Word: scarpia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This week she received one of the few operatic honors not yet accorded her-the opportunity to open the Met season. In the title role of Tosca, opposite Mario Del Monaco as Cavaradossi and George London as Scarpia, she looked statuesquely handsome in velvet gown and jeweled tiara, was more than ever the creature of low-banked passion whom an Italian colleague calls a "diva serena...
...With promotion and distribution costs, Victor figures to sink $250,000 in Butterfly with a relatively unknown cast of young singers headed by Philadelphia-bred Soprano Anna Moffo, $250,000 in Tosca, which features such established names as Soprano Zinka Milanov (Tosca), Tenor Jussi Bjoerling (Cavaradossi), Baritone Leonard Warren (Scarpia...
...Tosca, it called on the Metropolitan Opera's Assistant Manager John Gutman to tool it up for modern tastes. Gutman, an old hand at translating and adapting opera librettos, decided to switch the locale from the Rome of 1800 to an unspecified modern Eastern European capital. Scarpia, chief of the Roman police, became a Communist cop, and his enemies, the Bonapartists, became simply freedom fighters or "subversives." All told, Gutman had to doctor only 25 lines. The underling of Act II who formerly rushed in to announce that Bonaparte had won the battle of Marengo, now cries: "Our tanks...
...always, the audience loved Tosca -undoubtedly more for Puccini's score than for the cold-war innovations. At any rate, Modernizer Gutman missed one trick recently used at a similar Tosca adaptation in Argentina. There, after killing Scarpia, Tosca, in expert thriller fashion, cut the telephone wires...
...hair-raising. Callas entered Baron Scarpia's den looking like the Queen of the Night in her black velvet and ermine gown and glittering tiara. Her lip curled shrewishly at Scarpia's overtures, but she staggered when she heard her lover's tortured screams. She wound up her big show-stopping aria, Vissi d'Arte, on her knees just in time to receive the ovation that greeted it. Meanwhile, Mitropoulos, silhouetted against the stage lights, was kneading, soothing, irritating, roiling his orchestra, bouncing around in the climaxes like a marionette on a string. With a start...