Last Thursday, I went to see the opera Tosca at the Astra Theatre in Gozo. Opera performances are now a permanent feature of the theatre calendar in Gozo, and their high standard draws the crowds of aficionados. Of course, it wasn't the first time I had watched this particular opera, but I was reminded of the famous three Ps of the storyline. I am referring to Passion, Power, and Politics.
For those who are not opera buffs, Tosca follows the story of a famous opera diva, Floria Tosca, who is caught in a political thriller as her lover, Mario Cavaradossi, an activist, is targeted by a powerful, corrupt police chief, Baron Scarpia. Scarpia uses his lust for Tosca to coerce her into betraying Mario and his revolutionary associates. Tosca ultimately makes a terrible choice, committing murder to save Mario, only to find that the politician's promises are lies, leading to a tragic climax where both lovers meet their deaths.
The story explores passion, power, and politics. The opera's librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, developed a gripping thriller with lots of suspense and tension. The protagonists confront each other in dangerous situations from which escape seems impossible. The betrayals and double crossings in the plot form part of a cat-and-mouse game worthy of any Harlan Coben novel. Giacomo Puccini's score includes soaring love themes, menacing music, and famous arias that make the audience connect with the drama.
Opera is far from being a dead art. It remains relevant today, perhaps even more so if one cares to explore it. In Tosca, we have several themes that resonate with anybody following current affairs. There are politics and power, reflecting ongoing conflicts between authority and freedom, and the corruption that can thrive in authoritarian regimes. There is passion vs politics, depicting how intense personal passion can become a fatal weakness when it collides with the harsh realities of politics. There are betrayal and survival, with the sort of "cat-and-mouse games" and double-crosses which are such an intrinsic part of modern politics.
Today, as in Puccini's time, we have dictators or authoritarian rulers who seek to establish their propaganda as the supreme truth, the only solution to the problems of societies and countries. Putin, Kim Jong Un, Maduro and, yes, Trump ̶ to mention some ̶ lead regimes or governments which exhibit the characteristics of the power structure manifested in Puccini's opera.
In Tosca, Puccini and his librettists engage in coded criticism of power, even though they may have suspected this could put their liberty or lives in danger. In those days, as now, it was not unknown for artists to be incarcerated, beaten up, or killed. The only consolation they may have had was that their work might far outlive the fame of shabby tyrants dressed in a little brief authority.
The dictator may crush his critics in the confines of a torture prison or have them assassinated (for example Alexei Navalny in Russia, Mãe Bernadete in Brazil, Bishop Óscar Romero in El Salvador), but in the flow of centuries the critics survive dictators The dozens of journalists killed because they exposed powerful persons or revealed malfeasance in high places (for example Peter de Vries in the Netherlands, Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta), attest to this.
The problem when conflicts between authority and freedom arise is that we tend to suffer from myopia and miss the signs that society has slipped deep into repression. Tosca, a woman of amazing imagination, spends a whole act believing she is in an entirely different plot - one about jealousy and romantic betrayal, not about a psychopath in power who extorts sexual favours (remember Jeffrey Epstein?) or psychopaths who torture and kill at will (Hitler, Stalin, and Kim Jong Un).
In the first act of the opera, Puccini tightens the proverbial noose around the audience's neck. Mesmerised by the love story and the lofty music accompanying it, we want to forget that we've just seen a political prisoner (Cesare Angelotti) so skeletal and abused that Cavaradossi doesn't even recognize him as his comrade. The inhumane treatment of Angelotti is so horrible that the human response is to shut down and not be overwhelmed by sadness.
At one point, Tosca catches on to her political reality, to the obscene horrors that happen "in the other room". Tosca's long scene with Scarpia is driven by her own extraordinary double nature: she is a personage of the theatre ̶ a passionate and exquisite prima donna ̶ but also a fervent Christian woman. However, her religious bearings fail her when she is challenged by an impossible moral predicament. She is being asked to pay for her lover's life by submitting to rape by Scarpia. "Why, God, why do you repay me like this?"
As in Tosca, in the real world. Here we are, in the 21st century, and two thousand kilometres away, we have watched live the obscenity of the genocide of the Palestinian people, much like we watched the obscene killing and abduction of Israelis two years ago. In Tosca, the obscenities happen off stage; we can watch the horrors in Palestine and Israel as they happen.
However, the moral predicament is the same: at what point is justifiable defence of one's people outweighed by the harm inflicted on others, when the principal victims on both sides are innocent civilians. At the time of the Vietnam War, such civilian casualties were described euphemistically as "collateral damage". The phrase has fallen out of fashion, no doubt because it dehumanises the victims, rendering them into an impersonal statistic, and creates the false impression that these deaths are expendable for military purposes.
What should we do? Tosca persuades herself that the execution of her lover is just a piece of theatre with fake ammunition and pretend death. And we, the audience, go along and see this as the opera it is. But do we have the luxury of watching the obscenities in Gaza sitting comfortably on our sofa, and indulging in Tosca's myopia? Or should we, instead, face head-on the murderous cynicism of the world's Scarpias?
Certainly, we live in a world where one can be jailed for reciting a poem. Earlier this year, a court in St Petersburg sentenced 19-year-old Darya Kozyreva to two years and eight months in a penal colony for allegedly "discrediting" the Russian army, including by sticking a quote from a Ukrainian poem onto a monument. In the USA, the Trump administration illegally deported Franco José Caraballo Tiapa to El Salvador, mistaking the tattoo he wears for one belonging to the notorious gang Trent de Aragua. In March, the Iranian singer Mehdi Yarrahi was sentenced to 74 lashes for his song that encouraged women to remove their hijabs.
The three Ps are a huge scourge today. The deep passion that some people have for their cause and leaders, encouraged by the leaders themselves and by financiers with deep pockets and an insatiable thirst for power, leads to the politics of no-holds-barred. The lethal combination creates a latent force for violence that can be triggered by various social events or can be purposefully ignited for partisan political purposes (the riots on Capitol Hill after the 2020 presidential election or the murder of Charlie Kirk).
In the early 19th century and in Puccini's time, it took time for the three Ps to work their havoc, communications being limited to pamphlets, newspapers. and theatrical performances that often reached wider audiences, if at all, quite some time later. Today, communications are instantaneous, while the social media extend their reach to billions of people
Having enjoyed the performance of Tosca in Gozo, I was glad that Puccini gave us such a wonderful opera. However, I left the theatre wondering whether, like Tosca and Cavaradossi, the audience and I might lose the plot and ignore the signs of the times at our own peril.
Frans Camilleri is an economist. He studied at Oxford and University of East Anglia, is a former corporate head at Air Malta, and has served on various public and private boards.