Bondy and Gelb take the choke on the Tosca Telecast
General Manager Peter Gelb and Theater Director Luc Bondy certainly have garnered a lot of attention for their new production of G. Puccini’s Tosca. More than 25 reviews appeared in newspapers and online of the work’s opening night premiere in September. For proof, Google Met’s Tosca reviews as a starter. Added to that were the resounding boos the production received at the opening which has attracted the curious and profited the box-office for the Met. At least it seemed like that at the HD matinee telecast on October 10th as the camera showed a packed house.
However, there were significant changes in the direction between what the viewing audience saw and what the opening night crowd booed. If the word significant seems too weighty for the revisions Bondy made (no doubt with Gelb’s approval), it must be remembered that the director gave them prominence at the premiere.
And the changes had to do with two hot button topics that are part of our nation’s social fabric: religion and sex.
Originally Bondy gave his Scarpia, baritone George Gagnidze, an extra splash of foul behavior to fill out his concept of Scarpia as a degenerate. At the Act One curtain as the religious and laity profess their faith in the Te Deum, Gagnidze, according to all reports, gave the statue of the Blessed Virgin some salacious feels. For the telecast, Scarpia gave her a smacking kiss on the lips, hoping this would go down smoother to the millions watching. At the beginning of Act Two, Scarpia is entertaining three ladies of the night, one of which is suppose to fellate him. In the telecast, with her back to the camera it looked as if she was halfway between nibbling at his navel with a quick lick to the groin, hoping that this ambiguity would ease the blow. Also there was a shot of one lovely’s exposed breast, but then it was covered in the next one. Perhaps she had felt a draft.
Many of today’s directors are extending the dramatic status of comprimarii giving them more stage business as a means of heightening the drama. But the choices Bondy made interfered with the drama. He gave the character of Spoletta, one of Scarpia’s whiny henchman, so much false piety in the second act, he overshadowed some of the police chief’s diabolical interaction with Tosca. Also, Bondy gave more prominence to the part of the jailer in Act Three by making him the captain of the guard. As he took his firing squad through three mini-practice sessions, anticipating Cavaradosi’s execution, the constant severe look on the jailer’s face throughout this opening scene became increasingly annoying in contrast to Puccini’s beautifully reflective prelude.
Puccini and his librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa wrote exciting, emotion-driven roles for his three main characters. The composer, whose innate understanding of how theater can move audiences, also gave them both beautiful and dramatic music to sing and an opera plot taut throughout with intensity.
Floria Tosca, the opera singer, leads a life off stage as dramatic as the ones she portrays in the theater. In love with Mario Cavaradossi, a painter who has political ties to the ideals of the French Revolution, Tosca intersects with Baron Scarpia, Rome’s chief of police whose diabolical lust for the diva has no bounds. The roles run up and down the emotional scale like a roller coaster — jealousy, intended rape, lust, love fraught with danger, and some maladjusted religious piety that Puccini instinctively knew how to project. And it’s here, in the psychological threads that the composer wove through his work, where Bondy’s directorial skill came to the fore.
By now, soprano Karita Mattila, tenor Marcelo Alvarez, and Gagnidze have settled into their roles with sufficient ease to make the most of Bondy’s direction which asks them to fully realize their characters’ psychological and emotional inner core. Mattila, a Finnish singer who has given the Met some very searing performances in the past few years, has developed a Tosca ready to fight for her man’s devotion even if it kills her, which it does. From her first entrance to her last-Tosca leaves us by way of a suicide jump in the Tiber river- Mattila was equal to most of the lyrical and dramatic demands Puccini put into this complex character. Alvarez sang a convincing Cavaradossi, now able to sing legato and some mezza voce sections with a vocal ardor that partnered well with the many-changing dynamics in Mattila’s Tosca and express the lovers’ emotional give and take that lies at the core of Bondy’s direction.
The direction Bondy devised for Gagnidze’s Scarpia proved to be the most challenging characterization of the three. Bondy helped Gagnidze create a Scarpia that emphasized the sleazy, resentful side of a sadist who never gets the girl, as opposed to the hard-driven, but elegant sadist most singers make of the role. And the baritone acted out this characterization with telling insight and movements that accentuate Scarpia’s crippled mentality. It will be interesting to see how Byrn Terfel handles the direction when he assumes the role later in the year. The bass-baritone has performed the role enough in the past to have his own ideas about how to present it. Also Terfel has a fuller vocal compass than Gagnidze which could also effect his portrayal.
Bondy, along with set designer Richard Peduzzi, kept the religious symbolism in the opera to a minimum. Peduzzi’s Act One set for the Church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle was a big space surrounded by gray brick walls, no religious statues nor a visual hint of the chapel where Tosca presents her flowers to the Madonna. Since the text mentions Tosca’s religious devotions, we do see her carrying them in her arm as she enters, but later goes off stage for her offering.
The clean, simple lines of Milena Canonero’s costumes were in keeping with the overall dull look Bondy and Peduzzi wanted. But when it came to the Te Deum at the end of Act One, Canonero wasn’t having any of it. After all, she’s an Academy Award winner in costume design so in order to show her stuff, she decked out enough priests to fill an ecclesiastical council. In a nod to ecumenism, she dressed them in detailed vestments of red and gold, crowned with Western miters from the Roman rite and the Eastern mitra from the Greek. This vision of opulence may not have gelled with the rest of the production, but its vivid theatricality broadened Scarpia’s religious hypocrisy.
Act Two ends with the murder of Scarpia by Tosca. Much has been written about Bondy’s eschewing of any religious symbolism from the pantomime that ends the act, which by the way is described in detail in the score as stated by musicologist Michele Girardi in Puccini His International Art. After Tosca stabs Scarpia, rather than give in to his demands for sex in exchange for Cavaradossi’s freedom, she submits to her religious beliefs to help ease her anguish. She places two lit candles, one at either side of his dead body and a crucifix on his chest before she quickly dashes out of Scarpia’s apartment and into the arms of her lover. Girardi states, “This highly effective scene was created by Sardou (the playwright) for Bernhardt (the actress) and Puccini wrote his brief postlude in order to retain it…”
In order for Bondy to get his version of this scene across, he needed a committed singing actress like Mattila to move through it as if in slow motion. After she kills Scarpia, she sits as if in a daze on the big, dark red sofa Peduzzi designed in scale to the extended width of Scarpia’s quarters at the Farnese Palace. She gets up, runs to the window as if to jump, then steps back and very slowly picks up the fan that belonged to Countess Attavanti, her imagined rival, and lays back on the sofa slowly fanning her flushed face as the curtain descends. It will be interesting to see if another singer can work these dramatic moments as confidently as Mattila. In fact, Bondy’s biggest challenge in the future will be how to mold other singers to fit his original direction. The previous Franco Zefferelli production lasted 25 years, this one no doubt will be of shorter duration.
Video Director Gary Holvorson was able to capture all the action in Acts One and Three in an easy fashion, but certain shots in the faster-paced second act caused him to doubt where to go with the camera.
By the telecast, any misgivings the audience had about the production were of no consequence. This is one production which will thrive only by the subjective tastes of its audiences.
