TOSCA

Following its much-discussed interpretation of Lohengrin, the team surrounding Hungarian theatre director Kornél Mundruczó now focuses on a new approach to staging Tosca at the Bayerische Staatsoper. Mundruczó’s productions are performed at and on the world’s most renowned festivals and stages. He has also been working in the world of opera for some years now. His staging of The Makropulos Affair (2016) at the Vlaamse Opera was nominated for the International Opera Awards, and more recently, he staged the world premiere of Peter Eötvös’s opera Sleepless at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden und Tannhäuser at the Staatsoper Hamburg. He is also the founder and head of the independent theatre group, Proton Theater. Together with his team (including stage and costume designer Monika Pormale and lighting designer Felice Ross), he now turns his talent to Italian opera for the first time. Young Italian conductor Andrea Battistoni, who has already caused a sensation at the Nationaltheater with performances of Verdi, Puccini and Bellini operas, conducts.

There are few operas, which from the very first bar endure such intense pressure, few in which the temperature swings from ice-cold calculation to overheating in mere seconds. And scarcely any in which private entanglement and personal tragedy are so interwoven with political attitudes in historical accuracy. Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca has electrified audiences since its world premiere. The shock wave emitted by the opera was so strong that decades later many reactions still tend to point to the bewilderment and overpowering of those affected rather than the qualities of the piece itself and its love triangle surrounding the singer Floria Tosca, the painter Mario Cavaradossi and the chief of police Baron Scarpia. The artistic world of the protagonist couple, Tosca and Cavaradossi, is no colouristic ingredient here, but rather defines the profile of its characters – it justifies Tosca’s eccentricity, just as it does Cavaradossi’s liberality and also explains the singer’s pronounced self-confidence: The heroine of the stage becomes a heroine in real life. Scarpia’s appearance must also be understood as the emergence of his unleashed totalitarian power, and his sexual sadism still today as one of the truly scandalous moments of opera literature. The historical detail is certainly no staffage, but rather forms the, “precondition of the conflict between the representatives of two opposing social systems” (Norbert Christen) in a time of crisis. With his mish-mash of musical recognition motifs, which, with the exception of the rigid Scarpia chords, sensitively adjust to the situations, Puccini achieves a new dimension of through-composed operatic structure – in the intensive cohesion of the score, he nevertheless creates islands in which reflection compacts itself into moments of the highest possible arioso intensity.