Troubled Tosca makes screen debut
Lush production will broadcast as part of famed Met Opera’s Live in HD series
Tosca begins airing Saturday For a list of theatres, visit metopera.org/hd
You’ve probably heard how all three original stars dropped out of the Metropolitan Opera’s new Tosca and how the conductor had to be replaced twice. But did you know about the flap over the angel’s wings? A replica of the bronze statue of Archangel Michael that stands on the roof of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, sword in hand was supposed to dominate designer John MacFarlane’s third-act set for Puccini’s melodrama. But dominate it didn’t — at first. “When it came onstage last summer we looked at it and we said, ‘Too small!’” MacFarlane said in an interview.
“Which was absolutely terrifying considering the costs involved. It was one of these moments where the sweat is coming out of your brow.”
Rather than rebuild the statue, MacFarlane decided to amputate the wings and replace them with a larger pair.
“They got the angel down on the ground, and I stood on top of the superstructure and laid two pieces of twin wall under the existing sculpted wings,” he recalled, “and they drafted it out, and I yelled, ‘A bit more, a bit more, now stop!’”
The wings in all their glory will be on display in movie theatres around the world Saturday when Tosca is broadcast as part of the Met’s Live in HD series. Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva stars in the title role, with Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo as her lover, Mario Cavaradossi, and Serbian baritone Zeljko Lucic as their nemesis, Baron Scarpia. Emmanuel Villaume conducts.
MAKING TOSCA GREAT AGAIN
Ensuring the proper wingspan was just one concern for MacFarlane, who spent a week in Rome doing research to help him recreate site-specific settings for each of Tosca’s three acts.
Met general manager Peter Gelb had told director David McVicar that he wanted sumptuous sets and costumes to replace a grim, revisionist production by Luc Bondy that was disliked by the public and most critics when it debuted in 2009. Many patrons longed for a production on the scale of Franco Zeffirelli’s lavish version in 1985.
And that’s just what McVicar and MacFarlane provided.
“It’s hugely expensive, but I know it’s the size it has to be to lay a few ghosts,” MacFarlane said. “To give them the Tosca this house needs and wants.”
When Gelb saw the set models and sketches two years ago he was delighted, and MacFarlane suggested they show them to the Met’s board. (“Me and my big mouth!”) So in March 2016 he and McVicar appeared in the board room with “three big model boxes, all the drawings, and 60 to 70 costume designs on the wall.”
The 35 or so people who attended the meeting “loved it and said, ‘Oh, thank God, we’ve got a ‘Tosca’!’” MacFarlane said.
A LEAP OF FAITH
The rooftop setting for Act 3 provides Tosca with one of the most famous exits in opera — Tosca leaps to her death from the castle wall after her lover has been executed by a firing squad.
In the new production, Yoncheva jumps into a box filled with 2,000 15-cm foam cubes to ensure she won’t be hurt.
MacFarlane notes that in theory she would land in a courtyard “which is actually where the executions were held, rather than on the roof.”
Tosca’s leap has occasionally proved hazardous. In Vienna in 2015, soprano Martina Serafin broke a leg when she landed awkwardly on a mattress that was supposed to cushion her fall.