera’s choice to open its 2024 season. Palm Beach’s general and artistic director David Walker welcomed the audience of the opening night performance with news that this production was the company’s second-highest-selling production in at least the past fifteen seasons.
Imaginatively reinterpreting Tosca is difficult, for, like Sardou’s play, it is a highly specific period drama unfolding amid the very precise historical events of exactly one confusing day and night—the 17th to the 18th of June, 1800. Its three acts are set in well-known Roman locales: the Church (now Basilica) of Sant’Andrea della Valle, the Palazzo Farnese (now the French embassy in Rome), and the Castel Sant’Angelo, a medieval fortress then used as a prison. Two and a half years before the events of the opera, Napoleon’s forces in Italy occupied Rome and deposed Pope Pius VI, who ruled the city and the surrounding Papal States as a secular prince. The French invaders replaced the Old Regime with a republic designed after the Directory, the revolutionary government then ruling in Paris.
In the autumn of 1799, King Ferdinand IV of Naples, a Bourbon ruler related to France’s deposed monarchs, expelled the French and occupied the city. Allied Austrian armies, meanwhile, marched against the French in northern Italy, prompting Napoleon, who had just overthrown the Directory and made himself France’s de facto military dictator as ‘First Consul,’ to take the field. The decisive battle of Marengo, fought on June 14, 1800, went well for the Austrians until the very end of the day, when Napoleon’s forces managed to turn the tide. News of Austria’s presumptive victory, however, reached Rome on the day of the opera’s setting, in time for the restored government to order a Te Deum mass and celebratory concert. Only later did word of the French victory arrive. Rome would eventually come under Napoleon’s direct rule as part of his empire.
The characters whose fates depend on Napoleon’s fortunes are all invented but represent the forces at work. We meet Cavaradossi, who shares his name with an actual Italian noble family involved in the later events of Italy’s unification, as he is painting an image of the Madonna in Sant’Andrea della Valle. His work is interrupted by the arrival of Angelotti, an official of the overthrown Roman Republic who has escaped imprisonment by the restored Old Regime and has been told to find help in the same church. Cavaradossi sends him to his suburban villa to hide, only to be interrupted again by his jealous flame, the singer Tosca, who loves him but accuses him of favoring Angelotti’s sister as a model for his portrait. Cavaradossi barely consoles her before news of the purported victory over Napoleon arrives, followed by Scarpia, the police chief, who is pursuing Angelotti, suspects Cavaradossi of disloyalty and lusts after Tosca, whom he declares he will have as the historic Te Deum resounds.
Later, Scarpia summons Cavaradossi for questioning and orders his offstage torture when he refuses to give up Angelotti. Tosca, summoned to witness the horrible events from the victory concert in which she is performing, quickly reveals Angelotti’s location, though news of Napoleon’s victory arrives in time to inspire Cavaradossi’s further defiance. Scarpia offers to spare his life by means of a mock execution if Tosca will spend the night with him. Tosca reluctantly agrees after questioning the divine injustice of her fate, but stabs Scarpia to death before she succumbs to him. After rushing off to apprise Cavaradossi of their escape, their dreams are ruined when the firing squad turns out to be real, leaving Cavaradossi dead. Cornered for Scarpia’s murder, Tosca jumps from the parapet of the Castel Sant’Angelo, declaring that she and the police chief will meet their final judgment before God.
The setting is so deeply embedded in the opera that only woe could betide a director who would seek to change it. Updates to fascist Italy have been attempted but ring false, even though Cori Ellison’s simplistic supertitles, in use here, inaccurately refer to Scarpia as a ‘fascist,’ a word and concept that did not exist and would not have been understood in either 1800, when the opera is set, or in 1900, when it premiered. More generic sets also disappoint. The late Swiss director Luc Bondy’s bland effort of that description for the Metropolitan Opera, which in 2009 replaced Franco Zeffirelli’s achingly realistic sets, was itself quickly replaced with a new but less satisfyingly traditional production after the Met’s general manager Peter Gelb publicly admitted that replacing Zeffirelli’s production had been a mistake. Davide Livermore’s recent new production for La Scala preserved tradition but added some special effects, memorably including Tosca’s body suspended in midair after she leaps from the Castel Sant’Angelo (her death scene has been enduringly powerful—about twenty years ago, a disgraced Washington socialite of my acquaintance who faced insoluble legal, financial, and health problems ended his life à la Tosca by jumping from the fortress’s parapet). R. Keith Brumley’s sets are a bit crude but serviceable in this Palm Beach debut production by the Israeli director Omer Ben Seadia. Lena Rivkina’s costumes are evocative and elegant. But no one seeing the opera on mute would have had trouble guessing what it was.
The evening’s runaway highlight was the quadruple debut of the beautiful Italian soprano Anastasia Bartoli, who was not merely debuting at Palm Beach Opera but singing professionally in North America for the first time. It was also her first Tosca and her first role in a Puccini opera. Bartoli, whose mother is the well-regarded soprano Cecilia Gasdia, now superintendent of the Verona Festival Foundation, has sung in many of Italy’s leading theaters. The voice is agile and expressive, expertly malleable from one situation to the next. The tenderness of romance resounded as sweetly as the pangs of jealousy were acerbic. Her anguish at Scarpia’s hands perfectly captured feminine distress. Her ‘why me?’ moment, expressed in the plangent aria “Vissi d’arte,” painted careful reflection without descent into maudlin self-pity. Bartoli’s is a career in which we should expect to luxuriate for decades, and it should be noted that it started here, in Palm Beach, and not in New York.
Mario Chang began his career as a honey-voiced lyric tenor, but his Cavaradossi revealed a timely and prudent move into a heavier dramatic repertoire. He appeared here two years ago in the very different role of Nemorino in Donizetti’s comedy L’Elisir d’Amore, a signature part he has also sung at the Met. His Cavaradossi was clarion and beautifully supported, capable of ardent passion for Tosca and raw but beautifully expressed rage against Scarpia. His final act lament, “E lucevan le stelle,” resonated with the comfort of memory as alluringly as it rose to righteous anger at his fate. Good things lie ahead for this stellar artist as well.
Baritone Greer Grimsley has been singing for decades but maintains a powerful stage presence. The voice shows signs of age, but he used this to its fullest advantage in depicting Scarpia, who can more than credibly be portrayed as an old roué. Edward Thomas Bland, a resident artist of the company, sang a determined Angelotti. Devin Eatmon’s Spoletta and David Wolfe’s Sciarrone hammed it up as Scarpia’s henchmen. David Stern, son of the famous violinist Isaac Stern and currently Palm Beach Opera’s music director, led an engrossing performance.
