Giacomo Puccini TOSCA 180 min

The passionate, jealous and impulsive diva, the romantic, freedom-loving and enamoured painter and a merciless and unscrupulous chief of police are the three characters involved in this melodrama with a tragic end that Victorien Sardou wrote for the famous Sarah Bernhardt. Puccini used the drama as a model for one of his masterpieces, opera Tosca that had its world opening night in 1900 in Rome that is also the location of the plot. In the myth-like but also real Rome, between the shadow of the Sant'Andrea della Valle Basilica and the terrace of Castle Sant' Angelo there is a clash of passion, the erotic is interwoven with the sacral, love with possessiveness, theatre with life. Nothing is as it seems: the defeats become victories and false executions real. This monumental opera with popular and unforgettable arias was premiered at the Zagreb Opera in May 2022 with Alla Kulbaba as conductor and Mario Pontiggio as stage director after the original production of MMF from 2008 with excellent Croatian singers who were granted professional awards for their interpretations.