She won the audience prize in Placido Domingo’s opera competition Operalia in 2016. Since graduating from the Moscow State Conservatory in 2012, Stikhina has performed at the Paris Opera, the Gut Immling Opera Festival in Germany, and other major venues. Tosca is played by soprano Elena Stikhina, a Russian singer whose career has taken off in the past two years and who is making her American debut. And Scarpia, the police chief, is pushed by his antipathy toward the republic and his lust for Tosca. Cavaradossi acts on his sympathies for a supporter of Napoleon. The character Tosca makes choices based on her passion for opera and her lover, the painter Cavaradossi. Where Puccini’s “La Boheme” (the inspiration for the musical “Rent”) was a story of individuals subject to fate (disease), “Tosca” is a story of individuals who drive their own lives, said Esther Nelson, artistic director of the Boston Lyric Opera. Widely viewed as melodramatic, “Tosca” nonetheless is a popular opera because of the power of the music and the characters’ passion. The three main characters in the story, which is set in Rome in 1800, all die: the brave painter who shelters an escaped political prisoner, the opera singer who loves the painter, and the vindictive police chief whose actions lead to their tragic deaths. Love, torture, murder and suicide – it’s all packed into “Tosca,” the Puccini opera that opens Boston Lyric Opera’s 2017-18 season.
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