Ruggero Raimondi

Puccini’s musical thriller of lust, murder, and politics is one of the most dramatically riveting operas in the repertoire. Luc Bondy’s production, with sets by Richard Peduzzi and costumes by Academy Award-winning designer Milena Canonero, opened the Met’s 2009–10 season. Karita Mattila stars as the beautiful and dangerously impulsive singer Floria Tosca. Marcelo Álvarez is her lover, the painter Cavaradossi, a political enemy of the powerful chief of police, Scarpia (George Gagnidze), who wants Tosca for himself.

Benoit Jacquot reinvents the way we view opera in this magnificent production of Puccini's story of Tosca's love for the painter Cavaradossi and the intervention of Scarpia.

Benoit Jacquot reinvents the way we view opera in this magnificent production of Puccini's story of Tosca's love for the painter Cavaradossi and the intervention of Scarpia.

In the rapidly fading light of a Verona evening, the sound of the first menacing chords of Puccini's Tosca set the clock ticking for a sequence of dramatic events that begin at one specific time and place in history, Rome, on the morning of 17 June 1800 and end tragically at dawn the following day. The vast spaces of the arena call for big gestures, and producer and designer Hugo de Ana's opening imagery evokes a Rome of outsize sculpture - a sword, a vast hand holding a rosary with ominous metal links - that recalls the colossal statue of Emperor Constantine created to stand in the Roman forum in the fourth century.