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Updated: June 1, 2025
With 'La Tosca, which was produced in 1899, Puccini won another success, though for very different reasons from those which made 'La Bohème' so conspicuous a triumph. The libretto is a clever condensation of Sardou's famous drama. The scene is laid in Rome in the year 1800.
The latter gives orders that Cavaradossi's execution shall only be a sham one, blank cartridge being substituted for bullets. When they are left alone, La Tosca murders Scarpia with a carving-knife when he tries to embrace her.
Even as she drove to the theatre, Truda had noted how the streets were uneasy, how men stood about in groups and were in the first stages of drunkenness. The play that night was that harrowing thing La Tosca; she was dressed for her part when the word came, written on a scrap of paper: "It is to-night. I am waiting at the stage door."
He has a rich fund of humor and an intensity of utterance that at once arrests the listener. He came forward to greet the visitor with simple cordiality, saying he was pleased we could hear one of his latest "finds." The young tenor was at work on an air from Tosca. His rich, vibrant voice, of large power and range and of real Caruso-like quality, poured forth with free and natural emission.
Indeed there were already times when it seemed as if he need hardly wait for the excuse of the "Tosca" to turn refuge into indulgence. Thus come we to the afternoon of the 18th of the holiday month: a gray day, and a windy; and bitter, bitter cold; when all dreams of Christmas cheer were frozen in the forming and replaced by some breath of the shrivelling air.
I love to think of the rush to the door when the postman rings and the excited shouting up the stairs, "Quick, one from Con." February 2nd. You see by the writing how tired I was when I reached this point. It's nearly twenty-four hours later and again night. The gramophone is playing an air from La Tosca to which the guns beat out a bass accompaniment.
Somewhere in the distance Julian O'Farrell was singing, as he had sung on the first night we met, Mario's heartbreaking song in "La Tosca" the song on the roof, at dawn. Always in remembering Julian I must remember Mario's love and sacrifice! I knew that he meant it should be so with me. The voice was the voice of love itself, such love as mine for Jim, as Jim's for me, which can never die.
It is beautiful music, carefully done, artistically executed, but the orchestras are made up for the most part of men past the military age. We heard "La Tosca" one afternoon and in the orchestra sat twenty men with grey hair and the tenor was fat!
It was the question he had asked in his "Tosca Symphony": that symphony of helpless, human wonder and sorrow. And the question, repeated for the last time in the great motif of the finale, was still unanswered.
In this memorable year '95, a curious and incongruous succession of cases had engaged his attention, ranging from his famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca an inquiry which was carried out by him at the express desire of His Holiness the Pope down to his arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East End of London.
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