Tosca has always been an opera I’ve wanted to work on, though to be honest, I don’t remember my first introduction to it. It’s a piece that has always fascinated me, and each time the opportunity presented itself, I looked forward to playing it as a repetiteur — and now, conducting it.

It is an incredibly intriguing story with complex characters and fantastic music that supports the storytelling. The music gives us a lot of information about the internal state of the opera’s protagonists, and though they aren’t strictly leitmotifs, there certainly are motifs that define characters interwoven throughout the piece. Puccini was a master of writing memorable melodies, and I’m fascinated by the musical worlds he creates. His writing exhorts us to listen almost in two different ways: we hear the melody in the foreground, but also need to listen specifically to the text and how it is set. We can often find the character’s inner monologue depicted in the music, like in Tosca’s aria from Act II, “Vissi d’arte” (“I lived for art”). The underlying music is a repetition of the duet from Cavaradossi and Tosca’s first scene together in Act I. Through that musical language, we get a sense of the intimacy between them and the fragility and tenderness they share. In “Vissi d’arte,” it’s as if Puccini were trying to remind us of the initial introduction of Tosca, while at the same time overlaying the struggles she goes through in Act II.