Aria Code - Puccini's Tosca: Death is But a Dream

Puccini's Tosca: Death is But a Dream

06/09/21 • 27 min

It’s not easy to talk about death. We associate dying with so much suffering and loss. But for many people, the end of life is full of peaceful remembrance of the moments and relationships that have meant the most. For the leading man in Puccini’s Tosca, that’s the sweetness and beauty of his beloved.

Caught up in the messy politics of his time, Mario Cavaradossi has been arrested, interrogated, and tortured. And then, he’s sentenced to death. “E lucevan le stelle” finds Cavaradossi in his prison cell one hour before his execution. He knows his life is over, and what does he do? He gets lost in a daydream about a passionate night spent with Tosca. Host Rhiannon Giddens and her guests explore the memories and dreams that give us meaning at the end of our lives.

Joseph Calleja, A.K.A. The Maltese Tenor, sees a lot of himself in Cavaradossi - they’re both men of intensity and passion. He says that if the spectrum of human emotion were a harp, Puccini knew exactly the right string to pluck at just the right moment to convey the emotion the character is feeling.

Carolyn Abbate teaches music at Harvard University and writes about opera, including the book A History of Opera. One of the memories that she holds most dear is of an afternoon spent in a meadow with her son when he was young.

Dr. Christopher Kerr is the CEO and Chief Medical Officer at Buffalo Hospice and Palliative Care. Chris recently wrote a book called Death is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at LIfe’s End, about the dreams and visions that many people experience at the end of their lives. This work was later turned into a film, which became the basis of a Netflix production and a PBS World documentary.

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Handel's Agrippina: Nice Romans Finish Last

In order to be a Roman Emperor, you had to be entirely cold-blooded. It was a violent world of infighting, ruthless slander, and take-no-prisoners politics -- a world where rulers would kill a million people and enslave a million more just to flex their power. This was the Game of Thrones setting that George Frideric Handel chose for Agrippina. The opera's name comes from Empress Agrippina the Younger, a woman of ambition and influence, and this episode focuses on someone who inadvertently stands in her way: the hapless Ottone. He doesn’t realize that becoming the heir to the throne has put a target on his back, and that Agrippina is aiming to take him down. Eventually she turns everyone against Ottone, leaving him in total despair.

Having lost his friends, his future, and the love of his life, Ottone asks “Why me?” in the aria “Voi che udite il mio lamento.” Host Rhiannon Giddens and three guests take you on a tour of the cutthroat politics of ancient Rome, a world of murder and mayhem that still has something to teach us today.

Countertenor Iestyn Davies likes singing the role of Ottone because as the only honest character in the opera, he’s an audience favorite. This was the last role he sang at the Met right before the lockdown, and he knows that his future performances will be deepened by his experience of the pandemic.

Handel expert Dr. Alison DeSimone is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where she teaches courses in music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. She loves how Handel gets to the emotional depths of all of his characters, making them feel like real people. She recently published a book called The Power of Pastiche about music and culture in 18th-century England.

Historian Dr. Emma Southon is a recovering academic, writer, podcast host, and scholar of the ancient world. She's amused that ancient Romans are presented as paragons of civilization and culture even though their murder and mudslinging is anything but civilized. She wrote her first book, a biography of Agrippina, because she felt the Empress deserved her own book and no one else was stepping up to write it.

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Strauss's Elektra: Waltzing With a Vengeance

Note: This episode includes descriptions of childhood sexual assault.

The drive for revenge can be all-consuming, especially when you or someone you love has been wronged. Outcast and distraught, the title character in Richard Strauss’s Elektra is obsessed with avenging the murder of her father. And because the story is based on a Greek myth, and Greek myths are full of dysfunctional families, this means that Elektra is hellbent on killing her own mother.

We get our first taste of the darkness inside Elektra’s mind, and the trauma at the heart of her rage, in the monologue, “Allein! Weh, ganz allein.” It's a sort of primal scream accompanied by a huge orchestra, and Elektra plans her revenge in all its gory, graphic glory. Host Rhiannon Giddens and her guests explore the depths of trauma and the heights of vengeance, both for Elektra and for a man whose own drive for revenge brought him to those very same extremes of elation and despair.

The Guests:

Soprano Nina Stemme thinks there’s some truth to the story that Strauss once told an orchestra to play so loudly that they would drown out the soprano singing Elektra, and she should know -- she’s one of today’s leading interpreters of the role! She invested a lot of herself in shaping this character, and it's one that takes all of her physical and emotional energy to perform.

William Berger is an author and radio commentator. Equal parts opera buff and metalhead, he brings his love of intense storytelling to his work at The Metropolitan Opera, and to his exploration of Elektra. While it's a story of violence and revenge, Berger thinks the real journey is the one of psychological discovery and deep Freudian conflicts bubbling to the surface.

David Holthouse is a writer and documentary filmmaker who spent three years of his life consumed by the desire for revenge. He meticulously plotted to murder the man who raped him when he was seven years old. He tells his story of childhood sexual assault in his first-person essay “Stalking the Bogeyman,” and follows up on his story in “Outing the Bogeyman.”