This article is taken from the November 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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No doubt everyone has a secret favourite among the triumphs of the past 12 glorious years; mine — surely the pivotal point in our fortunes — remains Michael Gove’s 2013 history policy, a reaffirmation of the great Whig narrative of British benevolence which transformed the country into the harmonious happy Eden we now gambol about in, wrapped in glowing pride at the uncountable benefits we and our munificent empire bestowed on the world. Just imagine what might have happened if Michael hadn’t become education secretary — and shudder.

Who cares if there was the odd hole in the majestic tapestry requiring to be darned, or, better, ignored? The Frogs do that all the time. And yet forgetting those glitches in the great island story risks denying ourselves much innocent pleasure. Which is where opera steps in, as usual, to return to the light some of the fruitier moments of the blessed millennium.

Part of Puccini’s racket is how complicit he makes us in the working of his magic

This was brought to mind by the near-simultaneous appearance at Covent Garden and ENO of Giacomo Puccini’s sex-n-death stunna Tosca. Most people have a shaky idea of what’s actually going on in this piece beyond some fellow on the lam, another silly chap gloating over the proto-fascist police chief about a Napoleonic victory, a speculative chat between the cop and that chap’s girlfriend about what the price of his freedom might be, a fun non-mock-execution, and Tosca’s final dive from the battlements — top bombing!

I guess that’s quite a lot to take on, but it crucially misses the golden nugget that all this trouble was caused — hold on to your hats — by Emma Hamilton. That’s right, our Emma, previously known only as the world’s most complaisant girlfriend, “the sweetest of bedfellows” and for the poorly-suppressed giggles that greeted her Attitudes (“Agrippina mourning the death of Germanicus”, etc).

Down in Naples, Emma was big pals with the local Queen Maria Carolina, Marie Antoinette’s sister, and gamely mucked in with the struggles between royals and insurgents; and Nelson, chumming up to Emma and her new bff, strung up the semi-rebel Admiral Caracciolo from his yardarm in a rather blaggardly way.

The source text, Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca of 1887, gives us yet more: Angelotti, the escaped Republican hiding in the chapel at the beginning, had been framed by Emma, and thrown into the galleys, to protect her reputation — they’d had a thing in London 20 years back when she was plain Emmy Lyon turning tricks in Vauxhall. Far from the mild and pleasing character of legend, Emma is revealed as some kind of high-octane maenad, with even the pervy cop Scarpia quaking in his boots: “The Englishwoman is behind all this!” he bleats. “One word from her and I’m finished …”

Just like Emma, Tosca makes people nervous — or a certain kind of opera purist, anyway. Serious guys had spent centuries conjuring this most recherché of artforms, perfecting the only artistic edifice capable of confronting the world’s joy and tumult, then along comes this spivvy vulgarian and blithely bangs out three of the most effective (La bohème, Tosca and Butterfly) in eight years; devaluing all that toil with his meretricious plots, his salacious sadism, his preposterous sentimentality. But, annoyingly and undeniably, the bloody things work, they are as operatically sure-fire as anything by Mozart or Verdi.

Part of Puccini’s racket is how complicit he makes us in the working of his magic. Everyone loves the end of Act 1 of Tosca — a massive church scene with bells and a triumphant Te Deum, and over it all the badass Scarpia roaring out his cathedral-sized blasphemies: it’s a locus classicus of opera doing what it does, yet inescapably trashy. You can see perfectly easily how it works, how you are being manipulated, and the tenth time you see it is even better than the first: you long to fall for Puccini’s tricks yet again.

Our well-primed subconscious effortlessly sees it through the prism of fascist state terror

No other composer gives you this awful feeling that since these pieces are so good, so right, and so fabulously rubbishy, maybe all opera is actually rubbish. This is what the pinched souls of the Puccini-deniers can’t handle. You just have to balls it out till you find the core: and Tosca is the place, this unbeatably direct and deeply nasty story of two blameless love-bunnies waltzing merrily into the meat-grinder of state power — and (even better!) power wielded by one of the most monstrous perverts ever put on stage.

Unusually, the twentieth century has made Tosca (premiered in 1900) even more pointed: our well-primed subconscious effortlessly sees it through the prism of fascist state terror.

The Puccini miracle is that he creates this semi-pornographic farrago of erotomania, violence and death, and suddenly — hey presto! — extracts genuine gold-dust art and humanity from it, more shocking for being so unexpected. Tosca, like Othello, is about how the extremity of love is used to destroy it; like Aida, it’s about the triumph of the human  spirit over the powers that try to crush it. Remarkably, it manages this (inter alia) via a sickening, lurid torture scene, and the condemned Cavaradossi spending his last moments singing not something flash about art and ideals, but instead tunefully remembering a monumental shag. And if you can’t get off on that, what the hell are you even doing in the opera house?

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Tosca is at ENO until Nov 4, and at Covent Garden from Nov 28