Tosca (Italian pronunciation: ) is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on Victorien Sardou's drama, La Tosca. The . .   Expand    Wikipedia

Tosca (Italian pronunciation: ) is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on Victorien Sardou's drama, La Tosca. The work premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on January 14 1900. It is one of the world's most popular operas, a hit with audiences from its first performance. However it was not well received at first by the critics and was later dismissed by musicologist Joseph Kerman as a "shabby little shocker". Today, Tosca is a staple of the standard operatic repertoire and appears as number eight on Opera America's 2008 list of the 20 most-performed operas in North America. The original play by Victorien Sardou was produced in Paris in 1887; the composer first saw it that same year in Milan, with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. Puccini immediately asked his editor Giulio Ricordi to acquire the rights for him to adapt the work, but these were finally bought in 1893 only to be assigned to the composer Alberto Franchetti, much to Puccini's disappointment. Illica wrote his libretto, and in October of the following year, Franchetti, Ricordi, Illica and Giuseppe Verdi met with Sardou to present it to him. Verdi was particularly fascinated by this tragedy, but he had refused to compose music for it unless Sardou would devise another ending.

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