A Successful Production

Sixty Leitmotives for 'Tosca',
by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

Tosca is the quintessential Roman opera. With a political and sexual thriller of a plot located in three of the Italian capital's famous landmarks, its 14 January 1900 première in Rome was bound to be enormously successful. It is, conventionally, considered as the starting date of Novecento (twentieth century) Italian opera and music drama. Tosca was a breakthrough in a musical world still searching for its own ways, after Verdi's melodrama and attempts to mimic French grand opéra and to join it with the Wagnerian aesthetics and experience. Ten years earlier, Tosca had had a precursor: Giordano's Fedora, now nearly forgotten or regarded as minor work, even though it has many of Tosca's ingredients...

TOSCA

GIACOMO PUCCINI

ROME

ITALY