Seattle Opera’s Legendary Tosca Production

It was the mid-‘60s. Glynn Ross, the dynamic General Director of the brand-new Seattle Opera, wanted to show his employers—the Seattle Opera Board of Trustees—that he could present compelling opera productions while balancing the budget. Before Ross, every attempt to present opera in Seattle had ended in a big deficit, including the Seattle Symphony’s opulent 1962 Aida, presented as part of the World’s Fair. While creating Seattle Center, the city had transformed its vast old Civic Auditorium into the Seattle Opera House. (It would later be transformed into McCaw Hall, which opened in 2003.) It’s nice to have a terrific theater in which to showcase opera. But you still have to have the money to pay for the world’s most expensive art form.

Ross was competitive, and played his cards carefully. In his first season he presented Boris Godunov, a hugely ambitious work, way beyond the capacity of his baby opera company. But Boris had just been given at the University of Washington, and Ross was determined to show the public the difference between student opera and professional opera. A couple years later he bought a used production of Aida at a bargain price. Seattleites would inevitably compare this inexpensive “Soft Scenery” Aida with the ritzy one from the World’s Fair. 

The 1962 World's Fair Aida directed by “Horner of Hollywood” (inventor of the turntable set).

 

The 1968 Aida, performed on painted drops created by Sormani Scenography.

Ross was teaching the public another lesson: spend your money on singers, not elaborate scenery, if you want compelling opera that doesn’t break the bank.

What is “Soft Scenery”?
That second Aida, designed by Enzo Dehò of Milan’s Sormani Scenography workshop, consisted of a couple painted canvas backdrops and some staircase units (which offered levels for visual interest, plus they functioned as risers for Aida’s sizable chorus). There wasn’t much to it. With that kind of ‘soft scenery,’ cloth backdrops hang from pipes above the stage, which are raised and lowered by a series of pulleys.

Head Carpenter Justin Loyd working backstage at “the rail.”

Theaters first borrowed this technology from sailing ships, back when opera was born in the late Renaissance. Soft scenery was the norm in opera up until the 1970s, when ‘hard scenery’ started to become more popular. Acoustically, hard scenery’s solid surfaces can help direct singers’ voices out into the theater, instead of absorbing sound the way the cloth of soft scenery does. But soft scenery is functional and practical; it helped Ross keep his budgets under control. It can also contribute to a compelling opera production, if it’s designed carefully.

Who Designed this Tosca?
We’re playing Tosca this May on a work of art with a fascinating history: “soft” Tosca sets Glynn Ross purchased in 1969 from Milan’s Sormani workshop. Known nowadays as Sormani Cardaropoli Scenography, that firm was founded in 1838 by Ercole Sormani to design and build opera scenery for La Scala and other theaters. Italian opera was in transition in 1838: Bellini had recently died, Donizetti was about to abandon Italy for Paris, tenors were now singing high Cs in chest voice, and the young Giuseppe Verdi had just moved to Milan. Over the coming decades, as bel canto opera transformed into a more theatrical Gesamtkunstwerk, Sormani’s studio thrived. Sormani must have known how to recruit and train the best collaborators, how to choose an approach or style appropriate to each piece, and how to give the public what it wanted, because by the end of the century his firm was creating opera and ballet sets for theaters all over Italy and abroad, and had been showered with awards.

When this Tosca was designed and built, in the 1950s, Sormani’s grandson—also called Ercole, Italian for “Hercules”—was running the family company, with Enzo Dehò supervising the artists. For Tosca these included designers Alessandro and Nicola Benois, a Russian father and son from an artistic St. Petersburg family. The father, originally Aleksandr Benua, first designed scenery for St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater before heading west with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909. 

Aleksandr Benois’ design for the world premiere of Stravinsky’s Petroushka. (Wikipedia)

 When he moved south to take a job at La Scala, his son Nicola, whom he had trained, followed him.

Nicola Benois

Nicola Benois would go on to design hundreds of opera and ballet productions. He died in Italy in 1988, as did his close friend and collaborator Ercole Sormani Jr (whom he affectionately called “Ercoletto,” something like “Herkie”). Singers such as Zinka Milanov and Renata Tebaldi sang Tosca on La Scala’s copy of these Tosca sets.

Design in ink, signed lower left by Nicola Benois in 1952, for Tosca Act Two. Note that the original concept was for the torture chamber to be accessed by a trap door in the floor.

The designers and artists of the Sormani workshop knew how to create the illusion of depth with two-dimensional painted backdrops. For instance, Tosca’s first act church location looks much deeper than it actually is, thanks to the clever placement of columns and a hemispherical apse at back, which look volumetric but actually take up no space at all. In Act Two you’d swear the ceiling of Scarpia’s dining room at the Palazzo Farnese curves out overhead and is full of decorated niches. But no—it’s just a piece of cloth.

Tosca Act 2, Seattle Opera 2015

Italian visual artists have been fooling viewers’ eyes since the days of ancient Rome; trompe l’oeil, “trick the eye,” this technique was called by an eighteenth century French art theorist.

Among the trompe l’oeil tricks featured in Tiepolo’s 1757 Sacrifice of Iphigénie are the deus ex machina stag flying in on a cloud at left and the hand reaching around the second column from the right.

“Trompe l’oeil does two things at once,” says Chiyo Ishikawa, former Deputy Director for Art and Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Seattle Art Museum. “First, the work of art disappears, because initially you’re convinced you’re in a space. And then, when it dawns on you that it's artifice, you marvel at this tour de force by craftsmen so skilled at creating an illusion that they’ve pulled the wool over your eyes. It’s a double-edged thing; you’re meant to do a double-take, really.”

Ishikawa saw Tosca played on these Sormani sets at Seattle Opera in 2015, lit by Connie Yun (who returns this season). “The way she lit that Act 1 church scene, there’s one lighting for the foreground, a different lighting in the middle, and it’s brighter in the apse. That helps the illusion. To be surrounded by trompe l’oeil on this immersive scale is really transporting for the viewer-listener.” And the choice of a trompe l’oeil approach is particularly appropriate for a veristic opera about a painter and a singer—an opera that digs deep into the space between art and reality.

A Well-Traveled Tosca Production
Glynn Ross made a smart move when he purchased these Tosca sets. Tosca is an ever-popular “top 10” opera, and Seattle Opera has used these sets to showcase Puccini’s thriller in 1969, 1977, 1986, 2015, and now 2025. Says Robert Schaub, Seattle Opera Technical Director in the days of Speight Jenkins, “We didn’t use that Tosca in the ‘90s and ‘00s because it would have felt dated, to audiences who (some of them) remembered the days when all opera was presented on soft scenery. But a generation later, it’s time to enjoy this again. There’s the pleasure of nostalgia, to see opera the way it was done in the days of Puccini. There’s also extraordinary artistry here. It has to be handled carefully. Connie [Yun] is smart not to focus her lighting instruments on the drops themselves. Instead, she lights the singers and allows ambient light to bounce off the floor and touch the drops gently. That makes all the difference.”

Tosca Act 1, Seattle Opera 2015 (Robert Reynolds, photos)

And because the shipping costs are minimal—canvas drops don’t take up much space, and the whole production fits in a single truck—dozens of American theaters have rented this Tosca from Seattle Opera over the years. Add together all those productions—five in Seattle, plus at least 30 rentals since 2000—and you start to see the impact of Ross’s purchase. Millions of opera-goers have had a chance to enjoy Tosca, sung amid these fragile pieces of cloth.

Maintaining Soft Scenery
Opera productions don’t last forever. There’s wear and tear every night, onstage. And a popular production like this one, which has been shipped all over America and Canada, is sometimes treated more roughly than is suitable for a valuable work of art. Before rehearsals began on this season’s Tosca production the experienced hands of Seattle Opera’s backstage crew gave the show a little TLC. 

Unrolling one of the cloth backdrops in the rehearsal studio

 

Fixing tears where the Act One cloth backdrop had been folded (Glenn Hare, photos)

The enormous canvas drops were hung, to flatten out any wrinkles from how they’d been folded for shipping. Where there were small rips and tears, thin muslin patches were added from behind (and painters made sure everything looked right on the other side). Torn screens and mesh were replaced. Where there are small pieces of wood for framing, screw holes had to be filled in. According to Justin Loyd, Head Flyman at Seattle Opera, “This is a great old production, and it still has life in it. We just need to take good care of it. It’s like a part of our family.”