Opera: Tosca

The Metropolitan Opera

New York

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The Metropolitan Opera’s “habitually conservative” ticket holders booed its brand-new production of Tosca on opening night, said Martin Bernheimer in the Financial Times. The Met’s artistic director, Peter Gelb, had to suspect they might. After all, he’d asked Swiss director Luc Bondy to reimagine Puccini’s deliciously “sleazy” tale of a 19th-century opera diva lusted after by a sadistic police chief—even though patrons loved the “super-ornate, hyper-literal” Franco Zeffirelli version that had been part of the house’s repertoire for 24 years. Bondy’s “sparse, minimalist-revisionist” vision is a welcome break from tradition. Too bad it’s also jarring and riddled with “bad ideas.” What might have been a bold reinterpretation instead turns out to be a bland, “sterile melodrama with raunchy trimmings.”

The Italianate opulence of the old staging is booted in favor of “aggressively stark” sets that strip the passion from Puccini, said Ronni Reich in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Take the moment when Tosca plunges the knife into her tormentor, the constable Scarpia, in Act 2. In most productions, she then performs a “religious ritual with candles and crucifix” over his body. It’s a crucial moment, when Tosca’s “piety and tenderness” shine through. Bondy, by contrast, has Tosca visibly contemplate suicide—just one of the ways he saps the drama from her eventual demise. New views on canonical works “can be wonderful for opera, if there’s a dramatic reason”­ for them. But Bondy’s changes take away more than they add.

“Redoing Tosca was going to be sacrilege to some people, no matter what Bondy came up with,” said Anne Midgette in The Washington Post. His flaunting of fans’ expectations ­“virtually guaranteed a lusty chorus of boos.” But they ought not overshadow everything this Tosca does get right. Finnish soprano Karita Mattila’s voice may lack the “iron” that the role of Tosca demands, but she throws herself into the character, taking risks that mostly pay off. From the pit, conductor James Levine and the Met Orchestra proved that “this opera’s music can indeed still be fresh, vital, and ravishing.”