Puccini always dawdled over composing, leaving himself plenty of time for the hunting, womanising and foreign travel which he enjoyed.
Her performance almost put him off the project altogether, but he made some sort of a start on it in the following summer, after the première of La Boheme. In 1895 Puccini went to Florence specially to see Bernhardt in the play.
Franchetti was persuaded and relinquished his rights to the work. Puccini was seriously displeased and Ricordi hastened to retrieve the work from Franchetti by telling him that on second thoughts he had decided it was entirely unsuitable for an opera – brutally violent and involving a murderous heroine and a forgotten political situation that no contemporary audience would grasp. Ricordi had a libretto written, but as Puccini was busy with Manon Lescaut, the publisher gave it to another of his stable of composers, a lesser light called Alberto Franchetti.
Set in Rome in 1800 during the struggle between the repressive royalist regime and the republican revolutionaries, the play was called La Tosca. Her gift for mime, incidentally, accounts for the long wordless scene in the opera’s second act, after the villainous police chief has been murdered. As early as May 1889 Puccini told his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, that he wanted to make an opera out of a melodrama which the highly regarded French playwright Victorien Sardou had written as a sensational acting vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt.
0 kommentar(er)
