Tosca de giacomo puccini biography

• Melodrama in 3 acts
• By Giacomo Puccini
• Libretto: Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, after Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca (1887)
• First performed: Teatro Costanzi, Rome, 14 January 1900

SETTING: Rome; June 1800.

Tosca is one of a half-dozen operas that everyone knows: the one where an opera singer (performed by an opera singer) performs “Vissi d’arte”, and knifes an over-enthusiastic admirer.

It’s one of the most popular examples of verismo opera, which focuses on realistic (often working class) characters and situations, violently intense emotions, and just plain violence.

Tosca has all of those: torture, attempted rape, murder, death by firing squad, and suicide.  But it’s a sophisticated work, and one with plenty of heart and great melodies.

The opera opens with a series of ominous, fortississimo chords associated with Baron Scarpia, Rome’s corrupt chief of police.  Scarpia lusts after the opera singer Floria Tosca, whose boyfriend Mario Cavaradossi is a revolutionary.  When Cavaradossi helps a political fugitive to flee, Scarpia arrests him and offers Tosca a bargain: save Cavaradossi’s life at the cost of her virtue.  Cavaradossi, though, must appear to die; he will face a firing squad, but the guns will be loaded with blanks.  Scarpia, though, has no intent

1900 opera by Giacomo Puccini

For other uses, see Tosca (disambiguation).

Tosca is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900. The work, based on Victorien Sardou's 1887 French-language dramatic play, La Tosca, is a melodramatic piece set in Rome in June 1800, with the Kingdom of Naples's control of Rome threatened by Napoleon's invasion of Italy. It contains depictions of torture, murder, and suicide, as well as some of Puccini's best-known lyrical arias.

Puccini saw Sardou's play when it was touring Italy in 1889 and, after some vacillation, obtained the rights to turn the work into an opera in 1895. Turning the wordy French play into a succinct Italian opera took four years, during which the composer repeatedly argued with his librettists and publisher. Tosca premiered at a time of unrest in Rome, and its first performance was delayed for a day for fear of disturbances. Despite indifferent reviews from the critics, the opera was an immediate success with the public.

Musically, Tosca is structured as a through-composed work, with arias, recitative, choruses and other elements musically woven into a seamless whole. Puccini used Wagnerianleitmotifs to identify characters, objects and ideas. While critics have often dismissed the opera as a facile melodrama with confusions of plot—musicologist Joseph Kerman famously called it a "shabby little shocker"—the power of its score and the inventiveness of its orchestration have been widely acknowledged. The dramatic force of Tosca and its characters continues to fascinate both performers and audiences, and the work remains one of the most frequently performed operas. Many recordings of the work have been issued, both of studio and live performances.

Background

Main article: La Tosca

The French playwright Victorien Sardou wrote more than 70

Italian opera composer (1858–1924)

"Puccini" redirects here. For other uses, see Puccini (disambiguation).

Giacomo Puccini (22 December 1858 – 29 November 1924) was an Italian composer known primarily for his operas. Regarded as the greatest and most successful proponent of Italian opera after Verdi, he was descended from a long line of composers, stemming from the late Baroque era. Though his early work was firmly rooted in traditional late-nineteenth-century Romantic Italian opera, it later developed in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents.

His most renowned works are La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), and the unfinished Turandot (posthumously completed by Franco Alfano), all of which are among the most frequently performed and recorded in the entirety of the operatic repertoire.

Family and education

Born in Lucca in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in 1858; he was the sixth of nine children of Michele Puccini (1813–1864) and Albina Magi (1830–1884). The Puccini family was established in Lucca as a local musical dynasty by Puccini's great-great-grandfather – also named Giacomo (1712–1781). This first Giacomo Puccini, though often referred to as Jacopo, was maestro di cappella of the Cattedrale di San Martino in Lucca. He was succeeded in this position by his son, Antonio Puccini, and then by Antonio's son Domenico, and then his son, Michele. Each Puccini studied music at Bologna, and some took add