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BACKGROUND
Giacomo Puccini, the only Italian composer after Verdi to achieve lasting success with opera after opera, was born into a musical family in Lucca, near Florence. It was mainly at his mother’s urging that he studied music as a young man. When he heard Aida — then still a novelty — he recognized the lyric theater as his calling and got a scholarship to study at the Milan Conservatory with Antonio Bazzini and Amilcare Ponchielli.
After the lyricism of Le Villi and La Bohème and the romance of Edgar and Manon Lescaut, Puccini felt ready for a full-blooded melodrama. In Tosca he succeeded so vividly that the score remains a prototype of its kind. As with Manon Lescaut and Bohème, Puccini lighted on a text already chosen by a rival composer, in this case Alberto Franchetti.
Puccini had to face a temperamental playwright, Victorien Sardou, sixty-five-year-old dean of the French theater and author of La Tosca. Sardou not only exacted an exorbitant fee but inundated Puccini with unsolicited advice. The composer had even more trouble with his librettists, Illica and Giacosa; the former had written on the lengthy side and refused to cut, while the latter found the melodrama lacking in poetry. Puccini had his way, eliminating two of Sardou’s five acts.
A restless atmosphere preceded Tosca’s world premiere, in Rome on January 14, 1900. The public was skeptical of a local subject set by an out-of-towner. Despite a bomb scare and a near-riot instigated by disgruntled latecomers trying to get seated, Tosca was performed — by Romanian diva Hariclea Darclée, tenor Emilio de Marchi and baritone Eugenio Giraldoni, with Leopoldo Mugnone conducting. The reception was mixed, but the opera soon established itself. The U.S. premiere, at the Met (Feb. 4, 1901), starred Milka Ternina, Giuseppe Cremonini and Antonio Scotti, with Luigi Mancinelli on the podium.
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