San Francisco’s, and the tenor’s, love for Tosca
I dearly love this “shabby little shocker,” as the great musicologist Joseph Kerman once termed it, surfeited as it is with melodrama. The opera “Tosca” embodies the most greed, real-world corruption, duplicity, betrayal, revolutionary activism, hypocrisy and sheer sexual desire of any of Puccini’s operas, all set in familiar sites of Rome, adding up to a stunning social critique of the composer’s homeland. It shows this very establishment composer as a political activist, protester and reformer for once. Naturally, no…