Tosca, a bloody story of love and jealousy during the Napoleonic Wars, was based on the deafeningly successful French play by Victorien Sardou, starring legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt as Floria Tosca. Today the play is forgotten, but everyone knows the opera, and this is the merit of music. Puccini works on the listener's emotions with unerring, almost manipulative precision. We even forgive him for the gap in the rapid pace of events, which he was forced to make at the request of the first performer of the role of Tosca, adding the aria "Vissi d'arte", in which the soprano tries in vain to reach heaven.
The last romantic of Italian opera, Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) himself lived a life worthy of a libretto character. As an eighteen-year-old boy, he walked 20 kilometers to Pisa to listen to Verdi's Aida, and after that he decided to become an opera composer by all means. And he became him, and gained immense popularity, and became rich. He loved cards and fast cars, had romances with singers and was the talk of the town among critics for his too bright and catchy work. Puccini created only twelve operas, but a third of them are on everyone's lips: La Boheme, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, Turandot.
The current production of Tosca at SATOB is already the sixth in a row: the opera was staged here in 1933, 1941, 1950, 1963 and 1982. In the first half of the 20th century, it was run here under the original author's name. Since the 1963 production by director Georgy Gelovani and conductor Savely Bergolts, this opera has been listed on Kuibyshev and Samara posters as Floria Tosca, following the practice of Leningrad theaters. At the beginning of his career, in 1982, "Tosca" in our theater was designed by set designer Vyacheslav Okunev - it was a performance by Alexander Tumilovich and Lev Ossovsky. Three decades later, Okunev, already a People's Artist of Russia, returned to Samara to work on the same opera, this time in a different production.
