Puccini's Tosca returns to the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 12 April to 5 May 2027, in Oliver Mears's production.
Victorien Sardou wrote La Tosca for Sarah Bernhardt in 1887 and it was a vehicle: five acts of melodrama built to give the most famous actress in Europe something to die of. Puccini did not speak French and saw it anyway, twice, and understood the shape of it from the stage alone. What he then did was cut it in half. Three acts, no subplots, and a running time of under two hours, in which every one of Sardou’s contrivances is kept and all of his explaining is thrown away.
The result is the tightest libretto in Italian opera and the one most often accused of cheapness, usually by people who have not noticed how little of it is decoration. Oliver Mears sets it in a contemporary war-torn Rome, which is less of a stretch than it sounds: the piece was written about a specific occupation and has never needed the costumes to make the point.
It returns to the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Monday 12 April to Wednesday 5 May 2027. Mears also directs the house’s La Gioconda, which opens seventeen days later and runs against it, so the Royal Opera’s director of opera has two of his own productions on the same stage in the same fortnight. Tosca shares the Main Stage with Swan Lake through April and into May.