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- Floria Tosca (soprano Jill Gardner) makes a drastic decision to protect herself and her love from Baron Scarpia (bass-baritone Bradley Garvin). Photo Jeffrey Dunn for Boston Lyric Opera © 2010.
It has been interesting to see Boston Lyric Opera’s production of Puccini’s Tosca
just a few weeks after seeing Opera Boston’s production of Beethoven’s
Fidelio, just down the street at the Cutler Majestic Theater. The two operas, in their very different ways, invoke a powerful atmosphere of political repression — the world in which everyone lives, the trap that everyone is caught in, the air that everyone breathes — and in both cases a woman at the center of things wreaks havoc with the status quo. Kierkegaard, writing about Mozart’s
Don Giovanni, says that music is by nature seductive and thus that Mozart had found the perfect subject — seduction — for music drama to spin out and reflect upon. The music of
Fidelio seduces our better, aspiring selves into acceptance of a good and persistent and forceful woman character, and acceptance of the idea that the desire for liberation on the part of the oppressed can be answered, that the blazing sun can break through.