Dal New York Times del 31/05/2004

May 31, 2004, Monday
THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK


Roll Over, Puccini: 'Tosca' Has Been Pumped Up and Plugged In

By JASON HOROWITZ (NYT) 1095 words
ROME, May 30 -- Tosca has not been her old self lately.
One Saturday night in Milan she needed the help of a microphone in
her tragic songs. And instead of following a conductor's baton, she
grooved in stiletto heels to a recorded soundtrack. She even looked
different, trading in her usual operatic corpulence for showgirl
curves and skimpy outfits.


More than a 100 years after the debut of this Puccini opera,
audiences are seeing a Tosca very different from the traditional
one. The heroine is still lovelorn and troubled by similar suitors,
but she prefers belting out show tunes.

''Tosca'' the musical? ''This is a modern opera,'' said Lucio Dalla,
the composer and creator of ''Tosca: Desperate Love,'' who is best
known as an Italian soft-rock star. ''After 100 years you need to
change. My Tosca sings normally. The audience can understand her
without having its nose stuck in the libretto.''

Pop and opera have already collided in the United States, where Baz
Luhrmann put a popular touch on Puccini's ''Bohème'' on Broadway and
Elton John replaced the score of Verdi's ''Aida.'' But this is
Italy, the cradle of lyric opera, and some aficionados are troubled
that a pop version of ''Tosca'' will trespass in opera's hallowed
halls and sully their sacred stages.

''I am worried about this production,'' said Pino Castagnetti, the
secretary of Friends of the Gallery, a national association of opera
lovers. Mr. Dalla, 60, is itching to take his opus out of arenas
like the Mazda Palace in Milan and into places where audiences are,
he contends, ''sick and tired'' of traditional performances.

''Opera in Italy is very fragile and feeble at the moment,'' said
Fred Plotkin, a former performance manager at the Metropolitan Opera
who studied at La Scala as a Fulbright scholar.

Many theaters destroyed by fires are yet to be rebuilt, and
government money has been severely cut to many of the houses that
are still standing. Radio has largely abandoned sweet arias for
sugary pop, and the country's home-grown opera stars often go
unnoticed.

When Luciano Pavarotti, who is a friend and sometimes duet partner
of Mr. Dalla, took his final bow after a performance of ''Tosca'' at
the Metropolitan Opera in March, Italian opera came a step closer to
losing its most recognizable ambassador.

''Now it's rare to see a page in Italian newspapers about an opera
singer,'' said Franco Moretti, the general manager of Italy's annual
Puccini festival. ''The space is given to pop stars or musicals.''
But ''Tosca: Desperate Love'' has been getting plenty of press here.

That publicity and the more than 200,000 people who have paid to see
the show since it opened last year have led some opera houses to
invite Mr. Dalla and his cast to perform on their stages.

A scaled back version of ''Tosca: Desperate Love'' played with an
orchestra at Bologna's Teatro di Opera in March and is scheduled for
Vienna's opera house this summer. Mr. Dalla said he had his eye on
La Fenice in Venice, while officials at Italy's most revered opera
company, La Scala, are considering it for the Teatro degli
Arcimboldi, their temporary dwelling during restoration of their
famed theater. ''The line is blurring,'' Mr. Plotkin said. But
hardly anyone believes that opera has run its course or that its
theaters should embrace musicals. La Scala's conductor, Riccardo
Muti, has already taken a defiant stance against what some have
called the dumbing down of lyric opera.

In a newspaper interview in Corriere della Sera this year, Mr. Muti
lamented pop stars taking their chances with lyric scores. He has a
long running dispute with La Scala's manager, Carlo Fontana, over
whether the company's offerings should include more popular fare to
bring in more money.

''I think that the musical is the opera for our times,'' Mr. Fontana
said. ''La Scala is a great museum of opera. It's like the Louvre.
But it has to decide if it wants to open up to contemporary
repertory, this is the issue. This is the great question.''

One major concern to opera cognoscenti is the introduction of
microphones in the opera house. Mr. Dalla's singers are amplified,
leading some to worry that a new generation of operagoers, hooked on
musicals like ''Tosca: Desperate Love,'' will become accustomed to
artificial voices and feel disappointed when they hear natural
tenors.

But Mr. Dalla does not seem to have a problem with departures.

In Act I of ''Tosca: Desperate Love'' nuns strip down to red
lingerie, and priests partake in prurient embraces. Then there are
the new characters, including a sort of singing soothsayer.

The roots of the show, which was commissioned by Rome's leading
opera official, Francesco Ernani, are unorthodox. Mr. Dalla said his
inspiration came during long nights of listening to Puccini to get
in the mood for a mob movie he was scoring.

Even open-minded opera experts like Mr. Moretti, who said he would
welcome Mr. Dalla's Tosca at his annual Puccini festival, wondered
what the composer would think. ''I don't think Puccini would make it
through the show,'' he said.

Cast members do not see why not. Rosalina Misseri, the 24-year-old
who plays Tosca and who is one of the brightest stars in Italian
musicals, said that the spirit of the character remained intact. She
admitted, however, that her knowledge of Tosca was largely
intuitive, as she has never seen a staging of the opera.

Despite or perhaps because of all its poetic license, Italians
cannot get enough of the show. In Milan an enraptured audience
rushed the stage after the final scene.

Just as in Puccini's version, the drama ends with Tosca leaping over
a parapet to her death offstage. But this time Mr. Dalla had an
added touch: a muscular angel in black jockey shorts and white wings
carries her back up.

''My 'Tosca' is not destined to become a classic,'' Mr. Dalla
conceded. ''But there are people who have come to see it 10 times,
and for them this is 'Tosca.' ''