What's the story Art, love and politics form an agonising triangle in Puccini’s tense thriller. Tosca begins with a political prisoner hiding out in a church: Rome is under martial law, and nobody is safe. Celebrated opera singer Floria Tosca will do anything to protect her lover Mario Cavaradossi, a painter who is arrested for having helped the prisoner. She even visits the unscrupulous police chief Scarpia late at night to plead for him. Scarpia, stooping to blackmail and torture, demands to sleep with Tosca as the price for Cavaradossi’s release. She agrees, but when Scarpia signs the release order she kills him. She and Cavaradossi look forward to freedom together, but Scarpia never intended to play fair and has double-crossed the lovers. As his guards pursue her, Tosca hurls herself from the parapet.

Why should we care? ‘I lived for art, I lived for love, I never hurt a living creature.’ This is Tosca’s magnetic motto: she has devoted herself to her work and her lover, and never thought real life would kick the door down. ‘You’re far more tragic on stage,’ sneers Scarpia – but to save her lover, Tosca must act as never before when Scarpia proposes his squalid sexual bargain: a shag for Cavaradossi’s life. Based on a hit French play by Victorien Sardou, this Italian opera by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) grips audiences by the throat. Puccini knew the value of powerful emotion, and mines it through three of the most vivid characters in opera – the diva, the artist, the oppressor. Composing Tosca in his retreat in the Italian mountains, Puccini caught some butterflies to send to a friend. Thinking of his heroine, he wrote, ‘let them remind you that when evening comes we all must die.’ Death always sharpens the passions in Puccini. Audiences love his operas because his music shudders through the senses: terror, lust and greed. Characters like Scarpia grab at gratification and don’t bother about the consequences; others, like Tosca, are poleaxed by the unexpected strength of their feelings. Like Thelma and Louise, she finally makes a tragic leap into freedom.

What does it sound like? Church and prison bookend the sound world of Tosca. At the end of the first act, Scarpia’s nasty baritone thunders below a chorus singing their hearts out in church – he vows to have Cavaradossi killed and to make Tosca sleep with him. Scarpia twines religion with revenge, and his lust is clotted with violence. During the nerve-scraping second act, Tosca must endure hearing her lover tortured next door as Scarpia tightens the screws. Puccini racks up the tension by making his orchestra shriek or explode with brass and percussion. But one of the most chilling moments is the quietest: as Tosca looks down at the murdered Scarpia and speaks, rather than sings, his epitaph: ‘And all Rome trembled before him.’ Throughout, danger heightens lyricism, as Puccini stops time for his heartfelt heroes, soprano and tenor: Tosca asserting her innocence in ‘Vissi d’arte’, or the caressing clarinet that lets Cavaradossi recall the life he leaves behind on his last morning in ‘E lucevan le stelle.’

Other stuff On the first night in Rome in 1900, there was a bomb threat at the theatre. Police feared that the distinguished politicians in the audience might be assassinated. Puccini and his librettists are unusually precise about time and place: Tosca begins just before noon on June 17, 1800, ending after dawn the following day. Puccini was an enthusiastic researcher. For Tosca, he visited Rome to hear the early morning bells from his chosen setting. After touring the London slums, he was inspired to plan an opera based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Music critic Joseph Kerman delivered a crushing dismissal that still haunts Tosca’s reputation when he dismissed it in 1956 as ‘that shabby little shocker.’ An energetic womaniser, Puccini declared, ‘On the day on which I am no longer in love, you can hold my funeral.’ He also adored gadgets and vehicles, collecting a variety of cars and motorboats.

Exploring further - links Tosca, edited by Mosco Carner (Cambridge Opera Handbook). A guide to the opera’s music, context and history. Tosca’s Rome by Susan Vandiver Nicassio (Chicago). Follows the opera round Rome and puts it in historical perspective. Puccini by Mosco Carner (Duckworth). A monumental biography of the composer. Tosca (2001), film directed by Benoît Jacquot, with Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna, cutting between the action and the recording studio. Tosca (1992), film directed by Brian Large, with Catherine Malfitano and Plácido Domingo. Filmed in Rome at the precise locations and time of day specified in the libretto.