EVENT NAME: Tosca

EVENT PLACE: Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Florence

EVENT DATE: 24 May - 8 June 2024

EVENT TIME: from 8.00 pm

EVENT PRICE: tickets starting from 15.00 euros

EVENT DESCRIPTION:

On 14 January 1900, Tosca debuted at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. The source is the historical drama La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, written in 1887 specifically for the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Puccini was passionate about that subject after seeing a theater performance and did everything he could to transform it into an opera. However, the publisher Ricordi initially entrusted the project to another composer, Alberto Franchetti, only to then put it back in the hands of Puccini in 1895.

To create the libretto of Tosca, the Illica-Giacosa tandem, already successfully tested in La bohème, was reconfirmed. But the work proceeded slowly and with numerous complaints from the librettists. Both consider Sardou's drama unsuitable for operatic transposition due to the too many events that take over the poetry. Puccini, on the other hand, did not worry about it and following only his musical intuition in 1899 he signed what would soon become another of his great masterpieces. Tosca is therefore an action opera where the tension never loosens and in which the musical discourse must necessarily proceed without stopping, with rare exceptions. This leads the composer from Lucca to adopt a narrative technique built on a dense network of short and recurring motifs - often combined with each other - to comment on the frenetic unfolding of the story. The action is set in papal Rome at the time of the battle of Marengo. The protagonists Floria Tosca, a passionate and strong-willed primadonna, and her lover Mario Cavaradossi, a painter with liberal sympathies and a convinced anti-clerical, are hindered by Baron Scarpia, head of the Bourbon police at the service of the papacy.