The Gran Teatre del Liceu will premiere 2023 with a new production of Puccini's Tosca, with the seal of Rafael R. Villalobos. The young Sevillian director keeps Rome as the epicenter of the story, but it becomes a more timeless reflection on power structures and the revolutionary virtues of art and love.
The opera, which will be performed from January 4 to 21 at the Liceu, is a co-production with the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville and the Opéra de Montpellier and premiered in June 2021 at La Monnaie in Brussels. Now it arrives in Barcelona with Maria Agresta, Sondra Radvanosky, Michael Fabiano, Vittorio Grigolo, and Željko Lucic as main voices.
The original story of Tosca takes place in Rome in 1800, where the character of Cavaradossi is a liberal – therefore, a supporter of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte – while Scarpia is the head of the Vatican police, a political agent at the service of the Pope's absolutist regime, reports Pau Cortina, for ACN.
In Villalobos's production, both ideological positions become more timeless, and Cavaradossi is a defender of individual emancipation and human rights, while Scarpia is an accomplice of the intolerance that represents the fascist temptation. Tosca, in turn, is a young believer and obedient woman who one day begins to ask questions and no longer go with the flow.
To reinforce this symbolism, Villalobos has decided to accompany the action with characters, works of art, and situations that reinforce the thesis that power is afraid of art. In addition, the director uses two main names: the baroque painter Caravaggio and the film director and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini – murdered in 1975 – as an alter ego of Cavaradossi himself, in one of the various "layers" of reading that the stage director likes to include.
"It is a classic production in its conception, but at the same time it adds layers about what it means to be an artist in Rome, how the city buries within it three realities (capital of Italy, seat of the Vatican, and capital of Western morality) and how political-religious and artistic relationships intertwine throughout the centuries. Beyond melodrama, Tosca is a political work," Villalobos concluded this Thursday at a press conference.
Thus, Villalobos's production highlights the fear of God as a tool for political domination and social manipulation in a drama where music underscores the psychology of the characters. A score in which Puccini reached the highest level of truculence: it combines the low passions of verismo opera and expressionism with the singing of the Italian tradition.
Tosca is one of the most performed operas at the Rambla theater, and now returns under the stage direction of Rafael R. Villalobos with an extensive cast that includes the names of Maria Agresta, Sondra Radvanosky, Michael Fabiano, Vittorio Grigolo, and Željko Lučić, among others. Henrik Nánási will be in charge of conducting the Symphony Orchestra and Choir of the Gran Teatre del Liceu.