Does Tosca Have Anything New to Say to Us?

Louisa Proske’s dark, unsparing production at the Glimmerglass Festival this summer convinced me that it does, her radical staging offering a fresh perspective on the fragility of freedom in our own time.

Proske, a young German director, had already caught my eye with a revelatory staging of Handel’s Rinaldo two years ago. Her take on that baroque plot reimagined the tale as the fantasy of a young boy (the stellar Anthony Roth Costanzo) confined to a hospital bed. It became a deeply moving story about imagination’s power to transform the tragedy of a premature death.

Her Rinaldo was uplifting, her Tosca anything but. Where her Handel staging suggested how the power of imagination could redeem tragedy, her Tosca takes an already bleak story and makes it still more devastating. Tosca is also a story about imagination—think of the lovers singing ecstatically about their life together after what they think will be a mock execution—but we can’t help but feel the senselessness of their deaths by the end of this production.

In her director’s note, Proske makes clear that she sees Tosca as a story deeply relevant to today’s world, where, she observes, “one can be jailed for reciting a poem … or disappeared for wearing the wrong tattoo.”

There’s a danger in this approach. It can easily descend into a kind of moral posturing, one where the director presses a grand opera into service of her own political views. And Proske is not exactly subtle. During intermission, excerpts from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny appear on the curtain, reminders of how to resist a descent into authoritarianism. Just in case we are not making the necessary connections…

Not everyone I talked to afterward thought that Proske’s approach worked. But in spite of my resistance to being told what to think, I found her production to be utterly convincing.

That conviction comes through powerfully in her staging of each act, where she heightens the menace already present in one of opera’s darkest stories.

Act I, for example, always introduces the love story and only gradually turns sinister, first with the appearance of the political prisoner, Angelotti, and then definitively with the arrival of Scarpia at the end of the act.

But Proske’s version deepens the foreboding much sooner by transforming the usually comic interlude of the sacristan and children’s chorus into a chilling scene where the children—some in uniforms—knock him to the ground and kick him, hinting at a society where they are already being groomed for paramilitary obedience.

While Act I hints at authoritarianism, we see its full brutal reality in Act II. Normally set in Scarpia’s lavish apartment in the Villa Farnese, we watch his cat and mouse pursuit of Tosca, while we hear the cries of her lover being tortured in an adjoining room.

If Act II is always hard to watch, the beauty of the apartment helps to distance us somewhat from the horror of what’s happening. It’s always a grand opera set, appropriate to the fate of a tragic hero and heroine.

But not here. The office of this Scarpia is a spartan bunker with corrugated gray walls. As the curtain rises, an exhausted woman adjusts her stockings on a disheveled cot before slumping offstage. One of Scarpia’s henchmen is pissing in the dingy bathroom downstage right. We are confronted with the ugliness of a modern dictatorship, institutional banality replacing opera’s traditional elegance. Scarpia is no longer a towering villain, but a petty tyrant.

It gets grimmer. Tosca sings Vissi d’arte locked in the dingy bathroom—dramatically effective, for sure, but absent the grandeur of one of opera’s emblematic arias. It’s there she finds a razor—abandoned by one of Cavaradossi’s torturers—and uses it to stab Scarpia before strangling him on the cot.

It’s a degrading death, with lots of blood—I worried about those precious safe conduct letters! But she extracts them from his dead hand and, after removing a pistol from his safe, she departs. No candles and crucifix for him in this version.

The brutality of Act II gives way to a surreal reimagining of Act III, blurring the line between reality and imagination. Most of the set is rolled away, but the toilet remains, next to which Tosca sits slumped while Cavaradossi remembers their lovemaking in Lucevan le stelle.

And here Proske brings us into a new, unsettling imagined space. As Tosca joins her lover for their heartrending final duet, the scene transforms into a metatheatrical stage performance: footlights illuminate the back of the stage, behind which a well-dressed group of people take their seats to watch the spectacle. They look quite happy to be at the opera, though some of the women gasp when they witness Cavaradossi’s death.

It’s unnerving to see this audience mirroring us—enjoying the spectacle, wincing at the tragic moments, yet largely ignoring the political implications. Is this us? Are we enjoying the violence as vicarious entertainment, feeling saddened while watching the tragedy but unable to connect it to real life, where political prisoners really are summarily executed?

But surely we can at least anticipate Tosca’s final leap off the ramparts, a tragic death to be sure, but an operatic flourish that suggests she has taken control of her destiny, a moment where she leaps into a kind of mythic immortality.

But no, this Tosca returns to the sordid bathroom where she left her purse, pistol inside. With her back propped against the wall, she shoots herself and slowly slumps to rest alongside the toilet, leaving a dark streak of blood on the wall behind her.

This is no heroic gesture, but a private, ignominious death in precisely the spot where she sang her iconic statement, Vissi d’arte. This woman may have lived for art, but her death? There is nothing artistic or ennobling in it.

I can understand why some audience members come away disappointed. Is this what we come to Puccini for? It’s not the grand opera we have come to expect. Here, squalor takes the place of elegance, grittiness replaces splendor. And this is not just an aesthetic choice: it’s a challenge to the audience, every bit as much as Snyder’s On Tyranny is.

This production demands that we look beyond the stage, that we recognize the fragility of freedom in our own world. Will we heed its warning—or remain mere spectators?