I thought I would like the opera a lot more than I actually did, which was disappointing. I really didn’t like it until the end of Act II when Tosca killed Scarpia. Even then, Tosca had an extremely long, dragging scene when she took forever to leave Scarpia’s apartment by contemplating about what to do or something. Although the opera had an interesting storyline, I found it really slow and the intermissions were way too long.

I didn’t really like Tosca during Act I because as we discussed in class, the whole jealousy thing over the woman Mario painted was so irrelevant. Tosca was just annoying during the whole first act because of her jealousy, although I did find it a bit funny when she said to Mario to make the woman in the painting’s eyes black. Her jealousy didn’t contribute to the plot at all except when Scarpia came to their house and lied to Tosca saying that Mario was with another woman in the cottage just so the lieutenants could follow Tosca to the cottage. Either way, Tosca ended up finding out what was really going on since Mario told her the truth about him hiding a fugitive (away from the scene), but the jealousy took up so much of Act I and it barely contributed to the plot.

I started to catch the hint that Mario was going to die when Scarpia was telling the lieutenant to do a fake execution just like -insert name here- since that was suspicious. Tosca’s death wasn’t necessarily obvious but I had a feeling she would die as well since there was so much time between when she killed Scarpia and Mario’s “fake” execution. I just thought there was no way she would be able to get away with that; there would be some way the lieutenants would find out about Scarpia’s death.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the whole art being singing either which is ironic since  that is what an opera’s supposed to be. There wasn’t that much going on onstage for me to get lost in the subtitles and miss the action on stage, so that was good. Maybe I would’ve liked it more if the words were simply spoken instead of sung though. I thought the singing made it a little too dramatic at times, which contributed to making the opera a lot slower. Oh well, maybe operas are just not my thing!