Puccini's Tosca

Tosca comes alive in the open air of Israel’s Negev Desert, staged at the foot of the towering fortress of Masada. Starring Svetla Vassileva as the title heroine, Gustavo Porta as her beloved Cavaradossi, and Sergey Murzaev as the evil police chief, former Paris Opera Director Nicolas Joel’s 2015 production—captured here in 4K (ultra HD)!—reimagined Puccini’s resplendent opera on a breathtaking scale.

An extravagant diva and her high-minded artist-lover face off against Rome’s power-hungry chief of police and his thugs, with a conquering Napoleonic army coming ever nearer… if any literary tale was made for opera, it is Victorien Sardou’s 1887 melodrama La Tosca! After seeing the play on its Italian tour, Puccini decided to turn the work into an opera, enlisting the help of librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. The masterpiece they produced together received an initially lukewarm reaction from music critics: a bad premiere performance and the shocking verismo plot did not help. But audiences proved captivated by the opera's dramatic force, and ultimately assured Tosca’s place in the public imagination as one of the most emblematic works of the operatic genre.