In recent years, the Metropolitan Opera has asked artists to respond to the company’s new productions. Their creations are then transferred onto enormous banners that adorn the opera house’s façade. However, between the closing of Ainadamar and the opening of Michael Mayer’s reimagining of Aida due on New Year’s Eve, the Met’s banner on display features a photograph of Giacomo Puccini above the composer’s signature. This outsized tribute commemorates the centenary of the composer’s death on November 29, 1924. In addition to the banner, the Met offered on November 12 an unusually interesting gala performance of Puccini’s Tosca that would prove to be greater than the sum of its very disparate parts.
Why these extravagant gestures to Puccini? While celebrations connected to an artist’s birth are quite common, making a big fuss over the anniversary of their death happens far less frequently. But opera houses, particularly in the United States, owe much to the Italian composer whose ever-popular works have been programmed more and more frequently as companies continue to struggle to recover from crippling closures caused by the pandemic.
As many of Puccini’s operas are easily accessible and feature poignant stories of tragic love set to memorably soaring melodies, nearly every season of even the smallest opera company contains at least one: La Bohème, Madama Butterfly or Tosca are the most commonly performed with the larger companies also venturing the more demanding Turandot. And, unlike most masterpieces by, say, Mozart or Verdi or especially Wagner, these operas contain around two hours or so of music that novice audiences may appreciate.
The Met, which scheduled nearly sixty performances of four of the composer’s works last season, has long had a special connection to Puccini. That relationship was examined in a dazzling new short film by 59 Productions that was shown before Tosca. Directed by Tony Wexler and narrated by Peter Clark, the Met’s archivist, the gala audience was swept into the first decades of the twentieth century when Puccini’s operas were the newest Met hits. The composer first visited New York in 1907 to oversee the company’s first Manon Lescaut and the U.S. premiere of Butterfly. The film concisely evokes Puccini’s enthusiasm for the city, a fascination that culminated in the Met’s world premiere of La Fanciulla del West in 1910. The film ends with a mention that World War I prevented Puccini from returning to New York and oddly omits any mention of Il Trittico, which in 1918 also had its world premiere at the Met.
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After the film, the eagerly expectant audience was primed for a Tosca that included a number of important firsts. In August, the Met announced that Yannick Nézet-Séguin had extended his contract until 2030. That was scarcely a surprise, but the bigger news was that over the next few seasons, the Met would be remounting Wagner’s Ring and Tristan und Isolde, all directed by Yuval Sharon and starring Lise Davidsen. Since the banishment of Anna Netrebko, no singer has ignited Peter Gelb’s enthusiasm like Davidsen, whose Tosca, her first Puccini role at the Met, was the gala’s most highly anticipated centerpiece.
Portraying her lover Mario Cavaradossi was British-Italian tenor Freddie De Tommaso in his Met debut. Davidsen and De Tomasso have appeared frequently together, a match made in the boardrooms of Universal Music Group as both have exclusive contracts with Decca Records. Corporate pairings like these used to be common, from Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano or Renata Tebaldi and Mario Del Monaco to Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti. However, not since star couple Netrebko and Rolando Villazón fizzled has a pair been so earnestly packaged together as Davidsen and De Tommaso, who collaborated in Tosca this fall in Berlin and Munich before coming to the Met and will do so again in Vienna next month.
But the Met’s Tosca revealed that the pair are not especially well-matched. Davidsen’s Leonora in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino earlier this year at the Met and European reports of her Tosca led many online commentators to opine that the Norwegian soprano lacks the passionate Italianate style that De Tommaso delivers in spades. At the gala, they appeared more like a comfortably bourgeois couple rather than a volatile, passionate pair. Tosca’s mild fit of jealousy over the Attavanti portrait seemed more like an amiable old joke between them. One of the most refreshing aspects of Davidsen’s Tosca was that, rather than offering up the familiar tempestuous diva, she gave us a younger, more vulnerable woman plunged into a maelstrom she’s not prepared for.
De Tommaso, on the other hand, relied on shallow “leading tenor” poses, frequently gesturing to the topmost balcony begging for applause, like at his long-held high B-flat in “Vittoria” and especially at the end of his overwrought, sob-ridden “E lucevan le stelle.” His robust swagger and evident grasp of Puccini’s style might have been more impressive had he sung more of the correct notes. Intonation lapses were frequent, and perhaps nerves kept his staid “Recondita armonia” earthbound. His unsubtle approach was a poor match with Davidsen’s scrupulously nuanced attention to Puccini.
Oddly, Davidsen displayed more electrifying chemistry with the superb Quinn Kelsey as Scarpia, her predatory nemesis. Their interactions throughout crackled with an electricity lacking between Davidsen and De Tommaso. Remembering that he’s a baron, Kelsey gave us a suave would-be seducer who, for once, could have been a real romantic threat to Cavaradossi. His high, supremely secure baritone pined with enraptured love (or was it simply lust?) for Tosca and only revealed his brutal side when torturing Cavaradossi. Just one unexpected moment of vulnerability manifested when just inches apart, Davidsen, taller than either man, lashed out in anger at Scarpia: for a second or two, Kelsey’s implacable Scarpia was afraid.
While Davidsen sang with expected security and blazing high notes, she failed to pull off a number of Tosca’s iconic moments because she refused to push her chest voice. When unable to listen to Cavaradossi’s screams any longer, she revealed Angelotti’s hiding place meekly, almost inaudibly. Her softly intoned “Quanto? … Il prezzo?” to Scarpia also lacked fiery disgust, as did her “Muori dannato” to the dying Baron, though she stabbed him with breathtaking ferocity.
She began “Vissi d’arte” softly and skillfully built it to an unusually explosive climax; she was always able to easily soar over the too-frequent crests of Nézet-Séguin’s explosive orchestra. The music director, who had not led Tosca earlier this season, failed to present a coherent vision of the opera. The first act, in particular, emerged in fits and starts. The second act, however, brimmed with a propulsive urgency that kept the audience breathless but not his singers.
Stage and pit often got out of sync, unsurprising as this gala Tosca clearly suffered from too little preparation time. Davidsen had been in Munich performing the second act of Tristan for the very first time, so she arrived in New York just a week before Tosca opened. Kelsey concluded his enthusiastically received run of Rigoletto four days before his second-ever complete Baron Scarpia. The three principals, all new to the blandly conservative production David McVicar created in 2017 as the longed-for correction to Luc Bondy’s earlier, much-disliked vision, had even less rehearsal time together than usual mid-season recastings—and it often showed.
However, the audience (which appropriately included Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraìn, star and director of Maria, the upcoming film on Netflix about Callas that prominently features “Vissi d’arte”) greeted the performers with long, loud and lusty cheers. One prays things will have jelled by their fourth and final performance together on November 23, which will be beamed in HD to movie theaters worldwide. Puccini at the Met continues with more Toscas in January, with Sondra Radvanovsky returning to the title role and many more Bohèmes—nineteen in all!
The big announcement about plans for Davidsen in Wagner also mentioned that the soprano will be opening the Met’s 2026-27 season with a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth, co-starring Kelsey as her ambitious spouse. From a photo taken at the fancy Tosca afterparty, the pair is already plotting.
