I've been listening to Tosca constantly since last week; I liked walking from Sant'Andrea della Valle (Act 1) to the Castel Sant'Angelo (Act 3) listening to it. It's the first opera I really liked (not counting Hansel and Gretel) and still one of my favorites; I once saw a performance on TV that was filmed on location. It starts out at a very high, relentlessly lyrical pitch, and sustains that to the end. It's like Puccini's Richard II, Shakespeare's only play without a line of prose: there is some recitative in Tosca, but even that is full of little motifs, and always seems about to break into song (and usually does). I love the overblown pathos of the end, when she thinks he's playacting, and praises his skill — "Ecco un artista!" — and we know that he really is dead. (On the ramparts of Castel Sant'Angelo.) The music is just grand and passionate and sarcastic enough to pull it off.

Compare that to the last opera I saw, a few years ago, Don Carlos, which has about half an hour of good music in four hours. It's hard to take. In compenso, that's an opera with a serious story, and the most shocking line I've ever heard in a play or an opera. It's about the son of King of Philip, who wants to go off and fight for the freedom of the Netherlands, against his father's army. There's a bright and hopeful little tune whenever he and his best friend talk about this. (It hardly lasts a minute.) As if that weren't bad enough, he meets his stepmother-to-be in a forest; they're both masked, each doesn't know who the other is, and they fall in love. (OK, that's not serious.) So King Philip has two good reasons for wanting his son out of the way. He thinks this over, limping heavily around his darkened study. (That, and the Dutch melody, make up the grand total of really good music in the whole opera.) He calls in his confessor, the Grand Inquisitor, to hear what he thinks. "Why not?" the Grand Inquisitor asks. "God himself sacrificed his only son."

It's so shocking! I still can't get over it!

Schiller wrote the play; I wonder if the line is his, or Verdi's.