Robert Peters <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>This week I am listening to Tosca.  I have got a few questions (or
>thoughts) about the opera.  For a few years I worked as a volunteer for
>Amnesty International.  So I consider myself still very sensitive towards
>the subject of torture.  The heart of Tosca is the torture scene.  The
>scene is a masterpiece and works brilliantly.  But I could never get over
>the feeling that the whole scene is - well, tasteless.

If it makes you feel any better, even contemporaneously, Tosca was
described as a shabby little shocker...  it's biggest appeal appears to
have been the audience's love of Grand Dames of the Grande Theatre doing
epic death scenes.

Puccini set it to music in the tradition of verisimo; which was a pulp
opera style which was frankly much closer in spirit to the Theatre du Grand
Guignol in Paris than the current operatic museums in which the scores
are performed.  Like aIt the best verisimo operas (Pagliacci; M.Butterfly;
etc), Tosca was intentionally scandalous; & the Italians loved it.  They
still do...  Italians are no fools; & no hypocrites either.

Mind you: the guilotine executions in Poulenc's Dialogue of the Carmelites
(a postverisimo piece) are even more graphic.

Personally:  i think Robert is an ideal name for a torturer; but then:
i know that the Clements clan partly derives from a British navvy beating
the lystrosaurus out of transported convicts during the 2nd (Australin)
Fleet.  What a Spaniard called del Plate was doing in the British navy at
the beginning of the 18th century has never been satisfactorally explained,
however....

All the best,
Robert Clements <[log in to unmask]>