Drama imitates life.
He was the supreme bully. A man drunken on power and privilege.
He made his home in a fabulous mansion in the best part of town.
Powerful men quaked in his presence. He extracted vast sums from them under threat of imprisonment.
Having accomplished everything anyone could dream of by his forties, only the presidency itself was left to aspire to.
And his fall from the very pinnacle of power was as startling, as unexpected, as sudden as was his rise.
For under all that success raged a torrent of repressed sexual desire that was to be his undoing.
The former governor of New York?
No. His role model, Baron Scarpia.
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To limit the focus of this journal which is, after all, about Photographs, Photographers and Photography, to still pictures would be to exclude 50% of man’s greatest creation in the genre. The movies.
The best movies are not ‘movies’ at all. Rather, they comprise a succession of great still photographs.
More about ‘Still Movies’ here.
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My grandfather taught me all I ever needed to know about opera.
Just a bunch of people dressed in silly clothes, mouthing terminally idiotic words in quite unbelievable circumstances and doing so at tedious length in anything but the Queen’s English.
“Avoid it at all costs” was about it for opera in his mind. And this from a man whose idea of bedtime reading was Goethe.
But he made one honorable exception and I have never found a reason to argue.
That exception is Tosca. “The one where that fellow gets tortured” as he put it.
Short. Sweet. A real plot. Great music. High drama. Believable.
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No opera singer in his or her right mind wants to sing early in the morning. The instrument is tired, needing exercise and proper warming to make it effective.
Yet, at dawn on July 12, 1992, there they were, atop the world’s most fearsome prison, giving it all they had.
It was an experience never to be repeated in opera, or film for that matter.
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Catherine Malfitano. Placido Domingo. Ruggero Raimondi.
Mellifluous names that glide off the tongue.
But, like in the movies, it’s not good enough to be a master of one’s craft. You also have to be beautiful to look at.
And Catherine Malfitano, Placido Domingo and Ruggero Raimondi are very beautiful human beings indeed.
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Not until the time of Garibaldi some forty years later was Italy to finally see some semblance of unity and an end to hundreds of years of warring nation states within its borders.
Tosca is unlike any opera of the time. While premiered in 1900 it tells of real events exactly one hundred years earlier.
Scarpia may be a man of fiction but we all know he is everywhere we look.
We think of Austrians as those nice people speaking softly inflected German and living in quaint Tyrolean homes. But in 1800 this was a nation of aggressive, opportunistic warriors.
Part way through the second of its three acts, police chief Scarpia is informed by one of his servile flunkies that his man, Field Marshal von Melas, has been trounced by Napoleon at the Battle of Marengo, he and his occupying army having been sent with their tails between their legs back home from Piedmont. The French extended Italy and the hated Austrians were no more. Scarpia, needless to add, supported the Austrians.
Bullies like their own kind.
We had a great tradition of handling bullies at my old school in England. Three or four of the heftier members of the rugby team would take the bully to the toilet, force his head in the water and flush. No more bullying. And while one must view any unmarried priest with caution, especially if entrusted with the care of your son, there is something to be said for a Benedictine tradition which places so great a premium on fairness. The monks knew to look the other way.
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Puccini wrote Tosca’s three acts into the landscape of Renaissance Rome.
The first is set in Sant’Andrea della Valle, yet another priceless Catholic church. Completed in 1650 it proves that not only was life good in the building trades under Renaissance popes, the architects were having a field day too.
The second is in magnificent Palazzo Farnese, designed by Bramante’s assistant when he was drawing St. Peter’s basilica. France has the great good taste to house its Italian embassy there. Scarpia’s home in the opera.
The last is in that frightful prison Castel Sant’Angelo. The one atop which, at the crack of dawn, Malfitano and Domingo meet their maker. Only the Italians could name a prison after a saint. When Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to do the Sistine Chapel vault, was fearing for his life from yet another set of invaders, two hundred years before Tosca, this is where he hid.
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That producer Andrea Andermann would even contemplate making Tosca in Puccini’s original locations and at the same times dictated by the composer, seems like madness. Broadcast it live and you have pure, unadulterated lunacy. How could this possibly work? Three broadcasts separated by hours to let the sun coincide with the composer’s dream.
The orchestra was in a studio with lots of monitors. Playing the music to the action on the screen. The actors/singers all fitted with hidden radio microphones.
The cameraman, Vittorio Storaro, testifies to the seriousness of the effort. Can you say ‘Apocalypse Now’ or ‘The Last Emperor’ or ‘Last Tango in Paris’? The best of the best.
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Tosca was an actress. Catherine Malfitano is a superb actress. Had they called this production a movie the Oscar would have been hers. However, it’s not enough just to act, something that is second nature to her. Wonderful, expressive eyes, lips to die for, a body out of this world. A feast for the senses. And if that’s not enough she sings. A direct artistic descendant of that great singer/actress Maria Callas. What the voice lacks in unique timbre it gains in the beauty of phrasing and execution. Callas without the wobble.
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How they managed to keep all the cameras and equipment out of the frame beats me.
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Placido Domingo. The thinking man’s Pavarotti. A Ferrari to the fat man’s Mack truck of a voice.
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Can you imagine greater avarice than that in Ruggero Raimondi’s personification of Scarpia? Everything you expect in a morally degenerate cop, but with the presence and glamor of a fashion model. A bully. A sadist. A cruel man who desires women because he hates them so. Sort of like the guy you thought I was writing about at the start of this piece, but with film star looks.
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The photography? Mine is an old VHS tape and not so sharp, but these scenes from the first act tell you all you need to know. If you have ever seen two people in love you know there is no acting going on here.
Scarpia? I thought you would never ask ….
For some reason, one that totally defies belief, the movie/opera is not available on DVD.
You did keep that old VHS player, didn’t you?