All right, I confess. I tell you, I confess. Stop hitting me on the head with the phone book; stop shining those bright lights into my eyes. I confess, I confess. Stop putting those bamboo sticks under my fingernails. You don’t have to do that. I confess. I told you. I LOVE TOSCA.
All right. Do you want me to say it again? (Thank you for turning off the light. Now put down the phone book, please.) I LOVE TOSCA.
There, I’ve said it. Write it out and I’ll sign it. I don’t care that my confession will ruin my reputation, make me a laughing stock for being attracted to such a … well, what is it that the American music critic Joseph Kerman called it, ‘that shabby little shocker’? Hmm, not a nice thing to say about the opera, is it, however true it might be. But write it out anyway, and I’ll sign it.
What’s that, Officer? You want to know how it happened? Are you sure? OK, you pull out the bamboo sticks, and I’ll tell you.
Oh, that feels so much better, Officer. Thank you so much.
All right, here’s how it happened. It must have been in the early sixties, when I was working in New York. I’d always liked classical music but had never listened to opera except once in a while on the radio, the Saturday matinee from the Metropolitan Opera.
Out of nothing but curiosity, I decided I might as well go to the opera. Lots of people liked it, didn’t they? And since one was the same as every other, I chose Tosca, having no idea at all of what it was about.
The only ticket I could get at the old Metropolitan Opera was for a standing-room place in the Family Circle, just under the roof. I got there with enough time to read the story, which sounded a bit tempestuous, but this was opera, after all.
So there I stood, in the midst of a number of people who gave the distinct impression that they seldom left their apartments in daylight. They all spoke knowingly about the production, the singers, the conductor, all of them impassioned in their defence of their opinions.
The lights went down, everyone grew silent, the curtain rose – hoo ha! I was going to the opera for the first time. We were in church, and there was a handsome guy – not that this was discernible from the Family Circle – apparently painting a woman’s portrait, which seemed a strange thing to be doing in a church. But this was opera, so who knew?
There was a bit of cheerful music and a bit of scuttling around, and then from offstage a female voice sang out, ‘Mario! Mario! Mario!’ and a woman not at all appropriately dressed for churchgoing, and carrying a bouquet of flowers the size of a Newfoundland, swept onstage.
This was Zinka Milanov, a name with which I was entirely unfamiliar, as I had been with Tosca. If lightning had struck me – unlikely, given the fact that I was indoors – I could not have been more stunned. I stood motionless until the end of the first act. I’d read the story, so I knew who they were: she the diva, he the painter, Scarpia the super-bad guy. The story was easy to follow, and I understood the passion, and then – ZOWIE! – that final Te Deum, with about 712 people on the stage.
I think I did not breathe during the intermission, afraid that I’d break something if I did. The second act: false politeness, violence, torture, sexual blackmail, ‘Vissi d’arte’, which even a philistine such as I could tell was glorious, and then murder. And then – my heart still pounds when I think about it – she stood over the corpse of the man she’d killed and all but whispered, ‘E davanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!’ before, hands still red with Scarpia’s blood, slipping out of the room to go and save her lover.
During the second intermission I had to sit down. People had left (how was this possible?), so there were empty seats, in one of which I put myself and sat for twenty minutes, listening to my heart beat.
I knew what was going to happen, and as the third act began I wanted to warn them that it was a set-up and they were both doomed. Somehow, any way, I wanted to enter into this artistic reality and change things, give them a happy ending. But I knew.
So the charade played its way to the end: poor Cavaradossi got to sing his heart out in his one full aria and then to play the hero, thinking the bullets would be fake, and poor Floria applauded him as he fell, an artist who knew how to play a death scene. And those of us who knew stood or sat there, made of stone, terrified of what was really going to happen, transported to some other place by the beauty with which it was happening.
‘Presto! Su, Andiamo!’ she called as she bent over him, and then those same words as at the opening, ‘Mario! Mario!’, but, oh, we’d come a long hard way to get to hear them again. The world’s been turned upside down and evil has triumphed, and all is lost and soon Tosca will be lost, too, poor dear. All she wanted to do was live for art and love. She never hurt anyone, helped the poor, gave jewels to the Madonna, and God repays her like this.
And then she jumped. Those three hours changed my life. That sounds melodramatic, I know, but they did. I was hooked and went often, saw in the next twenty years the great singers of my time: Scotto, Pavarotti, Caballé, Domingo, Price, Sills, Olivero. (Yes, Magda Olivero – I saw her debut at the Met at the age of sixty-five. In Tosca.) Nilsson, Di Stefano, del Monaco, Corelli, Gobbi, Christoff.
In a way, these years ruined me, for I am now one of those old farts who, upon hearing the great singers of the present age, murmurs polite things about them and says, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and remember how spines shook when Nilsson sang Turandot and the heavens opened when Leontyne Price sang spirituals.
Or when Zinka Milanov sang Tosca.