Tosca is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto. It premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900. The work is based on Victorien Sardou’s 1887 French-language dramatic play, La Tosca. Tosca is a melodramatic piece set in Rome in June 1800, with the Kingdom of Naples’s control of Rome threatened by Napoleon’s invasion of Italy.
About Tosca in brief
Tosca is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900. The work is based on Victorien Sardou’s 1887 French-language dramatic play, La Tosca. Tosca is a melodramatic piece set in Rome in June 1800, with the Kingdom of Naples’s control of Rome threatened by Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. It contains depictions of torture, murder, and suicide, as well as some of PuCCini’s best-known lyrical arias. The dramatic force of Tosca and its characters continues to fascinate both performers and audiences, and the work remains one of the most frequently performed operas. Many recordings of the work have been issued, both of studio and live performances. The power of its score and the inventiveness of its orchestration have been widely acknowledged. The opera was an immediate success with the public, despite indifferent reviews from the critics, and is still a popular work today. It is a through-composed work, with arieas, recitative, choruses and other elements musically woven into a seamless whole. It took four years to turn the wordy French play into a succinct Italian opera, during which the composer repeatedly argued with his librettists and publisher. According to the libretti, the action of La TosCA occurs in Rome, in the evening and early morning of 17 and 18 June 1800.
The action of the play, more precisely in his play, is the Papal ruling of Rome in the small states of Papal Italy in the early afternoon and early evening of 17 June 1800; it takes place in the afternoon and evening of 18 June. The play, which premiered in Paris on 24 November 1887, was an outstanding success, with more than 3,000 performances in France alone, and in which Sarah Bernhardt starred throughout Europe. In 1891, Illica advised Puccino against the project, most likely because he felt the play could not be successfully adapted to a musical form. In 1895, Ricordi was able to get Franchetti to surrender the rights so he could recommission Puccani. One story relates that Franchetti gave the work back as a grand gesture, saying that he saw little merit in it and could not feel the music in it. A scholar contends that Francti gave it back simply because he saw it as too grand, and gave it up because he did not feel it could be made into an opera. In May 1895, Puccni signed a contract to resume control of the project. The composer used Wagnerian leitmotifs to identify characters, objects and ideas in the opera. The first performance was delayed for a day for fear of disturbances. Despite indifferent reviews, Tosca was an instant success. It was performed at a time of unrest in Rome.
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