Mario Cavaradossi is hard at work on restoring what appears to be a damaged fresco rather than a portrait of the Madonna.
Featuring a unit set designed by Bunny Christie, the visual picture is an unremittingly drab and claustrophobic interior, resembling a bombed or decaying warehouse. Lyric Opera of Chicago’s current venture, a co-production with Houston Grand Opera, manages to be neither fish nor fowl, eschewing the standard period trappings but not supplying anything of illuminating value. However, the work has both existential and archetypal dimensions which, given the right expression, could transcend matters of literal representation. Set in an exact time and place (1800, Rome), the opera’s specificity of locale does not lend itself to radical revisionism or reinterpretation. Today’s regie directors are typically confounded by works like Puccini’s Tosca. Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, based on Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca (1887)
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