Word: scarpia
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...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...
...carves up a would-be seducer with a fruit knife. In addition to her flawless acting, Callas was in full command of her remarkable voice-never luscious, but potent as TNT. She might have been good under any circumstances, but playing opposite a tangibly evil George London as Scarpia and supported by an orchestra made almost superhuman by Conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, she left the audience limp...
...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...
...legend has it, personally walked Brünnhilde's horse around the Ringstrasse before the performance of Götterdämmerung in order to prevent stage accidents. Vienna was never especially fond of innovations, but some became famous. When Soprano Maria Jeritza was rehearsing Tosca with a Scarpia who knew not his own strength, she landed flat on her face on the floor just before her big aria, Vissi d'arte. She sang it from there, and seldom afterwards did it any other...