Unfortunately, the first-night critics were less than impressed when Tosca received its premiere in Rome on 14 January 1900. Verismo-esque shouts and cries add to the opera’s brutal soundworld. There is also a good deal of ‘diegetic’ music in the score (songs or instrumental passages the characters themselves hear as music), notably the Act One Te Deum, an electrifying set-piece that juxtaposes the sacred and the profane.

Though the opera contains much rich lyricism, this contrasts sharply with the more restless through-composed music that surrounds it. Puccini had to develop a swift musical pacing and find ways to crank up the tension, which he does through devices such as the foreboding whole-tone chord progression we hear at the opera’s outset, which recurs as Scarpia’s theme. This most red-blooded of operas is action-packed, cramming torture, an attempted rape, a murder, an execution and a suicide into under two hours. Why do opera singers use so much vibrato?.But Cavaradossi must submit to a fake execution before the lovers can flee, and Scarpia has one final trick up his sleeve from beyond the grave. Having secured a safe passage out of Rome for herself and Cavaradossi, Tosca turns on Scarpia and stabs him. When Cavaradossi is arrested for assisting the escape of a political prisoner, Tosca faces a terrible choice – she must give herself to Scarpia or her lover will be killed. She is lusted after by the authoritarian chief of police, Baron Scarpia. The singer Floria Tosca is in love with the painter (and republican) Mario Cavaradossi. The opera that Puccini and his librettists produced was a leaner version of Sardou’s play, concentrating more on the themes of lust, jealousy and corruption than the politics of the Napoleonic Wars. Come October 1899, with the score at last almost complete, Ricordi had by now lost confidence in the opera, writing gloomily to the composer that it would herald financial disaster for both of them. Puccini, meanwhile, was often away travelling and slow to meet his compositional deadlines. The librettist Giuseppe Giacosa declared it ‘not a good subject for operatic treatment’ and threatened to pull out of the project. Unfortunately, his collaborators did not share his enthusiasm. Puccini was attracted to La Tosca’s atmosphere of mounting suspense and believed it contained all the ingredients of great drama: sex, violence, politics and lies.

Tosca opera wikipedia