Jun 25, 2025
What We Can Learn from Tosca — What’s love got to do with it?
Reprinted from Psychology Today.
Posted July 3, 2023
This year the first offering of the Santa Fe Opera was Tosca, the famous story of an opera diva named Tosca, her artist lover, and the toxic, predatory, and rapacious villain Scarpia. The setting is Rome, when it was under the thumb of the oppressive Holy Roman Empire, before Napoleon’s forces achieved military victory over the suffocating regime embodied by Scarpia. Tosca’s lover Cavaradossi, who is on the Napoleonic side, hides a friend who has escaped political prison. For this seditious act, Scarpia arrests him and will only free him from the gallows if Tosca sleeps with Scarpia.
Composer Giacomo Puccini and librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa pull us into a world where we hear about Tosca even before we see her. Cavaradossi sings about her jealous, suspicious, possessive love and reveals that he loves her for her external beauty and is excited by her big brown eyes and even bigger emotions and passion. For Scarpia, it’s lust for conquest; women are prey and once he lures one into his lair, he pounces, rapes, and then discards her.
With these excesses of unbridled emotion, superficiality, and selfishness, we know we are in trouble. We also know that the opera is a tragedy, so it is not going to end well. While sitting in a darkened theatre, it’s safe to think about what kind of lovers we are, and whether what we see on stage mirrors or echoes the kinds of relationships we pursue and maintain. Do we, like Cavaradossi, idealize those we fall for? To him, Tosca is a beautiful and gentle being who will one day be nurturing and raising children and smelling the roses in her garden. Like the villain Scarpia, he is excited by her anger and emotional demands, but his desire is only to love and be loved by her. For Scarpia, sexual entrapment and domination are the end goals, and the more Tosca resists and expresses her love for Cavaradossi, the more excited he gets at the idea of satisfaction by force. hen discards her.
Accompanied by compelling, driving music, the action on stage plays out with ever-increasing intensity. And for all of the characters, the end is death. Tosca acquiesces to Scarpia’s vile demand because he promises not to execute her lover. She sacrifices her body to save the man she loves, but before the act is consummated, she kills her would-be rapist. Cavaradossi, tortured and condemned to death because of loyalty to his friend, demonstrates before the end that all he truly cares about in life is his love for Tosca. The diva Tosca sheds her petty selfishness and vanity. She becomes a murderer out of self-defence and love and loyalty to Cavaradossi. When he is executed, she is hunted down as a criminal. In the throes of deep grief, she despairs for her life and kills herself.
You could hear the proverbial pin drop as the audience held its collective breath while the story grew in intensity, and all I could think about was that it was a relief that this is playing out on stage and not in real life.
After the curtain calls, it dawned on me that Tosca is actually a cautionary tale about love, and what it can lead to if it is not tempered by self-control, abandonment of greed and selfishness, and living in a dream world of idealization about our loves, lovers, or those we want to love us. Perhaps if we see it being played out on stage, we can reflect on what kind of lovers we are, and where that has taken us in life.
Cavaradossi is a dreamer, an idealizer, but he is also capable of intense loyalty and self-sacrifice. He is passionate in his painting and in his relationships with friends and lovers. He is brave, and he evolves past a slavish devotion to physical beauty and matures into a heroic figure. However, I couldn’t help but wonder if his fate would have been different if he had been more moderate and self-reflective before rushing headlong into action.
Tosca too, evolves, and shows that she can love deeply, sacrifice her vanity and self-absorption, but, ultimately, she is prone to excess and emotional extremes — including the no-return point of suicide. Could she have used her power as a diva, a star, to act differently, and with more self-awareness? Would her end have been different?
As for Scarpia, his rapacious, ugly, toxic, lust for power and domination led to his death and destruction. If he had acted differently, his end might have been avoided.
In the opera Tosca, the only balance to a life of emotional extremes is offered by religious devotion to the gentleness of the Madonna, or the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. But to me, in real life, the balance is provided by introspection, self-reflection, self-control, and healthy, reciprocal love.
Ultimately, Tosca offers an opportunity to see things played out in a fictional story and maybe trigger a shift in our behavior or at least awaken a desire to live a life where the outcomes of loving are more positive and less painful and tragic. Extreme forms of love make a great opera, but not a better life.
About the Author
Judith Fein is an award-winning international travel journalist who has contributed to 130 publications, the author of three books about transformative travel, an inspirational speaker, and an opera librettist.
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