When I was in my last few years of teaching in the Deep South, US culture seemed to shift from something adventurous to something surprisingly timid. Before, we taught works like plays and opera and novels and let them open themselves to the students. By the time I left, we had to give 'spoiler alerts', which I hated having to do. Plots, for instance, are a one time only surprise—you can’t regain that ever, ever again. I’ve been going to opera forever, and I remember the first time Tosca murdered Scarpia and then committed suicide. I was about 20, and I was devastated, absolutely blown away.
And that is how I felt tonight about the singing and the orchestral music (the pit orchestra of the Seattle Opera’s day job is the Seattle Symphony, and what a force that still is). Everyone, including the children’s chorus and the adult chorus and all the principals, were in great vocal shape, for the most part. Željko Lučić’s Scarpia was killed off in act 2; probably a good thing, as he was getting a bit ragged by his murder, but it’s a really big piece for one singer to do. And I would recommend that Yonghoon Lee (May 3's Cavaradossi) watch his vocal attacks but especially his vocal releases. I’m pretty sure I caught a few glottal stops that don’t belong in Italian from row S, and are damaging to anyone’s voice in the long run. But both of those two have gorgeous voices.
May 3’s Tosca (Seattle Opera wisely double cast many of the roles to allow the singers time to rest and recover) was Lianna Haroutounian, whose voice was… perfect. Just beautiful. And technically very impressive. The whole cast are great actors as well.
But there’s another problem with old chestnuts. After my first Tosca, I saw my second Tosca, and my third, and my fourth. My husband and I once left yet another Tosca at Lyric Opera of Chicago after only two years from the last time around, and he proposed an “All Tosca Season”. We howled in the cold Chicago winter, but there was truth to that. Opera can, too often, become a parade of greatest hits, though Seattle Opera has also had a long, long list of firsts.
And sometimes, you get surprised. I remember the time the staircase on the roof of the jail where Tosca leaps to her death was built away from the audience, and Renata Scotto (then a great singer but always a great actor) raced right up those stairs, jumped, hung for what seemed like hours, then dropped. What a “Oh, my God” moment. The entire audience gasped—and then rose to its feet with a roar. But that was years ago, and as I wandered around and listened to tonight’s audience, it was another exchange of previous great performances: “oh, yes, Scotto, I suppose, but what about Callas?” (This is brilliantly parodied in Terrence McNally’s The Lisbon Traviata.) It reminded me of the time I heard one of Chicago’s great critics, Claudia Cassidy, saying, “when I attended the world première of The Rite of Spring in Paris…” over our classical music station. And I thought, “when you WHAT?”
So, here is today’s spoiler: Seattle Opera’s new Tosca is a very old Tosca indeed. It was first designed back in 1952 using what was called 'soft scenery', painted canvas and trompe l'oeil, French for “fool the eye”, adding an illusion of depth. Newsflash: I’m in my late sixties, and that set is older than I am. The programme takes a couple of pages explaining why a long-dead technology can still be used, and okay, I see the point. I love old technology. But while a production using soft scenery technology can be revived in interesting ways and in new ways, you probably can’t use the exact same sets over and over and over.
Nostalgia doesn’t speak to everyone, and for some of us, it’s an acquired taste. But I have seen tonight’s exact production at least four times in many years of opera-going. Maybe in 1952 it was all that, but not now. You could commission a new artist, show them the 1952 sketches and say, “using painted canvas, make a Tosca for 2025.”
As Robert Schaub, the technical director under legendary general manager Speight Jenkins, noted in the programme, “we didn’t use [tonight’s] Tosca in the ‘90s and the ‘00s because it would have felt dated to audiences who (some of them) remembered when all opera was presented on soft scenery.” If the production from 1952 was repeated in 1969, 1977, 2015, and now 2025 with only a ten-year gap, it’s time to put that puppy to rest. It didn’t help at all that the scenic sketch by Nicola Benois (1952) reproduced in the programme was a lively pen and ink drawing that looked way more interesting than the sets themselves. And that the costumes and the lighting were from the 2015 production.
Revivals are fine, and new production is expensive—but this Tosca just looked and felt a bit tired, even if wonderfully sung and played.