“Recondita armonia” and “E lucevan le stelle” from Tosca

Tosca is an opera star out of her depth in early nineteenth-century Roman politics. She thinks she can save her lover, the artist Cavaradossi, from Baron Scarpia, the corrupt and pitiless Chief of Police, but he is too clever for her. Although Scarpia dies at Tosca’s hand, he has already given orders for Cavaradossi’s execution. First performed in Rome in 1900, a hundred years after the events of the opera are supposed to have taken place in that same city, Tosca ran to packed houses for twenty evenings in a row.

Two of the most famous arias in the opera - next to Tosca’s Vissi d’arte - are for Cavaradossi. The first comes from Act I, set in the church of S. Andrea della Valle in Rome where he is painting a Mary Magdalen. His Magdelen is blonde with blue eyes, he sings in “Recondita armonia,” but as he paints her he is thinking only of his dark-haired black-eyed Tosca. “E lucevan le stelle” comes from the other end of the opera, set on the roof of the Castel Sant’Angelo where, in spite of Tosca’s desperate intervention, Cavaradossi is about to be shot. Asking his gaoler for pen and paper to write a farewell letter to Tosca, memories of star-lit meetings with her steal in on clarinet and overwhelm him.