TABLOID OPERA : Suicide, Murder, Hoodwinking--Is There Anything Too Seamy for ‘Tosca’?

With scenes of torture, attempted rape, murder, execution by firing squad and suicide, the tale wasn’t acceptable as an opera. What audience would sit through that?

So argued publisher Guilio Ricordi and librettist Luigi Illica with composer Alberto Franchetti, a man of independent means who held the rights to Illica’s libretto for an opera called “Tosca.”

Actually, Ricordi and Illica were trying to hoodwink Franchetti.

They wanted him to relinquish his rights so that they could assign the work to Giacomo Puccini, a rising star who had already composed the wildly successful “Manon Lescaut” and the at-first-not-so-wildly successful “La Boheme.”

The trick worked. Franchetti agreed and went on to become a mere footnote in the annals of opera history (except for an occasional revival of his “Cristoforo Colombo,” a probably not too politically correct version of America’s founding father).

Puccini had taken an interest in Victorien Sardou’s five-act play, “La Tosca,” from the moment he had seen it in 1888.

Sardou, a French dramatist, had written the play a year earlier for Sarah Bernhardt, who earned enormous success in the role (some 3,000 performances, according to the playwright) long before the play became an opera.

Puccini quickly took over. He brought in Giuseppe Giacosa to turn Illica’s plot scenario into verse. (The three had begun working as a team with “La Boheme,” and they would go on to create “Madama Butterfly.”)

Giacosa stripped down and tightened up Illica’s scenario, eliminating, at the composer’s insistence, the hero Cavaradossi’s “farewell to life and art” speech prior to his execution. Instead, at this point, Cavaradossi remembers an amorous encounter with Tosca (“E lucevan le stelle”--”When the stars were brightly shining”).

Puccini reasoned that a man about to be executed would not make fine speeches. Realistically, he felt, at such a time he would remember the love of his life and his love of life, which is what this Cavaradossi does.

In fact, “Tosca” was to be Puccini’s first work in the then newly fashionable style of verismo, or realistic, opera. And in order to get the right ambience for Cavaradossi’s scene, which is set on the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo at dawn, the composer went to the fortress in the early morning hours to listen to how the bells from the churches around the city of Rome actually sounded.

He attempted to incorporate those sounds into the score by indicating specific pitches for bells and giving directions for them to sound as if they were coming from various distances from the castle. It is one of the few lyrical moments in a work that otherwise is dominated by volcanic, hair-trigger emotional irruptions and a nonstop, turn-of-the-screw dramatic plot.

The premiere, at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on Jan. 14, 1900, was a dramatic event in itself. Because of contending artistic societies and political factions in the city, there were wild rumors that a bomb would be set off during the performance. Nothing happened, however. And while the critics were cool to unfavorable, the public declared the work to be a triumph.

Incidentally, a young tenor earlier had impressed the composer by singing Cavaradossi’s first-act aria, “Recondita armonica” (“Strange harmony”) as an audition. But for some reason, the young man did not get to sing the premiere, to his great disappointment. His name was Enrico Caruso.

What: Opera Pacific presents Puccini’s “Tosca.”

When: Friday, Jan. 17, and Jan. 23 through 25 at 8 p.m.; Sunday, Jan. 19, and Jan. 26 at 2 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Street exit. North to Town Center Drive. (Center is one block east of South Coast Plaza.)

Wherewithal: $20 to $75.

Where to call: (714) 979-7000 or (714) 556-2787.