The Fall of the Roman Opera

Photo: Ken Howard/Courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera

Tosca is an opera of geometric precision. Its iii acts take identify at the points of a triangle in the center of Rome—a church building, a palace, and a prison, each a brusque walk from the other. The dating is exact (June 1800, a few days after Napoleon's bloody victory at Marengo), the politics are pointed, and the action is bounded by a solar day. Most of import, Puccini diagrams on the molecular level the emotional bonds amid iii characters locked in desire and betrayal.

The Tosca that opened the Metropolitan Opera's season to vigorous boos, on the other hand, is profligately generic. The director Luc Bondy has stripped the piece of specificity and replaced information technology with a grim drove of non-locales and fibroid interpolations. Rather than open in the Baroque basilica of Sant' Andrea della Valle, as the score dictates, Bondy places the painter Cavaradossi in a plain brick Everychurch, where he is at piece of work on a bare-nippled portrait of Mary Magdalene. In Act Two, the police chief Scarpia doesn't prowl an ornate lair with en suite torture chamber in the Palazzo Farnese; instead, he inhabits a blankly bureaucratic hall hung with yellowing maps. That, presumably, is the point—to brandish the eternal nature of evil's blandness, to insist that at whatsoever given instant, some government is inflicting deliberate hurting.

Though Bondy has never worked at the Met before, his fashionable Euro-minimalism has become something of a house manner: dim low-cal, blank walls, black costumes, and dour abstraction. Franco Zeffirelli'south opulent, hyper-detailed Tosca from 1985 demanded to be adored, and was. The new 1 challenges anyone to tolerate information technology. I hope the Met'south Peter Gelb is already trying to figure out how before long he can scrap this staging.

An opera equally sturdy as Tosca should be able to shrug off fifty-fifty sets as ugly as Richard Peduzzi'southward, only Bondy's direction plumbs deep plenty to do some serious harm. He even manages to undermine Karita Mattila, 1 of the world's most riveting sopranos. Having heard her as a ferocious Salome, a tough Leonore in Fidelio, and an indestructible Katya Kabanova, I thought she might overdo Tosca'southward ruthlessness. Puccini's heroine is petulant and enervating, simultaneously cunning and disastrously naïve, willing to betray her lover's hole-and-corner to salve him from martyrdom, ready to merchandise sex for favors and fifty-fifty readier to impale. Through information technology all, Tosca spins out i sculpted melody after another, slipping from lyric softness to homicidal grit.

All that should be fertile terrain for Mattila's talents, merely on opening nighttime the singer couldn't maneuver her gown, convey real feelings, or find her vocal center. She could stick her head in a burlap handbag and still outclass most of the competition, but the galvanic current of her soprano was weakened, her phrasing blurred, and her conviction flickered. So she did what every uncertain diva does: resort to eeks and swoons and head straight for the surefire aria—in this example "Vissi d'arte."

Mattila may nonetheless be able to rescue a compelling Tosca from this staging, but Scarpia is a lost cause. The manager must accept intended to underline the grapheme'southward badness past having George Gagnidze sing him as a baritonal Tony Soprano. There'south even a Bada Bing!–style moment, in which he gets fellated without skipping a notation—but even Tony might suspension before putting the moves on a statue of the Virgin Mary, as Scarpia does here. Such vulgarity overshadows the seductiveness. Puccini garlands the character's villainy with irresistible tunes and supports him with an orchestra that spits fire. We require his singing fifty-fifty as nosotros cheer his death. Bondy has fabricated him cheaply repulsive.

Equally Cavaradossi, Marcelo Álvarez is at to the lowest degree impressively adequate. He delivers shrink-wrapped sentiments in a loud and pretty voice, and makes few demands on the audience's attention. This is what it sounds like when a natural resource runs dry: I know of no agile tenors who could sing the part at the Met with the electrifying simplicity it requires: Álvarez is as good equally it gets. The evening's simply true clarity and color came from the orchestra, led by James Levine, presumably with gritted teeth.

Tosca
Directed by Luc Bondy.
Metropolitan Opera. Through May 13.

The Fall of the Roman Opera