The ’00-’01 season at Lyric Opera of Chicago presented two celebrated sopranos in the title role of Tosca, Daniela Dessi and Sylvie Valayre. Dessi, previously heard at Lyric as Margherita in Mefistofele in 1998-99, has appeared as Tosca in Berlin, Munich, Bologna, and Verona. Valayre, who debuted at Lyric as Tosca, has sung the role in Paris, Verona, Toulouse, Berlin, Bologna, Santiago, Toronto, and Tokyo. Several months before coming to Chicago, the two artists spoke separately with Roger Pines, the company’s editorial dramaturg. Valayre conversed in English, Dessi in Italian (translation her by Mr. Pines).
DANIELA DESSÌ
I was a child when I heard my first Tosca, at the opera in Rome. Above all, I remember the atmosphere. The music created particular moods—a joy, a sadness. I had so many feelings about it, although I was only ten years old. But I sensed that there were great emotions in this opera, illuminated by this stupendous music. I already hoped I would sing Tosca one day. Actually, I wanted to perform it immediately, but of course, my voice had to mature—the same was true of Aida, another role I was eager to sing the moment I heard it.
Tosca’s character is very special, very specific. Certainly she’s ideal for a soprano to portray, in the sense that she’s a singer herself. There is a distinction between the public Tosca and the private woman. She’s easy for me to understand. Actually, she’s similar to me—I’m a very passionate person, and I can be jealous, too! I believe that Tosca needs to be sung, not screamed—the phrasing can be so marvelous. This role has such theatricality; she’s so terribly dramatic, and that is demanding for the voice. Sometimes she’s even a little hysterical and exaggerated—she isn’t an easy personality. No matter what, though, you have to create an equilibrium of music and drama in singing her. I’ve read Sardou’s original play, which helps a lot to deepen the characterization of Tosca.
There are famous moments in the role—“Quanto?…Il prezzo?” or “E avanti a lui,” both in the second act—where you have a tradition of speaking the words instead of singing them. I’ve done it both ways, although it really does depend on what the conductor and director have in mind. There are specific notes in the score for those phrases, so I generally do it half speaking, half singing—it’s more expressive that way.
I always say that one needs to lighten up in the most dramatic moments. If you put all your strength there, then it becomes clear how hard you’re working. You don’t want to show what it’s taking out of you physically to do the role. In lightening your voice, you’re capable of transmitting the emotion, instead of forcing or crushing it. In rehearsal, you’re going through all sorts of emotions, trying to channel them in a positive manner and with expressiveness. You take things to the limit in a way that you just don’t do in a performance. I need to adopt a sort of coolness, a detachment, when I’m onstage, because I have to maintain control—I can’t risk not making it to the end of the opera!
My other Puccini roles also include Butterfly, which I always say is the most difficult role for a soprano. It’s not especially hard vocally, but certainly it’s the most emotionally stressful, especially for someone like me (being the mother of a little boy myself). Except for the first few minutes, she’s onstage from beginning to end. And of course, it’s filtered through the Japanese movement and the internal psychology of the Oriental woman. It’s not as expansive as an Aida or a Tosca, it’s more contained and the emotions are revealed in a different way. The whole thing is much more tiring than Tosca.
Whether I’m singing with one tenor or another, I don’t really change my idea of who the character is—my Tosca is who she is. Of course, there are partners who give you more emotion than others. Even when singing Tosca with very unromantic tenors, I haven’t changed what I’ve done with the role. It’s always difficult to choose between the tenor and the baritone, since Scarpia’s attraction to evil is so vivid in the music. And often the baritones are handsomer than the tenors!
I like Tosca very much as a person. Is she heroic? I don’t know—but courageous, very definitely. She’s a diva, she has her haughty moments, but really, I like her quite a lot. Her “Vissi d’arte” is the story of many of us singers, that is, living for art. We enter her soul there, and we see her seriousness, her belief in God. It happens to all of us—our saying to God, “Why would You do this to me?” It’s a very human thing, to ask God the reason that something bad happened to us. Musically, too, we sense a melancholy in her here. Altogether we are seeing the interior woman, not the exterior one.
SYLVIE VALAYRE
Before I became a singer, I’d always wanted to be a tragic actress—since I was probably four years old. Then I fell in love with music, so I studied it. I thought, “How can I choose between tragedy and music?” The only solution was to do both together, and I thought opera was the best way. I think Tosca is one of the peaks of both, especially in Maria Callas’s recording. Every time I hear Miss Callas, I feel like dying, because she’s always so sincere. She’s able to destroy the beauty of a sound to give the truth of the emotion.
I first heard Tosca at the Paris Opera. I knew the piece already, because I’d sung the first and second acts with piano for an acting competition at the Conservatory. While I was still there, I heard Callas’s recording with Gobbi and di Stefano and I thought, “This piece is for me.”
I’m a great theater fan. As a student, I thought, “OK, where did this Puccini get the libretto from?” Victorien Sardou’s play [La Tosca] wasn’t in print anymore, so I went to libraries, bookshops, and finally found it. I realized the play was much more complicated in its plot than the opera. Puccini, Giacosa, and Illica did a wonderful job reducing the number of characters to six or seven from 45.
The Sardou play explains completely Tosca’s character, which the opera does not. In the play, she’s a diva, but she’s 18 years old. She was discovered in Verona by the Pope when she was a shepherdess! It absolutely changes the way one considers her character. In 1797 she is in Verona, and she takes care of sheep. She has a beautiful voice, and she probably goes barefoot, with no fancy clothes, no makeup. The Pope hears her and thinks the voice is so beautiful, but it has to be trained. He begs her to go to the Vatican and learn from the school there how to sing properly. Three years later, she’s the new diva—not a theater diva, but the Pope’s singer, a religious diva.
One of the most significant moments for me is in the third act, when Tosca explains to Mario about killing Scarpia. She says with a lot of pride, “Io quella lama gli piantai nel cor” [“I planted that knife in his heart”]. The arpeggio she sings is very proud. Then Mario says, “You, with your hands, you killed him” and she says, “Yes, and my hands were heavy with blood” and she’s almost like Lady Macbeth. That’s Tosca—black and white, never grey: black because she’s able to kill, white because she’s in love. She feels guilty because she’s so religious. You know, as a Christian you’re not supposed to kill.
I really do love Tosca. In every way, she’s pure. She believes in love, she believes in God, and that’s why she can’t really fight Scarpia. He’s the winner in the end, anyway. She’s not able to fight with the same weapon because he’s too perverse for her—she’s not perverse. She doesn’t realize what “Si, come Palmieri” means [Scarpia’s signal for the execution, which turns out to be the real thing]. She really believes that she’s won.
I do vary my Tosca depending on my partners. Justino Diaz’s Scarpia is very subtle, but also macho. I’ve sung it with Jean-Philippe Lafont [Valayre’s Scarpia in Chicago]. He’s a rugby player, and onstage he’s monumental, even when he doesn’t say anything. I’m a tiny girl so, even in heels, it’s different to play with someone who’s as tall as Jean-Philippe—he can crush me in his arms like nothing. It was very different to play it with Leo Nucci, who has a different kind of strength that’s all intellectual. I think Nucci’s Scarpia could be close to a character like Goebbels. Leo was more like a smiling, sweet torturer.
[Have strange things happened to her onstage in this opera?] You mean, like having to kill Scarpia with a banana? I think that happened to Callas or Crespin, and it happened to Sarah Bernhardt. Once, when Bernhardt had to put the cross on Scarpia’s chest [indicated in both the play’s and the opera’s stage directions], she didn’t realize that the cross was painted on the wall. She tried to take it from the wall and couldn’t, so she just looked at Scarpia and said, “You don’t deserve it!” But no, nothing strange has happened to me onstage as Tosca—at least, not yet!
This article first appeared in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s magazine, Lyric Opera News, and is reprinted by permission.
