![]() Although this outcome is inevitable, it always causes sharp intakes of breath throughout the audience, including the writer, who has seen this opera many times. ![]() Inevitably, but shockingly, the firing squad fires real bullets, killing Cavaradossi and leading to Tosca’s leap to her death from the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo. ![]() Prior to this grisly moment, Tosca reflects on her life in the famous aria, “Vissi d’arte” (I Lived for Art), listing her good deeds and regretting the jealousy that has brought her to this terrible moment, when she must try to save Cavaradossi by concealing his role in sheltering an escaped political prisoner, Cesare Angelotti.īelieving Scarpia’s promise that Cavaradossi’s execution will be a fake, she finds Scarpia’s signed document providing the couple an escape from Italy and coaches Cavaradossi in the fine theatrical points of seeming to die. ![]() The cynical would-be lover, Chief of Police Baron Scarpia, uses this ghastly situation to propose a sexual liaison with Tosca in trade for the life of Cavaradossi, an attempt that eventually leads Tosca to stab him to death, crying out that this is the man before whom all Rome once trembled. The second act of Puccini’s opera proves just that, as the singer Floria Tosca is trapped by a cruel and powerful admirer while her lover, Mario Cavaradossi, is being tortured in the next room. One of the elements defining a “masterpiece” is the way in which a dramatic moment you know is coming nevertheless astonishes you every time it does.
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