Operatic Heroines
Tosca. The suicide of Floria Tosca has to be one of the most spectacular and melodramatic in all opera. After a night where she has seen her lover tortured and killed and has murdered the man who would rape her, she throws herself off the castle battlements. Not everyone liked Victorien Sardou 's play La Tosca when it was first performed in 1887, but the composer Giacomo Puccini - who saw it in 1889 - knew immediately it was the subject he had been looking for. He turned Tosca from the simple girl of Sardou's original into an actress, singer and thoroughly professional woman of the theatre.