tosca

GIACOMO PUCCINI

conductor Opera in three acts

Emmanuel Villaume
Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and
production
Sir David McVicar Luigi Illica, based on the play La Tosca
by Victorien Sardou
set and costume designer
John Macfarlane Saturday, January 27, 2018
lighting designer 1:00–3:55 pm
David Finn
movement director
New Production
Leah Hausman

The production of Tosca was made possible by

a generous gift from Jacqueline Desmarais, in
memory of Paul G. Desmarais Sr; The Paiko
Foundation; and Dr. Elena Prokupets, in
memory of her late husband, Rudy Prokupets

Major funding was received from Rolex

general manager
Peter Gelb
music director designate
Yannick Nézet-Séguin
 2017–18 season

The 959th Metropolitan Opera performance of

tosca
GIACOMO PUCCINI’S

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Saturday, January 27, 2018, 1:00–3:55PM

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Chorus Master Donald Palumbo

Fight Director Thomas Schall
Musical Preparation Gareth Morrell, Dan Saunders,
Howard Watkins*, and Joshua Greene
Assistant Stage Directors Gina Lapinski, Jonathon Loy, and
Sarah Ina Meyers
Met Titles Sonya Friedman
Stage Band Conductor Gregory Buchalter
Prompter Joshua Greene
Italian Coach Loretta Di Franco
Children’s Chorus Director Anthony Piccolo
Scenery, properties, and electrical props constructed
and painted in Metropolitan Opera Shops
Costumes constructed by Metropolitan Opera
Costume Department
Wigs and Makeup executed by Metropolitan Opera
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This production uses gunshot effects.

This performance is made possible in part by public funds

from the New York State Council on the Arts.

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2017–18 season A scene from Puccini’s Tosca

e Metropolitan Opera is pleased to salute

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PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

Synopsis

Act I
Rome, June 1800. The French revolutionary armies, led by Napoleon Bonaparte,
are at war with the rest of Europe. Rome has briefly been a Republic under
French protection but has now fallen to the Allied forces. Cesare Angelotti,
former Republican Consul, has escaped from prison. He takes refuge in the
Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, where his sister, the Marchesa Attavanti,
has hidden a key to her husband’s family chapel, where he hides. The artist
Mario Cavaradossi returns to the church, where he is working on a fresco that
depicts Mary Magdalene. He tells the shocked sacristan that the face of the
Magdalene is that of the mysterious woman who has been praying near the
chapel—in fact, Angelotti’s sister. Angelotti emerges once the sacristan has
gone. He recognizes the painter and begs for his help. Cavaradossi’s lover, the
singer Floria Tosca, calls from outside, and Angelotti hides again. The jealous
Tosca suspects that Cavaradossi has been with another woman in the church,
but he calms her fears. Turning to go, she spots the painting and immediately
recognizes the Marchesa Attavanti. She accuses him of being unfaithful, but
he again assures her of his love. When Tosca has left, a cannon signals that
the police have discovered Angelotti’s escape, and he and Cavaradossi flee
to the painter’s villa. The sacristan excitedly enters to tell the church choir that
the Allies have won a great victory against the French at Marengo in northern
Italy. As they celebrate, Baron Scarpia, chief of Rome’s secret police, arrives
looking for Angelotti. His agents search the chapel and discover the Marchesa
Attavanti’s fan. Scarpia recognizes her in Cavaradossi’s portrait, and when
Tosca returns, he uses the fan to trick her into believing that Cavaradossi is
unfaithful after all. She vows to have vengeance and leaves as the church
fills with worshipers. Scarpia sends his men to follow her; he knows she will
lead them to Cavaradossi and Angelotti. While the congregation intones the
Te Deum, Scarpia declares that he will bend Tosca to his will.

Intermission (AT APPROXIMATELY 1:45PM)

Act II
Dining that evening in his chambers at the Palazzo Farnese, Scarpia anticipates
the pleasure of having Tosca in his power; the diva will be singing that night in
the Palazzo at a royal gala to celebrate the Allied victory. The agent Spoletta
has broken into Cavaradossi’s villa and found no trace of Angelotti, but has
arrested Cavaradossi and brought him to the Palazzo. Scarpia interrogates the
defiant painter and sends for Tosca. When she arrives, Cavaradossi whispers
an urgent plea for her to keep his secret before being led into another room
by Scarpia’s agents. Scarpia begins to question Tosca. At first, she keeps
her nerve, but when Scarpia tells her that Cavaradossi is being tortured in

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 Synopsis CONTINUED

the next room, her courage fails her. Unable to bear Cavaradossi’s screams,
Tosca reveals Angelotti’s hiding place. The agents bring in Cavaradossi, who
is badly hurt and hardly conscious. Scarpia cruelly reveals her betrayal, and
Cavaradossi angrily curses her. Suddenly, word arrives that the news from
Marengo was false; Bonaparte has won the battle. Cavaradossi shouts out his
defiance of tyranny, and Scarpia orders him to be executed. Once alone with
Tosca, Scarpia calmly suggests that he would let Cavaradossi go free if she’d
give herself to him. She refuses, but Scarpia becomes more insistent, trapping
her with his power over Cavaradossi’s life. Despairing, she prays to God for
help. Spoletta bursts in; rather than be captured, Angelotti has killed himself.
Tosca, now forced to give in or lose her lover, agrees to Scarpia’s proposition.
Scarpia orders Spoletta to prepare for a mock execution of Cavaradossi, after
which he is to be freed. Tosca demands that Scarpia write her a passage of
safe conduct. Once done, he embraces Tosca, but she seizes a knife from the
dining table and stabs him. Before fleeing with the safe-conduct pass, she
performs funeral rites over Scarpia’s body.

Intermission (AT APPROXIMATELY 3:00PM)

Act III
At dawn, Cavaradossi awaits execution on the platform of Castel Sant’Angelo.
He bribes the jailer to deliver a farewell letter to Tosca and then, overcome
with emotion, gives in to his despair. Tosca appears and explains what has
happened. The two imagine their future in freedom. As the execution squad
arrives, Tosca implores Cavaradossi to fake his death convincingly, then
watches from a distance. The soldiers fire and depart. When Cavaradossi
doesn’t move, Tosca realizes that the execution was real and Scarpia has
betrayed her. As Scarpia’s men rush in to arrest her, she cries out that she will
meet Scarpia before God and leaps from the battlements.

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In Focus

Giacomo Puccini

Tosca
Premiere: Teatro Costanzi, Rome, 1900
Puccini’s melodrama about a volatile diva, an idealistic artist, and a sadistic
police chief has thrilled and offended audiences for more than a century. Critics,
for their part, have often had problems with Tosca’s rather grungy subject matter,
the directness and intensity of its score, and the crowd-pleasing dramatic
opportunities it provides for its lead roles. But these same aspects have made
Tosca one of a handful of iconic works that seem to represent opera in the public
imagination. Tosca’s popularity is further secured by its superb and exhilarating
dramatic sweep, a driving score of abundant melody and theatrical shrewdness,
and a career-defining title role.

The Creators
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was immensely popular in his own lifetime, and
his mature works remain staples in the repertory of most of the world’s opera
companies. His operas are celebrated for their mastery of detail, sensitivity
to everyday subjects, copious melody, and economy of expression. Puccini’s
librettists for Tosca, Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906) and Luigi Illica (1857–1919),
also collaborated with the composer on his two other most enduringly successful
operas, La Bohème and Madama Butterfly. Giacosa, a dramatist, was responsible
for the stories, and Illica, a poet, worked primarily on the words themselves.
Giacosa found the whole subject of Tosca highly distasteful, but his enthusiastic
collaborators managed to sway him to work on the project. The opera is based
on La Tosca by Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), a popular dramatist of his time who
wrote the play specifically for the talents of the actress Sarah Bernhardt.

The Setting
No opera is more tied to its setting than Tosca: Rome, the morning of June 17,
1800, through dawn the following day. The specified settings for each of the
three acts—the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, Palazzo Farnese, and Castel
Sant’Angelo—are familiar monuments in the city and can still be visited today.
While the libretto takes some liberties with the facts, historical issues form a basis
for the opera: The people of Rome are awaiting news of the Battle of Marengo
in northern Italy, which will decide the fate of their symbolically powerful city.

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 In Focus CONTINUED

The Music
The score of Tosca (if not the drama) is considered a prime example of the style
of verismo, an elusive term usually translated as “realism.” The typical musical
features of the verismo tradition are prominent in Tosca: short arias with an
uninhibited flood of raw melody, including the tenor’s Act I soliloquy shortly after
the curtain rises and his unforgettable “E lucevan le stelle” in Act III; ambient
sounds that blur the distinctions between life and art (the cantata heard through
the window in Act II and the passing shepherd’s song and the extraordinary
tolling of morning church bells as dawn breaks to open Act III); and the use
of parlato—words spoken instead of sung—at moments of tension (Tosca’s
snarling “Quanto? ... Il prezzo!” in Act II as she asks the price she must pay for
her lover’s life). The opera’s famous soprano aria, “Vissi d’arte” in Act II, in which
Tosca sings of living her life for love and her art, also provides ample opportunity
for intense dramatic interpretation. One of Tosca’s most memorable scenes
comes during the finale of Act I, in which the baritone’s debased inner thoughts
are explored against a monumental religious procession scored for triple chorus
and augmented orchestra, including bells, organ, and two cannons.

Met History
A year after its world premiere in Rome, Tosca appeared at the Met with an
all-star cast that included Milka Ternina in the title role and the great baritone
Antonio Scotti as Scarpia. Scotti would go on to sing the part 217 times at the
Met, a house record for an artist in a lead role. Among his principal Toscas were
Emma Eames, Geraldine Farrar, Olive Fremstad, Emmy Destinn, Claudia Muzio,
and Maria Jeritza. Farrar headlined a new production in 1917, which, incredibly,
was in use for half a century. Renata Tebaldi, Richard Tucker, and Leonard Warren,
with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting, headlined a “revised” production in 1955,
and in 1968, a new staging directed by Otto Schenk starred Birgit Nilsson, Franco
Corelli, and Gabriel Bacquier. Maria Callas brought her legendary portrayal of
Tosca to the Met for six performances, two each in 1956, 1958, and 1965. In
1978, Tito Gobbi, himself a celebrated Scarpia, restaged Schenk’s production
with a cast that included Shirley Verrett, Luciano Pavarotti, and Cornell MacNeil.
Pavarotti would go on to sing the role of Cavaradossi a record 60 times with
the company, which includfor his farewell performance on March 13, 2004. A
new staging by Franco Zeffirelli premiered in 1985 starring Hildegard Behrens,
Plácido Domingo, and MacNeil, with Giuseppe Sinopoli conducting. In 2009, a
production by Luc Bondy opened the Met’s season with Karita Mattila in the title
role and Marcelo Álvarez as Cavaradossi. On New Year’s Eve 2017, Emmanuel
Villaume leads a cast including Sonya Yoncheva, Vittorio Grigolo, and Željko
Lučić in Sir David McVicar’s new production.

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Program Note

A
h, you abuser! You tormented me for an entire night, should I not then
have my turn? She bends over him, staring at him eye to eye. Look at
me, scoundrel. Ah, to delight in your agony, and dying by a woman’s
hand, you coward! Die, wild beast, die despairing, enraged, die, die, die!

Floria Tosca, “celebrated opera singer,” shouts these lines at the end of Act IV
in Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca (1887) right after stabbing the man who has
just tried to grab her. Floria has been blackmailed, assaulted, and psychologically
manipulated by Baron Scarpia, the Roman chief of police who has had her in
his clutches. At the Paris premiere, it was Sarah Bernhardt who delivered those
lines “with feral joy and laughter,” according to the stage directions. Puccini saw
Bernhardt’s performance in 1889, and that experience, the intensity of which left
the composer for once bereft of eloquence, drove him to acquire the rights to
an Italian version and to employ Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa to convert the
play into a libretto. The librettists were dubious about their commission. Illica
complained that “the drama is too overwhelming and invades the libretto”—with
the result, he found, that it became virtually impossible to accommodate the plot
without writing duet after duet. Back-to-back dialogue scenes are something
quite natural in spoken drama, but potentially disastrous as a string of duets in
an opera, where variety of combination and texture in ensembles was deemed
essential. The other librettist, Giuseppe Giacosa, was even more vociferous:

I have the profound belief that Tosca is not a good subject for an opera. On first
reading it seems so, given the rapidity and the clarity of the dramatic action. But
the more one gets inside the action, penetrates into each scene in an attempt
to extract lyric and poetic passages, the more one becomes convinced that it is
absolutely inappropriate as musical theater.

The play was very much reduced and rewritten in the conversion to libretto,
but for the final scene in Act II—parallel to Act IV in the play, Scarpia’s death
scene—Illica and Giacosa followed their source almost exactly, directly adapting
Floria’s final speech. “Is your blood choking you? Killed by a woman—did you
torture me enough? Can you still hear me? Speak, then! Look at me: I am Tosca,
oh Scarpia! Bending over Scarpia. Is your blood choking you? Die damned,
then. Die, die, die!”
What follows Tosca’s triumphant words in both play and opera is a very
long, eerie, all-but-mute pantomime scene involving (at the time) blasphemous
gestures. Tosca searches Scarpia’s body for the safe-conduct papers he has written,
coolly gathers up her things, places lit candlesticks on either side of the corpse,
and leaves a Catholic crucifix, which she has taken off the wall, on his chest. Sarah
Bernhardt would have felt no terror at having to command the stage with mute
gesture for ten minutes at a stretch. While at the Comédie-Française (1862–64),
she became notorious for importing exaggerated pantomimic gestures, then
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 Program Note CONTINUED

associated with low-class boulevard theater, into classical plays. According to

one observer, when she played the death scene in La Dame aux Camélias (the
play by Alexandre Dumas, fils, that served as the source for Verdi’s La Traviata),
“she remains standing, defying death and breathing in life with all the strength
of her being. Then, using herself as a pivot, she suddenly reels and makes a
half-turn, and she falls from her stance in the most poetic collapse imaginable.”
Bernhardt’s most-photographed role was as a sinister and macabre Pierrot in a
wordless pantomime play, Jean Richepin’s Pierrot Assassin (1883).
The final scene in Act II of Puccini’s Tosca was unusual in many ways, not just
for its extended pantomime and demands on the soprano’s physical acting, but
also for the accompanying orchestral music, which functions just like a movie
soundtrack—background music that “catches the action”—long before such
soundtracks actually existed. And then there is the elephant in the room: all the
joyous glee of a woman staring her abuser in the eye, taking revenge for unwanted
“love” and for being assailed, for all the times when the only remedy was to dodge
or tremble in immobility— and of saying “die!” not once but as many times as
seems satisfying. That Scarpia’s death scene and its aftermath became infamous
in both the play and the opera was hardly due simply to sacrilegious desecration
of Catholic props. It was also because a woman had struck back, and because
she—abetted in the opera by compositional alchemies that put actions and
words to music—wins the entire audience over.
Puccini, usually the most uncertain and nervous of creative artists, had
not taken fright at the grim prognostications of his librettists and began work
on Tosca without enduring his usual crises of indecision. In fact, he seems to
have been flooded by ideas for novel and compelling musical means through
which to project an unlikely, seemingly unmusical dramatic subject. Tosca is full
of sounds that, in 1900, were denounced for their radical force. As one critic
wrote, “the organ, the Gregorian chant, the snare drums that announce the
march to the scaffold, the bells, the cow bells, the rifle shots, the cannon fire—
noises which at times constitute essential elements in the development of the
opera—are not enough to fill holes left by the lack of music.” The critic, though
offended, accurately captures a sense that in this opera, lifelike sound and music
are being mixed in equal ways.
Take, for example, the end of Act I, set in the Roman Church of Sant’Andrea
della Valle, in which Scarpia muses about how he will blackmail Tosca and eliminate
her lover, Cavaradossi. His soliloquy is delivered against a sonic background
made from found musical objects: noise and chanting in the stage world, with
two offstage bells providing two low pitches, B-flat and F, which alternate for long
minutes. From offstage, cannon blasts rumble in time with the beat of the music.
Puccini had to devise a vocal line for Scarpia that would wind around the bells’
fundamental tones and not depart from them; they control its length and breadth.
Latin chanting fits around the bells, too, as does an orchestral melody that in
40
 turn joins and underpins the ever-louder clamor. The baritone singing Scarpia
has to put all his power into delivering his lines so that they resonate into the
acoustic foreground, and some of those lines are disquieting in the extreme, as
he imagines that raping Tosca will bring her around to falling in love with him.
Finally, belatedly recalling that he is in a church, he blames Tosca for his verbal
blasphemies—“Tosca, you make me forget God”—and just when you imagine
things couldn’t get any louder, the full orchestra blares Scarpia’s theme (brass and
cymbals) as the curtain comes down. One almost expects heavy velvet to land
with equal acoustic force.
The compositional alchemies that draw us to Tosca’s side when she strikes
back at Scarpia can be quite different. In the second act, she is the focus for
Puccini’s most intense musical oppositions. When she sings “Vissi d’arte”—her
feminine, emotional response to Scarpia’s threats—she occupies a register of
lyric pathos familiar from earlier Puccini heroines. In the long pantomime scene
that culminates in Scarpia’s murder, on the other hand, she hardly sings at all. At
first, just soft single-pitch murmurs in answer to Scarpia’s questions. After she
stabs him, Puccini cloaks her words in a long descending line, sung fortissimo,
in which the singer repeats certain pitches for emphasis—“You tortured me,”
“Look at me,” and of course, “Die, die, die!” The contrast between “Vissi d’arte”
and this music, within an opera that gains much of its power and dramatic
momentum though sudden juxtapositions of atmosphere, demonstrates how
Tosca acts as the centripetal character, her force and peculiarity echoing the
drama’s own divided yet converging layers of meaning.
What we witness as Act II of Tosca ends is justice and efficacy achieved (even
if temporarily), in musical as well as in plot terms. There is a sense in which
the soprano herself is being encouraged, by the music Puccini has written for
her, to go beyond beauty. She demonstrates that the sounds required to lock
in an audience’s sympathies now go past lyric allure (though she has that on
her side too), to something un-lovely: point-blank volume and acoustic clamor
akin to the sheer noise found elsewhere in the score. The character of Tosca,
“celebrated opera singer,” is, in this regard, a harbinger of operatic modernity in
the new century. The character and her music represent a turning point in which
meekness and acceptance have rebelled, in which recompense is demanded
and taken, and an end is made.
—Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker
Musicologists Carolyn Abbate, professor at Harvard University, and Roger Parker,
professor at King’s College London, have each written several books about
opera and, together, authored the seminal 2012 A History of Opera.

Visit metopera.org 41
 The Cast and Creative Team

Emmanuel Villaume
conductor (strasbourg , france)

this season  Tosca and Thaïs at the Met; Samson et Dalila, Korngold’s Der Ring des
Polykrates, and Don Giovanni at the Dallas Opera; Faust at Lyric Opera of Chicago; Manon
Lescaut in Barcelona; and concerts with the Prague Philharmonia.
met appearances  Roméo et Juliette, Manon, Carmen, Samson et Dalila, and Madama
Butterfly (debut, 2004).
career highlights  He is in his fifth season as music director of the Dallas Opera, where
he has conducted Norma, Jake Heggie’s Moby Dick, Eugene Onegin, Tosca, and Iolanta,
among others, and his third season as music director and chief conductor of the Prague
Philharmonia. Recent performances include Prokofiev’s The Golden Cockerel and La
Fanciulla del West at the Santa Fe Opera, Roméo et Juliette at Lyric Opera of Chicago,
and Tosca at Covent Garden. He has also led Pelléas et Mélisande and Samson et Dalila in
concert at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre, Iolanta in concert in Monte Carlo, Carmen
in Rome, Manon at Covent Garden, Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine in Venice, and Offenbach’s La
Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein at the Santa Fe Opera.

Sir David McVicar

director (glasgow, scotland)

this season  Tosca and Norma at the Met, Ariodante at the Vienna State Opera, and
Britten’s Gloriana in Madrid.
met productions  Roberto Devereux, Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, Maria Stuarda,
Anna Bolena, Giulio Cesare, and Il Trovatore (debut, 2009).
career highlights  Recent productions include Rigoletto at the Savonlinna Opera Festival,
Falstaff at the Vienna State Opera, Wozzeck at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Die Entführung
aus dem Serail at the Glyndebourne Festival, Les Troyens at San Francisco Opera, and
Andrea Chénier in Beijing. He has also directed Andrea Chénier, Les Troyens, Adriana
Lecouvreur, Aida, Salome, Le Nozze di Figaro, Faust, Die Zauberflöte, and Rigoletto at
Covent Garden; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Giulio Cesare, Carmen, and La Bohème
at the Glyndebourne Festival; Rusalka, Elektra, Billy Budd, and Manon at Lyric Opera of
Chicago; Alcina, Tosca, The Rape of Lucretia, The Turn of the Screw, and Der Rosenkavalier
at English National Opera; Faust and Don Giovanni at Opera Australia; Les Troyens at La
Scala; Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna State Opera and in Tokyo; Don Giovanni, Agrippina,
and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Brussels; and Wagner’s Ring cycle and Così fan tutte
in Strasbourg; among many others.

42
 John Macfarlane
set and costume designer (glasgow, scotland)

this season  Tosca at the Met and Swan Lake with London’s Royal Ballet.
met productions  Maria Stuarda and Hansel and Gretel (debut, 2007).
career highlights  His operatic credits include Erwartung and Bluebeard’s Castle, Peter
Grimes, Die Zauberflöte, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and Gianni Schicchi and L’Heure
Espagnole at Covent Garden; Elektra and Rusalka at Lyric Opera of Chicago; The Rake’s
Progress at Scottish Opera and in Turin; Agrippina and Don Giovanni in Brussels; Hansel
and Gretel and The Queen of Spades at Welsh National Opera; Idomeneo at the Vienna
State Opera; von Weber’s Euryanthe at the Glyndebourne Festival; War and Peace and La
Clemenza di Tito at the Paris Opera; Boris Godunov at Dutch National Opera; Les Troyens at
English National Opera; and Il Barbiere di Siviglia at the Santa Fe Opera, among others. He
regularly collaborates with choreographers Glen Tetley and Jiří Kylián, and his designs have
also appeared at the Netherlands Dance Theatre, Danish Royal Ballet, London’s Royal Ballet,
National Ballet of Canada, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Australian National Ballet, and Dance
Theatre of Harlem. He exhibits regularly as a painter and printmaker in the United Kingdom,
Europe, and the United States.

David Finn
lighting designer (saint paul , minnesota )

this season  Tosca at the Met, Arabella at San Francisco Opera, The Queen of Spades with
the Royal Danish Ballet, The Crucible with Scottish Ballet, The Nutcracker with Atlanta Ballet,
and Swan Lake with London’s Royal Ballet.
met productions  Parsifal (debut, 2013).
career highlights  At the age of 16, he began working for puppeteer Burr Tillstrom and
the famed television program Kukla, Fran and Ollie. His extensive operatic credits include
productions at Covent Garden, Dutch National Opera, the Salzburg Festival, Scottish
Opera, Staatsoper Berlin, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Australia, the Santa Fe Opera, the
Canadian Opera Company, and in Turin, Paris, Brussels, Florence, and Stuttgart. He has
collaborated on dance works by Twyla Tharp, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Sasha Waltz,
José Limón, James Kudelka, Helgi Tomasson, and Dana Reitz and was resident designer for
Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project between 1993 and 2000. He has designed for
the Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet, and Bavarian State Ballet,
as well as Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and ZED and Michael Jackson ONE with
Cirque du Soleil. In 1999, he directed The Green Monster for PBS’s POV series.

Visit metopera.org 43
 The Cast and Creative Team CONTINUED

Leah Hausman
movement director (columbus , ohio)

this season  Movement director for Norma and Tosca at the Met, director for Benvenuto
Cellini at the Paris Opera, and associate stage director for The Rake’s Progress in Amsterdam.
met productions  Roberto Devereux, Maria Stuarda, and Il Trovatore (debut, 2008).
career highlights  She has choreographed for productions of The Rake’s Progress in Aix-
en-Provence; Falstaff at the Vienna State Opera; La Damnation de Faust at Staatsoper
Berlin, English National Opera, and in Palermo; Aida, Le Nozze di Figaro, Elektra, Die
Zauberflöte, Rigoletto, and Il Turco in Italia at Covent Garden; Giovanna d’Arco at La Scala;
L’Elisir d’Amore, Rachmaninoff’s The Miserly Knight, Gianni Schicchi, and La Bohème at
the Glyndebourne Festival; and La Clemenza di Tito at English National Opera and in
Copenhagen and Aix-en-Provence; among others. She has also served as co-director and
choreographer for Benvenuto Cellini in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and at English National
Opera; and associate director for Les Troyens at Covent Garden, La Scala, and San
Francisco Opera. Her work for the theater includes Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night
for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Fortune’s Fool at the Old Vic, and The Game of Love
and Chance for the National Theatre.

Sonya Yoncheva
soprano (plovdiv, bulgaria )

this season  The title roles of Tosca and Luisa Miller and Mimì in La Bohème at the Met,
Elisabeth in Don Carlos and Mimì at the Paris Opera, Tosca in concert with the Philadelphia
Orchestra, Imogene in Bellini’s Il Pirata at La Scala, and Poppea in L’Incoronazione di
Poppea at the Salzburg Festival.
met appearances  Violetta in La Traviata, Desdemona in Otello, and Gilda in Rigoletto
(debut, 2013).
career highlights  Recent performances include Stephana in Giordano’s Siberia and the
title role of Mascagni’s Iris in concert in Montpellier, France; Mimì at La Scala; Tatiana in
Eugene Onegin at Deutsche Oper Berlin; Antonia in Les Contes d’Hoffmann and the title
role of Norma at Covent Garden; Violetta at the Bavarian State Opera and Paris Opera;
the title role of Iolanta at the Paris Opera; and the title role of Alcina in concert in Versailles
and Monte Carlo. She has also sung Violetta at Staatsoper Berlin and in Zurich, Micaëla
in Carmen and Violetta at Covent Garden, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni in Monte Carlo,
Juliette in Roméo et Juliette at the Vienna State Opera and in concert in Madrid, and
Marguerite in Faust at Covent Garden and the Vienna State Opera.

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 Patrick Carfizzi
bass - baritone (newburgh, new york )

this season  The Sacristan in Tosca and the Mandarin in Turandot at the Met, Dr. Dulcamara
in L’Elisir d’Amore in Wiesbaden, Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance at San
Diego Opera, and concert appearances with the Utah Symphony.
met appearances  Nearly 350 performances in 31 roles, including Schaunard in La Bohème,
Cecil in Maria Stuarda, Frank in Die Fledermaus, Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Paolo in Simon Boccanegra, Ceprano in Rigoletto (debut, 1999), and Ortel in Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
career highlights  Recent performances include Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte at Central
City Opera; Dr. Bartolo in Le Nozze di Figaro at Opera Philadelphia and Austin Opera;
Figaro in Le Nozze di Figaro, Fra Melitone in La Forza del Destino, and the title role
of Don Pasquale in Wiesbaden; Henry Kissinger in John Adams’s Nixon in China, Dr.
Dulcamara, and the Speaker in Die Zauberflöte at Houston Grand Opera; the Tutor in Le
Comte Ory and the Music Master/Truffaldin in Ariadne auf Naxos at Seattle Opera; Dr.
Dulcamara at Lyric Opera of Kansas City; and Baron Mirko Zeta in The Merry Widow at
Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Vittorio Grigolo
tenor ( arezzo, italy)

this season  Cavaradossi in Tosca, Hoffmann in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and Edgardo in

Lucia di Lammermoor at the Met; Nemorino in L’Elisir d’Amore at the Vienna State Opera
and Bavarian State Opera; and Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi at the Paris Opera.
met appearances  The title role of Werther, Roméo in Roméo et Juliette, Nemorino, des
Grieux in Manon, Rodolfo in La Bohème (debut, 2010), the Duke in Rigoletto, and a solo
recital.
career highlights  Recent performances include the Duke at the Paris Opera, La Scala,
and in Zurich; Hoffmann at LA Opera and Covent Garden; Nemorino at La Scala,
Staatsoper Berlin, and Covent Garden; Werther and Rodolfo at Covent Garden; and
Edgardo at La Scala. He has also sung Roméo in Verona and at LA Opera, Ruggero
in La Rondine at Covent Garden, Alfredo in La Traviata at the Vienna State Opera and
Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Duke at Covent Garden, Hoffmann in Zurich, des Grieux at
Covent Garden and in Valencia, and Rodolfo at La Scala, the Bavarian State Opera, and
Washington National Opera.

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 The Cast and Creative Team CONTINUED

Željko Lučić
baritone ( zrenjanin, serbia )

this season  Scarpia in Tosca and Alfio in Cavalleria Rusticana at the Met, Jochanaan in

Salome and the title role of Macbeth at the Vienna State Opera, the title role of Nabucco
and Scarpia at Deutsche Oper Berlin, the title role of Simon Boccanegra and Scarpia
at the Bavarian State Opera, the title role of Rigoletto in Frankfurt, Macbeth at Covent
Garden, and Count di Luna in Il Trovatore at the Paris Opera.
met appearances  Since his 2006 debut as Barnaba in La Gioconda, he has sung 125
performances in 12 roles, including Rigoletto, Nabucco, Jochanaan, Iago in Otello,
Amonasro in Aida, Macbeth, Carlo Gérard in Andrea Chénier, Count di Luna, Michele in Il
Tabarro, and Germont in La Traviata.
career highlights  Recent performances include Iago at Covent Garden and in Zurich,
Rigoletto and Germont at the Paris Opera, the title roles of Falstaff and Gianni Schicchi
and Michele in Frankfurt, Count di Luna at Covent Garden, and Nabucco at Lyric Opera
of Chicago. He has also sung Scarpia at La Scala and the Vienna State Opera, Germont
and Rigoletto at La Scala, Gérard at Covent Garden, Michele in Barcelona, and Simon
Boccanegra in Dresden.

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