Tosca

Giacomo Puccini (1858 – 1924)

14
Sunday
January
17:00 - 20:15
C-Prices: € 100,00 / € 82,00 / € 58,00 / € 34,00 / € 24,00
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Information about the work

Melodramma in 3 acts
Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
based on the drama LA TOSCA by Victorien Sardou
First performed on 14th January 1900 in Rome
Premiered at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on 13th April 1969

3 hrs 15 mins / 2 intervals

In Italian with German and English surtitles

Pre-performance lecture (in German): 45 minutes prior to each performance

recommended from 13 years
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The Children’s Chorus is sponsored by Dobolino e.V.

14
Sunday
January
17:00 - 20:15
C-Prices: € 100,00 / € 82,00 / € 58,00 / € 34,00 / € 24,00
Buy tickets
Cast
the content

About the work
As in all operas by Puccini, TOSCA is an illustration of how human attentiveness and pleasures of the palate can be mutually dependent if the composer’s artistic intentions become a benchmark for directorial interpretation. Puccini’s humane attentiveness is essentially dependent on an outcry and/or a sense of resignation. The pity inherent in his music does not content itself with abstract gestures; it wants to unsettle, to bring about change. Out of the “small things” named by Puccini as the source of his inspiration and the focus of his music “big things” grow – as long as we want them. Puccini’s choice of material owes something, directly or indirectly, to the spirit of Zola, Gorki and Hauptmann, and the link between that material and his compositional style places him likewise as a direct descendant of Verdi and an exponent of verismo. He was also known as an admirer of Wagner, although a Wagner imitator he assuredly was not.

It was more a case of a personal connection based on selected achievements of both composers. Grappling with the bundled subtleties of harmony and nuances of instrumentation, he still uncovered a voice from the orchestral cross-hatching and gave it an accompagnato that was considerably more fractured and refined than the radical and laconic Verdi was wonted to do. This is also a reflection of the aesthetic themes of TOSCA. The music exudes brutality, intelligence and exactitude but also tenderness, sentimentality and a dream-like quality. Puccini set great store on musical precision, social awareness, a tactical heroism, the poetics of the seemingly hum-drum, the contrast between aloofness and passionate involvement, and following his true north.

Scarpia, the police chief, Floria Tosca, a singer, and Cavaradossi, a painter, are all bent on achieving their own personal forms of liberty. Scarpia’s is all about asserting his idea of power; Cavaradossi’s is that of the freedom fighter seeking systemic change; Tosca’s is the release that comes with private, straightforward, unbounded love. At a pivotal time of major upheaval these urges assume a heightened significance. Depending on the stance that we see ourselves and Puccini in at that moment in time, TOSCA either remains a grisly love story or ends up as a portent of “freedom”. In any event, each of the three very different protagonists pay for their part in this triangular clinch with their lives. There is nothing redemptive about their deaths, which are grim, violent and definitive.

About the production
In 1987 Götz Friedrich addressed Boleslaw Barlog’s straight production from 1969 with its stark, undemanding sets and delivered a version that took Puccini’s declared intentions literally: the mutual dependence of human attentiveness and pleasures of the palate is inspired by the music and becomes a springboard into the stage interpretation of the work.

Our articles on the subject

Dr Takt on Giacomo Puccini's "Tosca" / Act I, fourth meter before figure 5
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02
DEC

Advents-Verlosung: Das 2. Fensterchen

In today's Advent calendar window, we are giving away 3 DVDs of "Der Schatzgräber" - an opera in a prelude, four acts and a postlude by Franz Schreker. If you would like to win one of the three DVDs, please send an e-mail today with the subject "The 2nd window" to advent@deutscheoperberlin.de.

DER SCHATZGRÄBER (THE TREASURE HUNTER) by Franz Schreker was a triumph at its world premiere in Frankfurt in 1920 and went on to play 44 times at assorted venues over the next five years. It then fell victim to a shifting zeitgeist and slipped from opera-house programmes, with a National Socialist ban on performances sealing its demise. Even after 1945 the Schreker revival was a long time coming – and THE TREASURE HUNTER has not featured prominently in the renaissance.

As with the vast majority of Schreker’s libretti, the story of Els and Elis explores the relationship between fantasy and reality, between art and life. Soulmates in the sense that they are both at the mercy of the king’s disposition, Els and Elis set off in search of different treasures. Elis, the minstrel, uses his magic lute to locate a stash of jewels and do humanity a good turn. Els, an innkeeper’s daughter who has grown up motherless in a tough, male-chauvinist world, becomes a liar, cheat and murderess in pursuit of her goal, tasking her suitors to steal the queen’s jewels and then having them killed once they have returned with the haul of treasure. Yet even with the gold in their possession, the pair are not content, and so, true to form, Schreker turns his attention to the theme of yearning per se, which is the actual “treasure” that the composer is interested in, “a dream of happiness and redemption”. Elis and Els are caught up in a swirl of dreams, memories, premonitions, songs and music. Their stories take on a dreamlike quality in a world beset by greed, murder and emotional inconstancy. For Franz Schreker the path to redemption could only be via art. Composed during the turmoil of the First World War, the TREASURE HUNTER score amounts to Schreker’s personal confession of artistic faith, executed in florid strokes of late-Romantic musical colour.

Conductor Marc Albrecht; Staging Christof Loy; Set design Johannes Leiacker; Costume design Barbara Drosihn; With Tuomas Pursio, Doke Pauwels, Clemens Bieber, Michael Adams, Joel Allison, Michael Laurenz, Thomas Johannes Mayer, Seth Carico, Daniel Johansson, Gideon Poppe, Stephen Bronk, Elisabet Strid, Patrick Cook, Tyler Zimmerman a. o.; Chorus and Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin



Closing date: 2 December 2023, the winners will be informed by email on 4 December 2023. The DVDs will then be sent by post. Legal recourse is excluded.