[Met Performance] CID:256350



Tosca
Metropolitan Opera House, Tue, January 30, 1979




Tosca (631)
Giacomo Puccini | Luigi Illica/Giuseppe Giacosa
Tosca
Leonie Rysanek

Cavaradossi
Pl?cido Domingo

Scarpia
Cornell MacNeil

Sacristan
Renato Capecchi

Spoletta
Charles Anthony

Angelotti
John Cheek

Sciarrone
Russell Christopher

Shepherd
Robert Sapolsky

Jailer
Philip Booth


Conductor
James Conlon







Review 1:

Review of Bill Zakariasen in the Daily News
Leonie?s ?Tosca?; good and bad

Attending an opera starring Leonie Rysanek is often like walking into a ladies' room by mistake. One might be shocked or embarrassed ? one might also rejoice in an abundance of serendipity. Mme. Rysanek ran true to form Tuesday at the Met Opera as she celebrated her 20th anniversary with a role she hadn't sung there in many a year ? "Tosca." As always, she did many good things and many bad things, but nothing she did was uninteresting. I couldn't help but think of the film critic who reviewed Bette Davis in "Dead Ringer" ? "She's really ridiculous, but just try looking away."


Rysanek wasn't in very good voice Tuesday ? her pitch wasn't even Viennese A and her usually-fabled high C fell off the Castel Sant' Angelo well before she took the plunge herself. Moreover, too much of her semaphoric arm movements might have been more at home on the high seas.


Yet the voice itself remains one of the biggest, most exciting ones ever to be heard anywhere, and her basic commitment to the drama still provides certain inimitable moments of inner truth otherwise only told by the late Maria Callas.


Her fanatical devotion to Mario, her virulent hatred of Scarpia, and above all her utter femininity in the role were extraordinary things to experience. And she still is the only Tosca since Maria Jeritza to deliver "Vissi d'arte" from a prone position on the floor. Coincidentally, this was her best singing all evening.


To be sure, Rysanek has always been a controversial singer. She made her Met debut in "Macbeth" in 1959 as a replacement for Maria Callas, and Rudolf Bing actually planted a heckler in the audience to shout "Brava Callas!" upon her entrance in an attempt to win sympathy. Five years later, Bing closed down the standing room when the Rysanek-hecklers became for real.


Yet controversy has always been better than indifference. Old-timers found Rysanek's Senta in "Flying Dutchman" over-hysterical, yet the younger generation was overwhelmed by her superhuman upper register and her total immersion in the drama. She unfortunately never got to sing "Die Aegyptische Helena" here, but her "Frau Ohne Schatten" proved decisively her pre-eminence in most of the operas of Richard Strauss.


Hardly an ltalianate singer, she still performed Verdi and Puccini with a passionate involvement that shamed many a native. Her personal warmth on and off-stage, her sincere consideration for her colleagues and her over-riding respect for her audience have likewise overcome her innate stylistic-problems. Above all is her absolute dedication to her work, to which she never gives less than 100 percent. You may not always agree with the sounds and sights of Leonie Rysanek but you know she means every blessed one of them with a vengeance. For this reason, if none other, she is a rare operatic treasure.



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