![]() ![]() At intermission of director Louisa Muller’s production, a fellow audience member asked me if I thought the palpable approval at Tosca taking her revenge on Fabián Veloz’s scuppering guttersnipe of a Scarpia was merely customary or a projection of someone else the free world would like to see stopped in his tracks. ![]() Invariably, characters like Baron Scarpia seem always to be there to destroy such idealism. A pained audience stood, the artists sang from their hearts and the curtain fell, soon to rise again on the difficulty of a life, to paraphrase what Michelle Bradley’s Tosca famously sings in her gorgeous Act 2 aria, lived for art, and lived for love. Saturday night’s Lyric Opera of Chicago opening of “Tosca,” the Giacomo Puccini opera set as the Neapolitans abandoned Rome and the city fell to what would be years of annexation and Napoleonic domination, began with the Ukrainian national anthem.Ī noir-clad ensemble stood in humanist solidarity, bunched together in front of Jean-Pierre Ponelle’s ecclesiastical Act 1 setting, a magnificently malevolent work of perspective that notes how powerful, sedentary institutions can weigh on loving humans. ![]()
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