When she recognises that the Mary Magdalene is a portrait ofĪn actual woman, Marchesa Attavanti, who has recently been in the church, she demands Cavardossi paints her with dark rather than blue eyes. Poor old Cavaradossi cannot get any work done as next pops in his lover Floria Tosca to arrange their romantic evening and similarly quickly establishes her character as the feisty, jealous actress, religiously pious and madly in love. He sets the tone of a city where the church is corrupt and props up the ancient regime, power is abused, everyone is frightened of the secret police and that the establishment despises Napoleon (on the eve of the Battle of Marengo) and the ideas of the enlightenment. The cynical and comic Sacristan, sung by the lovely character singer-actor Donald Maxwell, comes in to tidy up and squeeze as much nuance out of the role as he does the cloth with which he wipes up drips from a leaking bucket that he moves around. He finds a hidden key to a chapel and hides. The former Consul of the failed Roman Republic and now escaped prisoner Angelotti, sung by Daniel Grice, has hobbled into the church where our hero Mario Cavaradossi, sung by Mexican tenor Hector Sandoval, has been painting a Mary Magdalene from on top of a slightly rickety platform. As we moved from the staircase of Wales Millennium Centre in Februto the interior of Rome’s Sant’ Andrea della Valle on June 17 and 18, 1800, an unfortunate exchange had put me in just the right mood for an opera about ugly intimidation dressed up in faux civility.
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