Maria Callas in "Tosca" or art for reason to live

2023-08-10 15:52:06

From one great actress to another. «In the second act, from the basket where I was placed, I saw the precise moment when Tosca decides to kill Scarpiaremembered Edwige Feuillère (1). Callas’ eye rested on the knife, the glass she held to her lips stopped halfway…”

Madly – and jealously – in love with the Republican painter Mario Cavaradossi, Floria Tosca will in fact assassinate the ignoble Roman police chief Scarpia, hoping in vain to save her lover from death. Adapted from a play by Victorien Sardou created in 1887 by Sarah Bernhardt, Tosca by Giacomo Puccini (1900) seems like a mise en abyme of the world of theatre. The heroine is a singer adored by the Roman public, the action takes place in a single day in three emblematic places of the Eternal City, then under the brutal domination of the Bourbon-Sicily: the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, the Palazzo Farnese and Castel Sant’Angelo, prison and place of execution. Thus tightened, the plot gains in intensity, in fatality too.

Maria Callas with Tito Gobbi and Renato Cioni after performing “Tosca” at Covent Garden, London in 1965. / G49/ZUMA/MAXPPP

Fierce, powerful but vulnerable as soon as her love for Mario is attacked, the beautiful Floria offers Maria Callas a golden musical and scenic score. His comrade in the city but irreducible enemy on stage, the baritone Tito Gobbi, liked to evoke the way in which the singer «scrupulously repeated each attitude in order, facing the public, to suddenly feel free to invent, inviting me to do the same”. He also tells a nice anecdote according to which Callas and he greeted each other with a bow at the end of each performance, like fencers at the end of the fight…

Theatrical charisma

“Tosca has accompanied the singer’s journey since her debut when she was only 18, emphasizes Alain Lanceron, president of the Warner Classics label. And it is in this role that the public will applaud him in 1965, the last year of his stage career, from Paris to London via New York. » She flourishes her theatrical charisma, playing with panache, and so much intelligence, the demonstrative gestures of the singer at the height of her glory. How can we forget her caged lioness gait in Act II, in her red velvet dress, feverish hands and hunted gaze? “Maria Callas in Tosca, it’s one of the greatest theatrical emotions of my lifeignited the actor Robert Hirsch (1). I don’t see an actress capable of being Floria Tosca like her. Everything passed on his face. »

Callas replied that she had only to listen Puccini’s music“with his soul and his ears” to find the right movements, the appropriate movements, everything that makes a character exist in its truth, when it sings and when it does not sing. While Scarpia is exercising the most odious blackmail on her, Floria Tosca feels lost, addressing a desperate prayer to God, a cry of incomprehension: «I lived on art, I lived on love. I never did wrong (…) I offered jewels for the Madonna’s mantle, and offered my song to the stars, to the sky, which shone even more beautifully. (…) Why, why Lord do you reward me like this? »

The filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, remembering the words of Toscaembraced in the same homage the interpreter and his character. «Poetry for you was called life and service of art. » He will make Maria Callas his Medea, in 1969, when she had given up the stage.

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