{"id":37531,"date":"2016-07-03T11:33:24","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T15:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=37531"},"modified":"2016-07-03T17:45:44","modified_gmt":"2016-07-03T21:45:44","slug":"scrutiny-letters-from-munich-tosca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2016\/07\/03\/scrutiny-letters-from-munich-tosca\/","title":{"rendered":"SCRUTINY | Letters from Munich: Tosca"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bayerische
Bayerische Staatsoper: Tosca (Photo: Wilfried Hoesl)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca: Jonas Kaufmann as Mario Cavaradossi, Anja Harteros as Floria Tosca and Bryn Terfel as Baron Scarpia. Bayerische Staatsoper, National-theater, July 1st<\/sup> 2016.<\/h3>\n

MUNICH, GERMANY \u2014 Greetings from the Bavarian State Opera<\/a> \u2014 this is the first of several reports on my annual visit to beautiful Munich for the Opera Festival. I\u2019ve been coming to the National-theater and the Cuvilli\u00e9s-theater since the 1980\u2019s, with fond memories of the many wonderful performances I\u2019ve seen here. \u00a0What was an occasional visit, in the beginning, turned into an annual \u2018pilgrimage\u2019 of sorts.\u00a0 Year in, year out, when it comes to star singers and\/or conductors, the musical quality of the BSO is on par with \u2014 and sometimes superior to \u2014 the best houses in the world, the likes of Wiener Staatsoper and Royal Opera Covent Garden.<\/p>\n

My visit this year started off with a bang last evening, with Tosca starring the Traumpaar<\/em>, Jonas Kaufmann as Cavaradossi and Harteros as the Roman diva. Adding to the mix Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel as Scarpia, and you have the ingredients for the hottest ticket in town.\u00a0 It\u2019s common to see every evening before a performance, on the steps in front of the National-theater, people holding up \u201csuche karte\u201d signs, hoping to buy any unused tickets for the evening. One sees this in Bayreuth or Vienna, and sometimes even London and the Met. Toronto? Never! \u00a0I am sorry to say, no matter how good the product, Canada just doesn\u2019t have the opera culture to generate as much interest. \u00a0Last evening, I counted at least 25 people with hangdog faces holding up the signs, and when the lucky few who scored a ticket, it was like Christmas in July\u2026<\/p>\n

There was a good reason for the frenzy. In the past forty-nine years of opera-going, I can\u2019t tell you how many performances of Tosca I\u2019ve seen, good, bad, or indifferent. It\u2019s one of those unavoidable warhorses. Having seen so many, I usually avoid routine performances if I can help it. Last evening was anything but routine. It ranked as among the very best I\u2019ve seen. From the downbeat of Kirill Petrenko, the BSO Music Director, I was pinned to my seat by the sound coming out of the pit. Loud yes, but never crude. The Bayresiches Staatsorchester isn\u2019t you run of the mill band, and I\u2019ve never known it to play badly.\u00a0 The sound was balanced, nuanced, exciting, and visceral under the baton of Petrenko. The public loves him, and he got a huge ovation at the end. \u00a0Not surprising he\u2019s taking over Berliner Philharmoniker in 2019.<\/p>\n

\"Bayerische
Bayerische Staatsoper: Tosca (Photo: Wilfried Hoesl)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A great orchestra and conductor do not a Tosca make \u2014 it\u2019s still up to the three principals, and you can\u2019t get better than Kaufmann and Harteros. Munich is the best place to hear them since they are home and relaxed and least likely to cancel. Given they have sung together so much, they have perfect stage instinct and rapport, reacting to each other freely and confidently. I was surprised how much they get into the drama. Harteros\u2019 Tosca is every inch the diva in Act One, alternately imperious, playful, arch, and yet capable of womanly warmth. In her interaction with the powerhouse villain of Terfel, she is fierce one moment and despondent the next, her Vissi d\u2019arte exquisitely sung. Her physical struggles with Scarpia (almost) real. The Luc Bondy stage direction means the murder is very deliberate, not the spur of the moment thing. Terfel took awhile to warm up, his voice in the Te Deum was marginally leaner than before \u2014 after all, he\u2019s been singing at a very high level since 1989, a long time in a singer\u2019s career. But by Act Two, he was at his snarly best.<\/p>\n

\"Bayerische
Bayerische Staatsoper: Tosca (Photo: Wilfried Hoesl)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But top vocal honours went to the Cavaradossi of Jonas Kaufmann, whose dramatic tenor never sounded better. There were all sorts of rumours this past spring, speculations that he was having vocal (or health) problems and the cancellations of the rest of this season was imminent. All such rumours turned out to be false, to the great relief of his fans. I certainly did not detect any vocal issue. He sang with security, beauty, and his usual spectrum of dynamics and tone colours. His E lucevan le stelle in Act Three was a tour de force. Really today, in either the Germanic Heldentenor fach or the Italian and French reps that calls for a dramatic tenor, he\u2019s unbeatable.<\/p>\n

I save for last the 2009 Luc Bondy production that the Met audience loved to hate so much. People complain that it is sordid and ugly. \u00a0Let\u2019s face it, Tosca as a story isn\u2019t exactly pretty is it! \u00a0It was famously called a \u201cshabby little shocker\u201d by Joseph Kerman many decades ago. The now retired Zeffirelli production for the Met was opulent to the extreme, and frankly, that style is pretty much out of fashion in the opera world today. While I do agree that it was a feast for the eyes, the set was so grand that it somehow dwarfed the characters and their emotions.<\/p>\n

In an ideal world, the opera houses should keep more than one production of the same opera and rotate them to keep everything fresh. For example, I quite liked the late Gunther Schneider-Siemssen\u2019s Met Ring from the 80\u2019s. I hated to see it go. The new Robert Lepage Ring was received rather negatively, although somewhat unfairly I feel. It is good to have a change once in awhile. But wouldn\u2019t it be great if we could have both versions? But that\u2019s not going to happen, given today\u2019s economics. In any case, the Bondy Tosca<\/em> has been sufficiently tweaked that it\u2019s working better. They got rid of the hideous dummy when Tosca jumps at the end. In fact, the staging of Act 3 has been quite radically revamped. They also got rid of the embarrassing passage of one of the three prostitutes in Act 2 giving Scarpia simulated oral sex. \u00a0Perhaps the most surprising thing about this Tosca is Petrenko\u2019s knack for verismo<\/em>. In fact, I\u2019m totally surprised by how veristic the whole cast is.\u00a0 Here we have a Greek, a German, a Welshman, with a Russian at the helm, and not an Italian in sight! Yet they\u2019ve outdone any Italian Toscas I\u2019ve seen \u00a0\u2014 Bravi tutti!<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bayerische Staatsoper’s summer production of Puccini’s Tosca: a Greek, a German, a Welshman, with a Russian at the helm, and not an Italian in sight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":37535,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5723,43,52],"tags":[6232,6231,588,1775,5913,3364],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2016\/07\/tosca_munich_terfel_2016.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-9Ll","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37531"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37531"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37541,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37531\/revisions\/37541"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37531"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=37531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}