Tosca: the back story
VICTORIA KINGHAM looks into Anthony Flaum’s Prologue Opera and this year’s production
Anthony Flaum, producer
Suave, elegant Anthony Flaum is an opera singer whose professional career began in banking, finance and marketing. He retrained at the Royal Academy of Music and the National Opera Studio, and has worked for most of the UK’s leading opera companies. Since moving to St Leonards, he is making inroads into the local arts community by hosting his own recitals, besides solidifying his work with Barefoot Opera. He produced their last, excellent La Cenerentola, but alongside this has developed his own production venture, which was aired here with Becoming Carmen a couple of years ago. “Everyone has a backstory, a prologue, something that forms them as a human…so do characters in an opera,” he remarks. He feels that it is this story that can lead people into understanding the performance, perhaps ultimately the artform itself. So Prologue Opera was founded on the unique and innovative concept of, quite literally, acting out these backstories. It does this through newly commissioned music and dialogue that lead the audience into abridged versions of the original classics. This time, it’s Becoming Tosca. Clearly, Flaum’s dual background makes him uniquely placed as performer, producer, and CEO.
The new production is an innovative and unique piece of drama, illuminating the earlier lives of the characters from Puccini’s original score and propelling the audience into the world of Floria Tosca. Becoming Tosca will bring an evening of revolution, romance and tragedy, combining newly-composed music with a tango flavour and a shortened version of Puccini’s score. Flaum will be performing alongside a stellar cast of professional singers. Many of the cast and crew are local East Sussex residents: besides Flaum, other locals involved are highly acclaimed composer Frank Moon, designer Viva Halton Wright, stage manager Jane Richardson, and lighting designers James Dean and Jonathan Richardson. In addition, cast member Harry Gentry is a new vocal talent from the White Rock Youth Theatre and will be playing the young revolutionary Angelotti.
Harry Gentry who will sing the part of Angelotti
Becoming Tosca relocates the action to a Latin American setting in the 20th century in a nation founded on Jesuit colonisation, where religion now jostles with the politics of capitalism and self-interest. It is a society dominated by the struggle to exchange poverty for influence, while still seeking solutions to all-pervasive inequalities and oppressions. Does the Church love repentance or does it prefer punishment? Is brutality a necessary weapon to control a turbulent population? Puccini’s opera has a complex plot, adapted from a slightly earlier play by Sardou, set in the Rome of 1800 during the Napoleonic conquests. It was first performed in Rome a century later at another time of Italian political and social unrest. Like Puccini’s other well-known works La Bohème and Madama Butterfly (and indeed like a great swathe of classic stories, plays, songs, and poetry), its emotional core revolves around a desirable woman whose fate and tragic end are ultimately controlled by the men in her life.
Musically, La Tosca has always been irresistible; it will be fascinating to see how Flaum’s production and newly-composed prologue deal with the complexity of the operatic narrative, and how this original production renders it more accessible.
Becoming Tosca is partly funded by the Isabel Blackman Foundation and the Hinrichsen Foundation. It will be hosted at three local venues, St John The Evangelist, St Leonards ,2 July, Battle Abbey, 9 July, and The Stables, Hastings 23-24 July. Tickets and further details are available at prologueopera.com.
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