GIACOMO PUCCINI'S TOSCA IS ONE OF THE MOST COMPACT OPERAS/ THE PLOT TAKES PLACE ON A SINGLE DAY IN ROME IN 1800/ALL THE PROTAGONISTS - THE BEAUTIFUL TOSCA, HER LOVER CAVARADOSSI AND THE POLICE CHIEF SCARPIA - DIE/ESSAY ON THE DIVISION OF LABOUR IN MELODRAMA

JV: Tosca is introduced through her fama, the reputation and fame of her voice [···]

AK: The most beautiful singer in Rome.

JV: The most beautiful singer in Rome, the embodiment of what might be called a violence of song, a centre of excitation spanning the gamut of all emotional registers, from tenderness and devotion through to passionate outburst, in jealousy for example. And with that she also shows off a spectrum of political noises, prompting the question: What does a voice do? How does it intervene in the business of politics, in the drama of political intrigues and machinations?

AK: She's a force to be reckoned with. If she appealed to the Queen in Naples, she would be cleared. She therefore embodies a spiritual power, whereas the police chief Scarpia has real po wer, he has his sbirri.

JV: And that also makes her a peculiar object of desire. She stands at the crossroads of politics and desire, and makes clear that the institution, the operation of wish machines is at stake in politics, too.

AK: But politics is lacking something there, the glamour of music. Politics is unmusical.

JV: Maybe politics isn't really unmusical, it has its own tonal register, but in opera, at least, politics is understood in such a way that it's translated into acoustic irritations and dissonances. There's a famous example where politics and dissonance actually coincide, the scream released under torture by the male lead, the painter, Tosca's lover, where musicality is confronted with its end, with cacophony or noise.

AK: While outside a magnificent cantata is being sung, here there's this scream.

JV: And that's why I would say that politics doesn't appear as something genuinely unmusical, but offers problematic acoustic situations and introduces frictions, jarring chromaticisms, dissonances, cascades of noise and so on into music, including this somewhat lascivious operatic music. And politics encounters in Tosca a representative of harmonic power, an attraction that mobilises all the forces of desire.