Booking Confirmation by email
Ticket pick-up at the evening box office
Run time: 2hrs 45min, 2 intermissions
Sung in ITALIAN
Subtitles in English, German, Italian, French, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese
When Anna Netrebko made her role debut as Tosca in 2018 at the Met, the New York Times hailed her as “magnificent”, Observer found her performance “breathtaking”, and OperaWire called it “Anna Netrebko’s masterpiece”. This December Netrebko sings Puccini’s explosive diva at the Vienna State Opera - alternating with Saioa Hernández. Tenor Yusif Eyvazov is the idealistic painter Cavaradossi, and baritone Wolfgang Koch completes the opera’s fatal love triangle as the menacing Scarpia. Bertrand de Billy conducts the electrifying score, which features some of Puccini’s most memorable melodies.
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was enormously popular in his lifetime, and his mature operas remain at the core of today’s repertoire. An operatic composer with a most original gift for lyrical melody, Puccini possessed a masterful technical savoir-faire and an extraordinary sense of the theatre.
Puccini’s librettists Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906) and Luigi Illica (1857–1919) based their text on Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca, which had enjoyed years of international success with the great actress, Sarah Bernhardt. It was a major feat of adaptation: the original’s five acts and twenty-two characters were reduced to three acts and nine characters in the completed opera.