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The Comparative Toscas
A curatorial study in how the same score becomes five different operas
4 selections · Stage Door Society Editorial
Why Comparison Reveals
To hear Tosca five times in the same week — five different recordings, five different casts — is to discover that the same score supports radically different dramatic interpretations. The same notes become five different Floria Toscas: five different relationships to vanity, to love, to violence, to sacrifice.
This is one of opera's great pleasures: the score as a fixed text that releases different meanings depending on who speaks it.
Callas (1953, de Sabata, La Scala)
The essential recording. Callas's Tosca is not primarily a lover — she is a woman of extraordinary pride who happens to be in love, and whose pride becomes both her weapon and her tragedy. De Sabata's conducting is among the most dramatically charged ever recorded.
