About the opera "Tosca"
V. Sardou, the king of French dramaturgy, wrote Tosca specifically for Sarah Bernhardt. Her success in this role was so great that Sardou spoke of three thousand performances! (It should be noted that this was the author himself speaking, and it was twenty years after the premiere).
Even if the number is exaggerated, the drama was undoubtedly very popular—enough to inspire three composers to turn it into an opera simultaneously: Verdi, Franchetti, and Puccini. Franchetti was the first to acquire the rights to the play, but he eventually ceded them to Puccini—not without some cunning maneuvers by the publisher Tito Ricordi (later, Franchetti’s family stated that he relinquished the rights voluntarily, acknowledging the superiority of the Maestro from Lucca). Some, however, felt that the drama of the play was too excessive to serve as the basis for a perfect libretto.
Puccini sought to situate the action within the sonic, visual, and moral atmosphere of early 19th-century Rome. This is evident in numerous details—the shepherd boy’s song, the sound of the bells, the way the Te Deum is performed. Like a painter at his easel, Puccini freely depicts nature with the enjoyment and immediacy of a first encounter. The orchestra sketches the characters as if in preliminary studies, yet convincingly: unexpectedly calm speech becomes nervously agitated, a character weeps or threatens, insults or pleads. The spectator, held tightly in suspense, cannot recover when the untamable Puccini drains their tears, restoring a smile, while continually adding new psychological strokes and refining what has already been painted.
- Dragomir Yosifov
