With a dozen versions of Tosca currently or recently available on DVD or streaming services, including those from the Royal Opera, Met, Vienna and Dutch Opera, any new production is going to be judged against very high quality competitors.
While not quite in their class, this 2024 adaptation in Florence directed by Italian actor Massimo Popolizio still manages to offer new insights into one of the most familiar works in the repertoire.
Crucially, Piero Pretti’s Cavaradossi, head bowed, does not for a minute believe Tosca, sung by Spanish-American Vanessa Goikoetxea, when she tells him of their miraculous deliverance by Scarpia. Although this comes at the end of the opera, it serves to reinforce the difference in character that runs through the entire story: he cynical, worldly-wise; she naïve, emotional.
Popolizio’s other major idea is to transfer the piece from one dictatorial period to another, from the Napoleonic era to that of Mussolini, by setting it in Rome’s EUR district in the 1930s, the latter’s bleak rationalist, nationalist, cold concrete creation.
Scarpia, Russian baritone Alexey Markov, has a ghoulish trophy collection in his cabinet, including a couple of foetuses in formaldehyde, and, rather than resorting to the formal firing squad, leaves it to one of his black-leather-clad thugs to despatch Cavaradossi summarily with a pistol shot.
The 20th century setting no doubt brings events closer to a contemporary audience in Italy—and means that Scarpia can listen to Tosca’s recital on the radio—but at a cost. Most of the great productions of the past also bring out the tension between the baroque, claustrophobic splendour of the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle with the evil, lustful and blasphemous intervention of Scarpia.
Here, in a plain, spacious modern setting that resonance is diminished, almost as if one has gone from the sanctified, suffocating amosphere of Catholicism to a Calvinist chapel, and the painted flats for Scarpia’s study have a flimsy, unrealistic appearance. But setting the final act execution in an anonymous piazza where children play is brutally effective.
Goikoetxea (pronounced Goikoit’e) is a rather obvious, flirtatious Tosca—which I found a bit much—and her strong vibrato rather clouds her diction. However, she brings bucketloads of expression to her big aria "Vissi d’arte" and is possessed by such conflict of emotions—joy, relief, terror—on the murder of Scarpia that she seems paralysed.
Pretti brings a steady intensity to his role, caressing the hopelessly nostalgic "E lucevan le stelle" to poignant effect, and Markov is as greasily horrible as his slicked-back hairdo.
Musically, the piece suffers from what appear to be frequent uncertainties between the stage and the pit, perhaps through lack of rehearsal time, particularly at the opening, when conductor Danielle Gatti allows the singers some overly leisurely tempi. This has its dramatic downside too, as in the final moments, a bereft Tosca, bending over her murdered lover, has her eyes on the conductor, not on him.