All this gesticulation foreshadows Cavaradossi’s “Oh sweet hands” aria in Act 3. Racette’s singing is bright and expressive, and matched well by her body language-especially her hands, which she puts to use to flesh out Tosca’s personality: Drumming impatiently on the church pews, she is at once pious and bratty. Indeed, the cast is the highlight of the production. Playing the title character is Patricia Racette, a soprano who won high praises in the same role with the Met in 2010, and who also starred in last season’s Iphigénie en Tauride here in D.C. A whole third act follows with even more implausible devices, including a mock execution, ending abruptly with the diva’s inevitable tragic death as she dives (in this case, belly-flops) to her doom from the prison walls. Scarpia pushes his luck too far though, when he presses her to give into his carnal wishes in exchange for her lover’s life. Scarpia, using classic movie-villain logic, knows that the best way to impress a lady is to torture her boyfriend in front of her, which he does until she gives up Angelotti. But Scarpia has his sights on another target: Floria Tosca, a singer and Cavaradossi’s tempestuous girlfriend.
Pursuing Angelotti is the wicked Scarpia, chief of police for the royalist government of Naples. Curiously, the Italian composer (basing his opera on the French play La Tosca) puts the invading French forces on the side of the good guys: Cesare Angelotti, a republican dissident on the run, and Mario Cavaradossi, a painter who helps him hide in a church. Tosca takes place in Rome, during Napoleon’s invasion of Italy in 1800. So it’s fortuitous that this season’s program (set years before either Domingo’s departure or the company’s financial troubles were anticipated) opens with a safe bet, as if reassuring audiences and donors that the company may be going through an existential crisis, but they’re not doing anything crazy. WNO doesn’t always open seasons with chestnuts-last season’s opener, Un Ballo in Maschera, was not a fan favorite. D.C.’s top opera company went through two near catastrophes in the past year: first, losing Plácido Domingo, WNO’s longtime and often absentee director, to the Los Angeles Opera then, being bailed out and absorbed by the Kennedy Center after almost going bankrupt. The Washington National Opera doesn’t have any qualms with going lowbrow, certainly not for its season opener, and certainly not this season. So too is the Washington National Opera’s treatment of it, this month at the Kennedy Center. And yet the final product is really quite enjoyable. It’s a trite story, with one-dimensional stock characters and the dramatic arc of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, that tugs at your basest emotions. Among his many well-loved, overperformed works, Tosca best puts his hack talents on display. Opera snobs look down their noses at Puccini for his penchant for dumbed down melodrama, but this is both his greatest flaw and strength. But there are a few operas that remind you of the genre’s onetime mass appeal. It’s hard to believe, given all its pageantry and extravagance, that opera was once a genuinely popular art form that catered to the lowest common denominator.
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