06:00 pm | Nationaltheater | PREMIERE

TOSCA

Giacomo Puccini

Opera

Opera
#BSOtosca

TOSCA

Composer Giacomo Puccini. Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica based on the play La Tosca by Victorien Sardou.

Melodrama in three acts

recommended for 16 years and older

In Italian. With German and English supertitles. New Production.

Duration est. 2 hours 40 minutes

1. Akt est. 06:00 pm - 06:55 pm Interval est. 06:55 pm - 07:25 pm 2. Akt est. 07:25 pm - 08:10 pm 3. Akt est. 08:10 pm - 08:40 pm

Introductions take place one hour before the performance  on the first tier in the anteroom to the royal box.
Limited seating available, duration approx. 20 min.

 

BMW GLOBAL Partner
Medienpartner

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.

Cast

  • Bayerisches Staatsorchester
  • Chorus of the Bayerische Staatsoper
  • Children's chorus of the Bayerische Staatsoper
  • Münchner Knabenchor