Tosca: The ultimate diva

Orla Boylan (Tosca), NZO head of wigs Coleta Carbonell and director Stuart Maunder. Photo / Patric Seng

Puccini’s opera Tosca is a great classic, featuring powerful characters, including a heroine willing to kill and die for love. William Dart reports

Stuart Maunder is enjoying his first year at the helm of New Zealand Opera and, at the moment, he's a man with two jobs. When he's not steering the operatic ship from his general director's office you'll find him in the company's rehearsal rooms, marshalling the cast of the upcoming Tosca.

The Australian has a directorial CV that runs from Manon to The Mikado. He immediately tells me he "absolutely adores musical theatre" with "a particularly unhealthy obsession for Gilbert and Sullivan and Noel Coward".

He cheerfully quotes Richard Bonynge's pronouncement that "operas are nothing but old musicals", and, in 2006, his work on the Sydney production of Dusty The Original Pop Diva earned him a Helpmann Award.

"Most importantly, musicals and operas both tell stories," he says. "It's all about the power of the music. There's nothing like Dusty singing I just don't know what to do with myself, and I don't know whether there's anything quite as powerful as the opening chords of Tosca - but that's a different story."

Watching New Zealand's operatic activities from across the Tasman, he has always admired the way we "really punch above our weight in quality" as well as the range of productions here.

"Of course, there are the Toscas and Carmens that we need to do for bread and butter, but let's not forget that these happen to be some of the greatest creations of mankind," he says.

"But you've also done Boris Godunov, Jenufa, The Bartered Bride and Xerxes. In these times, that's bold programming and New Zealand should be proud of it."

Tosca and Cavaradossi (Simon O'Neill). Photo / Patric Seng

He feels that one of the main challenges for NZ Opera is diversification, which means not being so dependent on "the white Pakeha audience that might have some dim, dark memory of opera in Europe or know that it's part of their heritage.

"We've got to get out to different members of the community who might never have gone to opera," he says, "and this usually happens through the great classics, pieces that speak to the broadest population."

Tosca should certainly fit that bill and, in the programme booklet, Maunder talks of its heroine, the ultimate diva, as "the fire that burns throughout this musical thriller".

The Australian is very grateful to have topnotch singing actors in his cast, led by Irish soprano Orla Boylan. "She brings a great vulnerability to the role of Tosca that other singers don't often have."

Simon O'Neill, as Cavaradossi, has "got it all, being both heroic and romantic", and I am assured that, in a few days, New Zealand's celebrated heldentenor "will unleash the Italianate hero within".

Maunder has worked before with this production's Scarpia, Phillip Rhodes. The baritone played Marcello in NZ Opera's La Boheme and, more recently, across the Tasman, sang Judge Turpin in Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.
"Phillip is a very fine actor, who's finding lots of colours in Scarpia," he says.

"This character's going to be so much more than a cardboard villain."

The word "melodrama" is avoided in Maunder's written introduction to the opera, although Scarpia is labelled as "one of the great baddies in all opera".

"There's nothing wrong with a bit of melodrama," is the director's explanation. "It's like that wonderful moment in the movie theatre, when the killer comes up with the axe and the audience screams on cue; or a roller coaster going up to the highest peak and then plunging straight down. We're being manipulated by Puccini in this opera, and we love it."

This is an opera that is "just so passionate," he adds. "It is more than just the political context or the sexual power battle of its second act. And Tosca cannot work without incredible relationships between its characters, relationships that make sense of those duets in the first and last acts.

"It's Julie-Andrews-on-top-of-the-mountain stuff," he laughs. "It's so rapturous, to use a word that isn't used enough. It's that love between two people that goes straight to the heart."

Maunder is also very happy with the second team working alongside him, which, in creating set, costumes and lighting, actually puts the production on stage. Jan Ubels, Elizabeth Whiting and Jason Morphett are quite a triumvirate.

Ubels, a New Zealander previously engaged with stage carpentry, has created a set that is "a negative space in which light is crucial", Maunder says.

"It's like walking into Notre Dame, turning left and seeing the rose window. The window is less important than what it does."

The director is also impressed with the "incredible theatrical mind" of Whiting, with the designer's "marvellous ability to reinvent" and trusts that Morphett's lighting set-up will have the same "sheer power and audacity" that the Englishman brought to the company's recent staging of Rigoletto.

And how more fortunate could this production be than to have Swedish conductor Tobias Ringborg? "He sang in the children's chorus of Tosca when he was 10 and will tell you it was this work that turned him on to opera."

As for Maunder's final exhortation, he advises "all of those vegetarians who only like Baroque music should get their teeth into our Tosca. It's great stuff, with just the visceral slap-in-the-face quality that's needed."

'Shabby little shocker'

It's not often that the barbs of musicologists have made it into anthologies of quotations, but Joseph Kerman, damning Puccini's Tosca in 1955 as a "shabby little shocker", coined a phrase that has stayed with us, and the opera.

There are composing colleagues, too, who have not been kind.

Shostakovich once dismissed Puccini as writing "marvellous operas but dreadful music" and Britten claimed in 1951 that he was "sickened by the cheapness and emptiness" of Puccini's music.

Tosca, one of the most popular operas in the repertoire, need not worry. Since its premiere, just a few weeks into the 20th century, it has thrilled audiences, even if critics have carped.

The most amusing, a response to the 1901 New York premiere, accused the score of having "no trace of Wagner's logical mind either in the choice of material or its development".

The original story, a stage melodrama by Victorien Sardou, had been a successful vehicle for the great Sarah Bernhardt. She played a celebrated opera singer, Floria Tosca, caught in an unholy triangle between her love, the artist Cavaradossi and the tyrant Scarpia.

Puccini achieved a masterly transformation with his librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, but there were issues. He had to deal with Sardou wanting the heroine to "swoon and die like a fluttering bird".

More practically, the seasoned opera composer was worried about "getting to the end without boring the audience too much, and without indulging in any academic stuff whatsoever".

The musical rewards of Tosca are much more than its few famous arias such as Cavaradossi's Recondita armonia and Tosca's Vissi d'arte. Not only is it "gripping from start to finish", commented the late British opera scholar Julian Budden, but it presents "the composer's most varied and interesting soprano role, a credible woman of the theatre, lacking neither intelligence nor humour, and capable of genuine dignity".

Performance

What: Tosca, with NZ Opera
Where and when: Aotea Centre, September 17, 19, 23, 25 at 7.30pm; September 27 at 2.30pm