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Like plays, operas have no genuine existence away from a stage. A play can be profitably read, and an opera enjoyed on records, but neither really lives until it is performed in the theater. The music is the irreducible element (although Peter Brook's 1981 La Tragedie de Carmen even fiddled with Bizet's score and orchestration). After that comes the controversy.
Similarly, there is no canonical form that producers must slavishly adhere to -- no original, ideal performance to be imitated and, in some cases, not even an authoritative score. What, for example, constitutes the definitive Don Carlos by Verdi, a work that the composer was amending as late as the rehearsals before the first Paris performance and later shortened by an act and recast in Italian? What is the version of Carmen that conforms most closely to Bizet's intentions? For many years, Carmen was unthinkable without the recitatives that Ernest Guiraud added after the composer's death. Now it is unthinkable with them.
"People don't understand that what they have in their hands is something that is undergoing change," says Director Miller, whose previous ventures into operatic transposition include his 1982 setting of Rigoletto as a 1950s Mafia romance. "These works tumble down through history and change their identities. The charge of tampering is a philistine objection. To do them at all is to tamper."
In a recent book, Subsequent Performances, Miller discusses what he terms the "afterlife" of a work of art: "In the past when opera was accepted as a dramatic work it was for an audience whose sensibility was so different from our own that we cannot accept the way in which it appealed to them. In order for it to reassert itself as first-class music and drama it has to be emancipated from the formal presentation in which it may have been conceived but has now been imprisoned."
Like his Rigoletto, Miller's Tosca (first seen last summer in Florence) is a transposition. In moving the action from the Napoleonic era to 1944, the director found cognates for both character and events. Scarpia, the oily chief of police, was based on the notorious Italian Fascist Pietro Koch, for example, and the original libretto's reference to the battle of Marengo becomes Anzio instead. The opera's familiar locales, such as the Farnese Palace and Castel Sant'Angelo, have been eliminated in favor of a huge drab gray space, extravagantly tilted, which serves as church, interrogation chamber and execution room. When Tosca (Soprano Josephine Barstow) jumps to her death, she does so by crashing through a window. Everyone in the cast . wears black, white or gray; as conducted by Jan Latham-Koenig, the production lets Puccini's vivid, cinematic music provide the color.