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An opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini. Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica after the play La Tosca by Victorien Sardou. Tosca was first performed on 14 January 1900 at Teatro Constanzi in Rome. The Puccini ― 1900 performance lasts approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes, including an interval of 20 minutes. Sung in Italian with English surtitles. A New Zealand Opera production. AUCKLAND ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre 17, 19, 23, 25 September 2015, 7.30pm 27 September, 2.30pm Accompanied by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra WELLINGTON St James Theatre 10, 15, 17 October 2015, 7.30pm 13 October, 6pm Accompanied by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra 2015 season P.3 Welcome Welcome to New Zealand Opera’s second Auckland and Wellington offering for the year … Puccini’s monumentalTosca . Whose spine doesn’t tingle to the opening chords of this glorious melodrama? The great Russian composer Shostakovich said of Puccini: “He wrote marvellous operas but dreadful music”. Lucky for us Puccini never pretended to do anything else. Towards the end of his life he said God had touched him with His little finger and said “Write only for the theatre” and so he did. Puccini has been responsible for more real, and yet theatrical ‘heart on the sleeve’ emotion than any other operatic composer. And his Tosca is the opera that conquered the world. This passionate story of lust, revenge and sacrifice has become one of the most loved operas in the repertoire. Tosca is the fire that burns throughout this musical thriller. She is the ultimate Diva. To bring this lady to life we are thrilled to welcome Orla Boylan, who stunned audiences in our 2013 season of The Flying Dutchman. In this brand new production this great singing actress is met by men worth fighting for – or against. As Cavaradossi, the brilliant New Zealander Simon O’Neill will unleash the Italianate hero within. Heroic and romantic…he’s got it all. He meets his match in Phillip Rhodes’s fanatically evil Scarpia, one of the great baddies in all opera. Phillip continues to triumph in European houses and we welcome him back to delight in some delicious villainy. He is aided in his evil pursuit by returning New Zealanders James Benjamin Rodgers as Spoletta and Wade Kernot as Sciarrone. Wellington resident James Clayton returns as the wronged Angelotti Puccini ― 1900 and it is particularly pleasing to welcome back to the stage a giant of opera in New Zealand, Barry Mora to give us his Sacristan. The musical forces of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in the pit and the Freemasons NZ OPERA Chorus under Chorus Directors John Rosser (Auckland) and Michael Vinten (Wellington) will be led by returning favourite Tobias Ringborg. Tobias helmed our last foray into the world of Puccini with the 2013 season of Madama Butterfly. Extraordinary music in the hands of an extraordinary musician. We at New Zealand Opera couldn’t be more proud to present this great, great work. Enjoy! Stuart Maunder AM General Director, New Zealand Opera 2015 season P.5 Tosca Victorien Sardou, Vanity Fair, 1880. Giacomo Puccini, circa 1900. P.8 nzopera Giacosa to condense the play into manageable form. A Hit from The play has a complex plot sprawling across five acts and involving 35 speaking parts. Puccini wanted something more tightly constructed. The opera Tosca has the start just three acts and 9 major singing roles. Puccini had to talk his librettists out of having Tosca go mad rather than By Dr Nicholas Reid committing suicide. Amazingly, too, Puccini considered dropping the aria “Vissi d’arte” because he feared it From its first Do great operas always have to be rejected by their held up the action. It took over three years for both score first audiences before their greatness is accepted? The success, this opera has remained a and libretto to be finalised. Contrary to popular legend, disastrous debuts of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Bizet’s living thing, with however, Puccini did not face any strife from the church Carmen, Verdi’s La traviata and Puccini’s Madama producers often over the content of his opera. He consulted a priest Butterfly would suggest so. But Puccini’s Tosca suffered no switching its setting to later historical friend, Father Pietro Panichelli, to ensure that the opera’s such initial rejection. periods to bring ecclesiastical music was appropriate. Its opening night was just short of a triumph. Tosca out the universality And what of the nasty things critics have had to say opened in Rome on 14 January 1900 – in the city where of its themes. It is about Tosca? the opera is set and almost exactly one hundred years opera’s prime example of the truth that The opera seems to bring out extreme reactions. The after the events of the opera take place. There was a little the opening night composers Gabriel Fauré and Paul Dukas hated it. In the concern about how the opera would be received. 1900 audience is not had been declared a “Holy Year” by the pope. Rome was always wrong. 1930s, the musicologist Gerald Abraham denounced it filled not only with ardent supporters of the church but also as “hysterical in the worst Tchaikovskian manner”. Most with anti-clericals and some anarchists who were spoiling notoriously, Joseph Kennan called it “a shabby little for a riot. shocker”. What the critics seemed to object to was the Would the audience dislike an opera touching on the opera’s sensational mixture of sex, sadism, religion and art church and political power? Would it provoke some sort of - plus the fact that all the major characters die. In addition, outburst? there were those who thought the libretto was illogical and The Queen of Italy and the Italian prime minister were unclear. In the early 1950s, in his More Opera Nights, the in the audience, as were the city fathers of Rome. In the venerable Ernest Newman spent over forty pages minutely event, the only outburst was the shooshing of latecomers. comparing Sardou’s original play with the opera’s libretto, The diva Hariclea Darclée acquitted herself well as Tosca, always to the latter’s disadvantage. According to Newman Emilio de Marchi was a popular Cavaradossi and Eugenio and others, the opera doesn’t make clear what exactly the Giraldoni a suitably sinister Scarpia. Hindsight regrets only story’s political situation is, doesn’t inform us adequately of that the 27-year-old Enrico Caruso had been turned down the backstories of both Tosca and Cavaradossi, and leaves when he auditioned for the role of Cavaradossi, because the type of loose threads which Sardou’s original play Puccini ― 1900 he was considered too inexperienced. The opening night neatly sewed up. audience called for five encores and there were 21 curtain The irony is that the old Sardou himself collaborated calls. with the librettists, thoroughly approved of the opera, Italy’s opera houses had seen far more triumphant oversaw its first Paris production and finally declared to debuts than this, but Tosca at once established itself as Puccini that the opera was a great improvement on the the favourite it has remained. A recent survey, looking play. He may have been flattering the composer, of course, at international opera-houses over the last thirty years, but in spite of what Newman argued, few people who rates it as the world’s 5th most popular opera in terms of experience the opera have ever been confused about what productions mounted. is happening. So there was no strife at the opening of Tosca. The So Tosca has continued to flourish regardless of the strife came in the opera’s gestation, and in the way critics’ carping. Antonio Scotti set the standard for Scarpias highbrow critics have reacted over the years. in an early production, and the role has been filled by Victorien Sardou, France’s king of sensational, such greats as Tito Gobbi and Sherrill Milnes. At the Met crowd-pleasing historical melodramas, had written his in the early 20th century, Tosca was a triumph for Emmy play La Tosca in 1887 as a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt. Composers of opera loved Sardou for the extreme Destinn and Cavaradossi for Enrico Caruso, consoling emotional situations his plays presented. They were so him for having missed out on the role in the original Rome readily adaptable into the operatic idiom. A total of seven production. Later performances added nuance to the operas (most of them now forgotten) were adapted from roles. In the 1930s Maria Jeritza was the first Tosca to sing Sardou. Puccini loved the play Tosca as soon as he first “Vissi d’arte” while lying down. Maria Callas followed her saw it in the early 1890s. Unfortunately, a rival composer example. Between the wars, Beniamino Gigli was the first had already snagged the rights to the play. For Puccini, the tenor to play Cavaradossi as if he were fully aware that he first level of strife was getting his publisher to trick the rival was going to die, and not escape, adding pathos to his “E composer out of the rights. lucevan le stelle”. Plácido Domingo played it the same way. Once this was accomplished, Puccini’s major headache Dr Nicholas Reid is an Auckland historian, poet and was getting his regular librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe critic. 2015 season P.9 Hariclee Darclée as Floria Tosca. Maria Jeritza as Floria Tosca. Tosca Claudia Muzio as Floria Tosca. Maria Callas as Floria Tosca. P.10 nzopera at the Metropolitan. For twelve years, from 1921 to her A Diva as departure from that company in 1932, she was the main box office attraction, replacing the dead Caruso in both audience appeal and scale of fee.