Faced with an authoritarian state, opera singer Floria Tosca finds herself in a fight for her freedom and dignity as a woman and stage artist. In a spiral of fear and violence, the boundaries between stage and reality begin to blur in a paranoid way.
The world of opera ushered in the new century with the premiere of Tosca on January 14, 1900 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. In keeping with the spirit of the times, Puccini takes the morbid pleasure of tragic entanglements and desperate love to the extreme in this opera in order to "shake people up and strain their nerves a little."
The title character Tosca loves the painter Cavaradossi, who is sentenced to death by the police chief Scarpia, the representative of the repressive state power, for "subversive" activities. Tosca agrees to a humiliating deal with Scarpia in order to save her lover, but although she brings the police chief down, he destroys any hope of a happy ending in death. The artistry of the protagonist couple is not a picturesque detail in this work, but the driving force of the plot: in a society that is in a state of emergency due to political arbitrariness, censorship and abuse of power, Tosca and Cavaradossi are threatened not only in their personal existence, but also in their artistic existence.
Four years after his impressive reinterpretation of the musical Cabaret, Immo Karaman returns to the Klagenfurt City Theater. With Shelley Jackson in the role of Floria Tosca, he devotes himself to one of the last Italian prima donna operas, which lives entirely from the musical and dramatic expressiveness of its title character.
