I can’t decide whether this is an act of genius or a travesty, but I think you’ll agree that it definitely belongs in the Friday Fun category…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vbJgF-F5ZA&version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0]
The rest of the opera can be found here:
It’s the subtitles that do it for me, really. I especially like this little exchange between Scarpia and Tosca:
Sccarpia: “You’re nothing like some girls who pose for paintings while having affairs with the painters and eating ice cream!”
Tosca: “What! Love affairs! Ice cream!”
It’s hard to go past that.
Having sung in the chorus of Tosca last year, and thus heard the entire thing through exactly twice, I was surprised by how many bits of the music I didn’t just recognise but also remembered well enough to recognise where they had been cut. (The chorus bits, unsurprisingly, got cut quite a lot.) Puccini doesn’t really do set arias – everything runs together into a single musical conversation, which for me, at least, makes individual sections harder to remember. Though apparently I remembered just about every note that came out of Scarpia’s mouth, particularly in Act 1. Well, he is a spectacularly villainous sort of villain – just as a bass should be…