Tosca

The literary model for Puccini's torture opera (Oskar Bie) was provided by Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) with his successful play La Tosca, which premiered in Paris in 1887 with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role.

As in all of Puccini's operas, Tosca shows how human attention and culinary pleasure can be mutually dependent when the composer's artistic intentions become the standard of interpretation.

The police chief Scarpia, the singer Floria Tosca and the painter Cavaradossi claim freedom in every personal variation: as a dynamic-subjective claim to power (Scarpia), as a rebellious ethos aiming at change (Cavaradossi), as a private, simple and at the same time boundless love (Tosca). In a time of epochal upheavals, such attitudes gain exemplary meaningfulness. Depending on how we understand ourselves and Puccini in this time, TOSCA remains an eerie romance or becomes a portent of the theme of "freedom". In any case, each of the contrary partners pays for this love triangle with death. Their deaths do not claim any redemptive glory for themselves, but are bitter, horrible, definitive.

Götz Friedrich's 1987 re-staging of Boleslaw Barlog's straightforward staging from 1969, which focused on scenic concreteness, takes Puccini's intentions at their word - the interdependence of human attention and culinary pleasure is inspired by the music and becomes the starting point of the scenic interpretation as well.