Mass hysteria, as everyone knows, has become the defining characteristic of London theatre, with rainforest-style whooping and hollering now obligatory for whichever miserable two-hander or nauseating jukebox musical is doing the rounds. One of the good things about opera is the general lack of all that (except at student performances), a vestigial sense that the audience can tell the dross from the gold.
Well, after this Tosca, I’m not so sure. The second Freddie De Tommaso finished knocking out his first big number, “Recondita armonia”, the place erupted. And fair play to the local lad and all that, he certainly did it justice, but with about as much finesse as the shouty vedge guy at Portobello market. This was an audience that was going to love this show, whether or not it was any good.
Ever willing, I certainly wanted to, as well. Covent Garden’s last Tosca, a production by Jonathan Kent that seemed to run for decades, was a pretty hoary old thing that relied for characterisation mostly on Baron Scarpia’s hair — often the star of the show, in truth — evidently modelled on Megadeth circa 1995. That show was all photorealist sets of period Rome and down-the-fairway operatic behaviour. So it was about time they gave us something a little less silly.
It’s tricky of course because you can’t avoid the fact that Tosca is the ludicrous melodrama to end them all. It is routinely derided for being tawdry and salacious (stupid criticisms to throw at opera, particularly opera that emerged from the horrors of 19th century theatre) but it can — should, must — transcend its own prurience and nastiness to say something violently effective about the world’s knack of crushing innocence and idealism with pitiless cruelty — a strong thread through opera since at least Handel’s Ariodante of 1735. Anyone who doesn’t get Tosca should really go home and take up macramé.
To direct this new staging we had Oliver Mears, who made his name with an impressive production of this very piece fifteen years ago at Northern Ireland Opera. Political executions and pervy police chiefs don’t change much, so updating things from 1800 to a not very specific bit of later twentieth century isn’t alarming (impressive designs by Simon Lima Holdsworth). And churches change even less, so the opening scene with Cavaradossi painting the Madonna and so on looks altogether pretty trad, even if Mears brings the war rather closer than in the text, with the crump of explosions outside and bits of plaster dropping from the ceiling on a cowering congregation singing what is now a highly inappropriate, celebratory “Te Deum”. (Pretty good example of contemporary opera direction’s tendency to fetishize “realist” detail except when it concerns something the director thinks is stupid, like religion.)
Though we all wanted Freddie to acquit himself well, everyone had really come for Anna Netrebko, banned for a few years for the egregious sin of failing to anathematise her native land to the requisite degree: she still hasn’t, but Covent Garden blinked first. She is an admirable singer and person, actually, whose 30-year career — a hell of a time for an operatic soprano — starting when Valery Gergiev talent-spotted her at 22 is still going strong. And she gives us a frisson straight off, coming on stage and effortlessly upping the decibels, even though Freddie is no bleater.
But despite Netrebko giving her all to the skittish young Tosca, a personable creature whose libido is only slightly hampered by a childish religious mania (“Not in front of the Madonna!”, she simpers), but whose girlfriend-credentials are severely compromised by hair-trigger jealousy and a tendency to make everything about her, this relationship feels terribly rehearsed and operatic, terribly old-fashioned. Luckily, to take our minds off it, evil Scarpia and his goons pop up in the church like magic, he strangles the sacristan to establish his thuggish credentials, and we’re off and running.
Netrebko isn’t on top form, it becomes clear — the tone is a bit uncertain, not pure, sometimes the notes too, and the bottom end of the voice is developing the boom of one of those old-school Russian altos. But she’s still pretty good, better than most — maybe it’s just an off night. And something doesn’t gel: the melodrama stubbornly fights back against Mears’s attempts to introduce a sort of TV realism, the characters and relationships feel painted on top of the marionettes on stage. I know these fascistic torturers tend (disappointingly) not to be camp, extravagantly raving monsters, but Gerald Finley’s middle-manager Scarpia with overactive sweat glands never fills the role, though he’s certainly the most nuanced of the singers, by turns unctuous and full-on Nazi.
And so it goes. There are bits of Tosca that can never fail, like the torture scene, given Puccini’s brilliant tension-ratcheting, the mix of foreboding plod and insinuating sarcasm in the score. It’s all beautifully conducted by new music director Jakob Hrůša, who accentuates the deathly, the portentous, the detail of slurs and extreme rubato so much that the thing occasionally grinds to a halt — a long way from the unstoppable excitement of the way Tony Pappano used to conduct it. The scene culminates in Tosca’s ultimately self-pitying aria “Vissi d’arte” — which Netrebko sings with fabulous stylistic control, but again the voice itself is not right; no matter, the crowd goes crazy anyway. After she kills Scarpia, the audience titters at “Now I forgive him!”
The last act happens in a very unromantic execution room, though it has a nice view, since of course it needs a window for Tosca to jump out of. (Madness — everyone knows you have to put these things in the basement, for drainage purposes.) It’s all very brutal and effective, but it’s also a fact that Puccini’s gorgeous dawn-over-Rome music loses something essential when it comes without the looming, evocative, darkened battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo — however babyish we understand our longing for such things to be.
Don’t get me wrong, I strongly approve of the urge to take opera away from mincing around in stupid costumes, to try to liberate and enable the drama in ways that twentieth century theatre has made possible — and which the composers could never have dreamed of. But you can’t be too prissy: Tosca is always going to be a bit rubbishy, and you have to allow its grandiose gestures. Do it in a half-hearted way and it can all seem actually sillier than the full old-style flounce.
And that’s what happened here. The ingredients are fabulous but a persistent recoil from the preposterous and the melodramatic simply makes things feel a bit disengaged, unconvincing. Yet Tosca is a rare creature: it takes a piece this visceral and essentially uncivilised to remind us that we are still capable of pity and terror, that catharsis is not a quaint history-book notion from the days when human sensibility was less completely anaesthetised, but a violent, appalling thing that can disrupt your entire sense of the world. I got plenty more of that from the trip home on tube-strike night, a naff, Londony version of last-chopper-out-of-Saigon excitements of 1975, than from anything I saw on stage.
