Tosca. Puccini’s opera based on Frenchman Victorien Sardou’s 1887 play, La Tosca.

Tosca. Puccini’s opera based on (Frenchman) Victorien Sardou’s 1887 play, La Tosca

Per SF Opera’s “The rest of the story Tosca’s historical background”

“Sardou (1831 – 1908) would be all but forgotten in his native France, were it not for the extraordinary success of Puccini’s opera based on his 1887 play La Tosca. Sardou was an avid historian who took pride in the wealth of factual detail he poured into his plays. In fact[,] the overwhelming supply of erudition relative to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that overburdens La Tosca makes the play a tough slog for modern readers.”

I don’t agree that the detail overburdens the play – J’adore La Tosca! – and take full responsibility for the following opinions, and the grammatical corrections I made in the paragraph above.

When I first saw this performance live at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, I loved it in large part because of the historical foundation. I saw it again, but on a tv screen in our house, on 11 October – thanks to the Pandemic-induced changes at our opera house. Feel so fortunate they now offer a streaming service! This is an older performance being streamed.
I found the version I saw live to be more accurate than this earlier version; perhaps due to my preference for performances closely based on actual history.

“Sardou wrote the work as a vehicle for the famously temperamental French actress Sarah Barnhardt, yet the heroine does not make ger entrance until forty-five minutes into the play. But the play’s heated melodrama and vivid characters enabled its drawbacks to be overlooked by opera librettists and composers, including the aged Verdi, who at eighty-one allowed that he would have made La Tosca into an opera had he been younger.”

“Despite being firmly based on the aftermath of the French Revolution, the opera itself includes no actual historical characters. But real-life figures appear in Sardou’s play, and even the fictional ones may be partly based on actual people. Harvard musicologist Deborah Burton has found evidence that Baron Scarpia, Tosca, and Angelotti may have been based on historical figures of the time. Burton also uncovered the story of an unfortunate prisoner named Palmieri, whose execution was real, not ‘simulated’ as Scarpia suggests to Tosca.”