Tosca

The evening of Mary's funeral, Leo and his wife Lucille attended a party at the Metropolitan Opera Company.

The opera they were celebrating that night happened to be Puccini's Tosca, one of his most tragic.

Almost everyone is dead by the end of the performance.

After the party, the family played cards at home, but Leo never joined in.

I absolutely do not understand what is going on narratively other than pastiche scenes from her life.

And that was hard for me as someone who loves, you know, give me a juicy Tosca.

Let me sing Turandot and just own it.

And so in many ways, I feel like the dunce sitting in a corner when I'm looking at an opera like this.

But this idea of a don't know mind, you know, and Zen Buddhism that comes in with John Cage, Philip Glass, who loved this opera.

I think they are also pulling from that.

And it's not so much coming up with a concrete answer and more, well, how does this make you feel? What are you noticing as you're seeing this? You're not just waiting for Tosca to stab Scarpia and jump off the Castello San

Angelo.

And also, I remember there was a tenor who I worked with who also was singing a role for the first time.

I think it was Cavaradossi in Tosca.

And again, he was just saying, can you just, you know, be with me when I have these, not the arias so much, but the rest of it.

And of course, it's terrible because then he'll walk on out of stage and he's supposed to be making Love to Tosca.

And instead he's

staring, he's

First began to hear opera?

That, during the rehearsals, over and over and over, they played the famous tenor aria from Tosca.

And I had gone to an opera when I was in high school, Madame Butterfly, with my school, with my high school friends.

I did not like the opera.

But Awake and Sing really was my life because I heard that opera.

I went to the Metropolitan Opera and read the libretto for the first time.

I went to see the opera Tosca.

That was what the aria was from that I was rehearsing.

After this, he kind of goes through a bunch of different aspects of opera, and he sticks with Italian for quite a while.

So the next chapter is Opera as Drama, and the opera is Tosca.

So that was the second one we listened to in the project.

And, you know, obviously, in the verismo style of opera, yeah, the drama is pretty big.

And the alternate for that was Pagliacci.

The next chapter was Drama Expressed Through Music, and the opera for that was Lucia di Lammermoor, and the interesting contrast he draws here is that if you're leaving a performance of Tosca, you might talk about how dramatic it was, how it really drew you into the action.

And in Lucia, if you're leaving a performance, you might talk about just how beautiful it was, because this is obviously from the bel canto era of opera.

And so the beauty of the music is kinda the big thing, but still, there is drama involved.

Hello, this is Philip Gainsley, and let's talk music.

Whether it be Emanazro in Aida, Giorgio Germán in La Traviata, Count di Luna in Il Trovatore Scarpia in Tosca, Marcello in La Boheme, so many, numerous other baritone roles, Quintelci has become one of the most in-demand performers not only in the U.S., but in the world.

And he's about to assume the title role in Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth at the Metropolitan Opera.

It's a pleasure to welcome Quinn Kelsey to this podcast.

That's a major...

That's a major showing.

You know, I was thinking when I asked you about how many Gildas you've done, every actor, Aida, Amelia, Chotosan, Gilda, Leonora, Tosca, Violetta, they're all different.

And does that make you respond or react differently depending on who that Aida, Amelia, Chotosan is?

Really, really messed up.

Yeah, like Tosca.

Tosca!

Jumps off a building.

I went to school with a...

When I was in primary school, a friend of mine was one of the children in Tosca.

Like...

Yeah, opera.

[laughs]

Or, uh, or Puccini I'll do, like the [singing] like Tosca.

[laughs]

What goes through your mind, Mark, when she does this? Oh, it makes me laugh.

Yeah, it really is.

It's kind of a similar thing of when I had, again, sort of one of the most challenging things I had done, which was the second Tosca that I ever got to sing, which was a jump in.

And, you know, I got a phone call on a Sunday and flew there first thing the next morning, got off the plane, went to rehearsal.

right away and then sang full out monday tuesday wednesday thursday um because i i don't often mark unless i really have to um because i like the stamina build that's singing yes

Um, I think the performance as a whole went really well.

And again, now I know I can do that.

I can do, uh, what was thought that would that have been, that would have been at least eight performances of Tosca in a week, given the rehearsal process.

Um, yeah.