Puccini's tightly wound Roman melodrama Tosca returns to the London Coliseum this autumn, sung in English by English National Opera.
English National Opera stages Puccini’s Tosca, sung in English, at the London Coliseum in Covent Garden from Friday 30 October 2026. The run continues until Friday 11 December 2026.
Puccini saw Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca on tour in Italy in 1889 and spent six years getting the rights. He then turned a wordy French melodrama into three acts.
The opera opened in Rome on 14 January 1900 and has stayed in the repertoire since. Its first night was played under a bomb threat, and the conductor was told to start the national anthem if anything happened.
The plot covers one day in a Rome under Napoleonic threat. A singer and her painter lover face a chief of police who will spare the man in exchange for her. The action is set at three real addresses a visitor can still walk between.
Scarpia’s entrance, the offstage torture and the false execution are its best-known scenes, with arias people know from adverts. English National Opera frames the opera as the art of resistance, the through-line of its nine-opera season, and gives every performance in English.