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Schedule - Deutsche Oper Berlin

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Tosca

Giacomo Puccini (1858 – 1924)

09
Saturday
November
19:30 - 22:45
D prices: € 144.00 / 112.00 / 82.00 / 50.00 / 30.00
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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Cast
Our thanks to our partners

The Children’s Chorus is sponsored by Dobolino e.V.

09
Saturday
November
19:30 - 22:45
D prices: € 144.00 / 112.00 / 82.00 / 50.00 / 30.00
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.

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02
DEC

Adventskalender im Foyer: Das 2. Fensterchen

Today in the Rangfoyer on the right: ‘Mozart for violin and piano’
with Maïlis Bonnefous and Maxime Perrin
5:00 p.m. / Rang-Foyer rechts
Duration: approx. 25 minutes / Free admission


This afternoon in the Rangfoyer, you can experience two young French artists, our former violin academy student Maïlis Bonnefous and our solo repetiteur Maxime Perrin at the grand piano, who will play some Christmas carols for you, along with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Sonata for Violin and Piano in F major, K. 376. The piano and violin communicate with each other lightly and gracefully, as equal musical partners in the movement. This is because the composer shifted his aesthetic premises from the accompanied solo movement to a balance of both instruments. This sonata was part of a cycle of six works that Mozart dedicated to his student Josepha Auernhammer. An unknown critic praised the wealth of ‘new ideas and traces of great musical genius (...) In addition, the accompaniment of the violin with the piano part is so skilfully combined that both instruments are maintained in constant attention’. Today, look forward to this musical dialogue between Maïlis Bonnefous and Maxim Perrin.

Born in 1992, the young French violinist Maïlis Bonnefous initially completed her musical training at the Toulouse Conservatory in 2011 before moving on to the Berlin University of the Arts and then to the Leipzig University of Music for her master's degree. Alongside her studies, she was the section leader of the second violins in the French Youth Orchestra from 2009 to 2013, was an academy musician with the Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse in 2011, played in the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra from 2013 to 2015, and was an academy musician in the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin between 2015 and 2017. She regularly performs in concerts of the Karajan Academy of the Berliner Philharmoniker and was a scholarship holder of the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble between 2018 and 2020. She is the winner of numerous competitions.

The French pianist Maxime Perrin (1988) has been an accompanist at the Deutsche Oper Berlin since 2020. His piano studies initially took him to the University of Music and Theatre in Leipzig to study with Prof. Markus Tomas (piano) and Prof. Phillip Moll (song interpretation), and then to the University of Music in Hanover. He attended numerous masterclasses, including with Emmanuel Ax, Andrzej Jasinski, Alexandre Tharaud and Philippe Cassard. During the course of his career, he has performed as a soloist, chamber musician and song accompanist in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. In 2013, he was awarded a scholarship by the Richard Wagner Association of Hannover and accepted as a pianist into the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie. With this orchestra, he has already performed at the Berlin Philharmonie and the Alte Oper Frankfurt.