Comrade Scarpia

The set represented a sleekly modern office-apartment equipped with a pushbutton intercom system and a radio. The booted, black-uniformed officer listened for a' while to a local radio singer, questioned a corduroy-jacketed "freedom fighter," and chased a redhead in green strapless evening gown about his desk. 'What was going on? Answer: A modern-dress production of Puccini's Tosca.

When Cleveland's Musicarnival decided to do Tosca, it called on the Metropolitan Opera's Assistant Manager John Gutman to tool it up for modern tastes. Gutman, an old hand at translating and adapting opera librettos, decided to switch the locale from the Rome of 1800 to an unspecified modern Eastern European capital. Scarpia, chief of the Roman police, became a Communist cop, and his enemies, the Bonapartists, became simply freedom fighters or "subversives." All told, Gutman had to doctor only 25 lines. The underling of Act II who formerly rushed in to announce that Bonaparte had won the battle of Marengo, now cries: "Our tanks were fired upon!" Tosca (Soprano Beverly Sills) hears the screams of her lover, who is being tortured offstage, over the intercom. (Scarpia: "Let's turn up the sound!") Having killed Comrade Scarpia (Baritone William Chapman), Tosca hopes to spring her lover from jail and cries: "Once we are at the airport . . . we'll be free." In the end, instead of hurling herself off the battlements of Castel Sant' Angelo, Tosca stabs herself.

As always, the audience loved Tosca --undoubtedly more for Puccini's score than for the cold-war innovations. At any rate, Modernizer Gutman missed one trick recently used at a similar Tosca adaptation in Argentina. There, after killing Scarpia, Tosca, in expert thriller fashion, cut the telephone wires.

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