BLOGG # 69 AT LAST I GOT TO SEE "TOSCA"

For years now I have been wanting to attend the great tragic opera-"Tosca" and last Saturday, finally , there I was at Silver City Cinema listening to and watching this great production  by the wonderful Metropolitan opera of New York. Tosca by Puccini is one of the great tragedies in opera. The music is wonderful, the singing glorious and the plot as usual in opera somewhat trite, but there is nothing trite about the glorious heroine Tosca- she is dynamite. There is great love, jealousy, betrayal and murder. The murderer is Tosca,a sensitive artiste and singer in love with a painter, pushed to jealousy by the arch villain Scarpia and- wouldn't you know it- the chief of police and a barrel of a baritone- who drives her to jealousy and betrayel of her lover's hiding place. Poor Tosca is torn between listening to her lover being tortured and yielding to this dastardly-and ugly- villian's lust. The drama  is pitched very high, the music and voices ascending to passionate heights ending in Tosca, hampered by a voluminous very decollete gown, stabbing  Scarpia.  I have watched many a violent movie, stabbing being a rather tame method in our high definition movies, but never have I felt such horror. Tosca, her voice soaring, repeatedly stabbed him using both arms in violent thrusts, her hatred overflowing along with the bloody stabbing action as she kills this powerful despot. Immediately after she collapses,shocked at what she has done, her voice dropping at least three haunting registers with  her despair as she sings"and all Rome feared him." I found this very moving because as she sang she acknowledged the horror of murder-so unlike modern movies,where the murderer rushes off blithely to other mayhem. Up to the moment of the stabbing Tosca acted as victim responding to things out of her control, but Tosca is a modern woman, a famous singer in charge of her life, and when she grabs that knife she rejects the victim role and takes charge of her life. Unfortunately , this is a tragic opera, and she is one of Opera's major tragedians.  She does not conquer all-again just like a modern woman who can't "have it all"- and finds that Scarpia betrayed her even in death and her lover is shot anyway. Trying to escape her tyrant's lackey she plunges to her death-and that is the story of the Great Tosca- a modern woman.  I know the story is indeed trite but take my advice dear readers,and try to attend" Tosca" at least once in your life and be thrilled to the marrow of your bones.