Actually I am! 

Suddenly remembered that about 30 years ago I wrote out the last 11 bars of La Boheme in a manuscript book...(my sister used to play it to make me cry...) and I've just found the book under a pile of music I haven't looked at for years. Can't believe I actually found it - my house is very cluttered but I often know where things are! Wish I could scan it in to show you - my manuscript's so much neater than Puccini's!

Someone on the radio recently - an operatic soprano I think, maybe Bairstow  - expressed the view that the difference between performing Puccini and Verdi was that all you had to do in the former was perform the music exactly as written. There was no scope to inhabit the character, devlop one's own view of motivation, what the charcter might do outside the libretto, in the way that a Shakespearean actress would build up her character. Verdi by contrast demands much more characterisation, including gaps that the singing actress needs to fill in for a full portrayal.

This fits with my perception of P and V and perhaps, Reiner, with your apparent feeling of conscious manipulation by P.

And no one has mentioned Suor Angelica. As one who has lost children I was completely unprepared for the sheer tackiness of this opera. Not 'psychological onslaught', just offensive kitsch.

But I can't escape liking Boheme and Turandot...

Thanks MabelJane but it ain't quite that simple. I can see the [/quote] after the bit I wanted to quote, and no such mark after the end of my own text. And I did get a box round the bit of Reiner (??) that I wanted and I can't see any other formating marks anywhere afterwards. So there must be another magic trick...

Aha, MJ, cracked it! It was having 2 sets of [ quote ]s at the top of the quote, one plain and one with the 'address' of Reiner's post in!

Hmm RT, we both have a long way to go then, but you're well ahead of me! My sig reflects a general enthusiasm for Flann O'Brien rather than any close involvements with that sort of pedal. For that I rely on my wife who will probably need the rat-traps to get up these here Cornish hills. She seems to be putting her faith in 6 well-spaced gears at the moment - she just doesn't read the right manuals! 

I was wondering when someone would recognize (or question the source of) the quotation...

Re Puccini: I never like to give up on a work or a composer so I'll look forward with interest to your production. You'll have to get it a bit closer to Cornwall than Russia unfortunately.

Things come into real life when we dream about them. 

All fair points. But perhaps the opera's gender politics are a little more open to interpretation than you seem to allow...  In any case, here's my tuppence-worth on a few of the operas.

In the case of Tosca, she is undoubtedly a forceful figure, but she still ends up dead (the means of her death are important, but surely not as important as the fact that she lies broken at the bottom of the Castel as the curtain falls). Tosca heroism and defiance are only really validated if we see death at the end of a tragedy as in some way redemptive or cathartic, a debateable point. And if she didn't jump, she'd surely have been marched off by Spoletta to prison and thence to the gallows. My point is not that Tosca isn't a strong figure but that in the masculine world of the opera where the men do the politics and a women's involvement in this realm leads to disaster, Tosca's choices are invariably circumscribed. And I can't be alone in finding the torture scene in Act Two a very disturbing episode. We are forced to identify primarily with Tosca's reactions (interesting that Puccini gives the high Cs to Tosca rather than the one under torture, Cavaradossi) and the whole scene ratchets up the violence in a horribly masochistic fashion ('piu forte, piu forte'), one that bears out Scarpia's deeply troubling alignment of sexual violence and power. The opera seems to take a curious pleasure in pushing Tosca over the edge, so to speak, in a way that it doesn't quite with the men.

Angelica's case is similar. The 16th c context is interesting and the gender politics of nunneries a whole other story! As for her suicide, well it may be 'self-prompted' but whether in 16th or 20th c Italy it would still have been seen as a mortal sin according to patriarchal dictates of the Vatican. 'Fate', well perhaps, but Angelica is led to her end because her sister is getting married and she must sign away her half of the estate to smooth the union. La Zia Principessa may be the messenger, but the politics are clear: marriage, property and children are the key. With Angelica in an institution and her son dead, the younger sister must now produce a legitmate heir. La Zia Principessa's 'repentance' is a double edged word: religiously motivated certainly, but also politically inflected in terms of the dishonour that Angelica has brought on her family.

In Mimi's case, it's perhaps less an issue of 'blame' and more one of male jealousy as well as inadequacy in the face of female suffering. Murger's source is interesting in this respect - a number of the men here are clearly a bunch of middle class boys slumming it in the Latin Quarter, playing at being 'bohemian'. The same does not apply to the females - an interesting political dichotomy? As for Liu, again I'm not sure that 'responsibility' is the issue so much the masochistic construction of a female who has devoted her life to one man (Timur) because another (Calaf) deigned to smile at her once. But it is interesting that Puccini should return to the same torture/suicide/love paradigm in Liu's death that he explored in Tosca.

Bws