Puccini's passionate murderess

'To make it work, you can't just sing beautifully; it needs a real personality, blood and guts. You have to be a woman.' Catherine Malfitano, who stars next week in Tosca with Roberto Alagna at Covent Garden, talks to Michael Church

Andrea Andermann's 1992 Tosca, shot in real time and at the precise locations in Rome where Puccini's drama is set, is one of the best opera films ever made. Opening in the cavernous ecclesiastical gloom of Sant'Andrea della Valle, and with its closing execution on the bleak ramparts of the Castello Sant' Angelo, its effect was so potently realistic that during the main love scene, the producer, fearful of offending the Vatican, had to intervene to dampen Placido Domingo's ardour. Which, given the sexual provocation he had been getting from his Tosca, was hardly a surprise.

Andrea Andermann's 1992 Tosca, shot in real time and at the precise locations in Rome where Puccini's drama is set, is one of the best opera films ever made. Opening in the cavernous ecclesiastical gloom of Sant'Andrea della Valle, and with its closing execution on the bleak ramparts of the Castello Sant' Angelo, its effect was so potently realistic that during the main love scene, the producer, fearful of offending the Vatican, had to intervene to dampen Placido Domingo's ardour. Which, given the sexual provocation he had been getting from his Tosca, was hardly a surprise.

Next week, at the Royal Opera House, now partnered by Roberto Alagna, the lady in question will return to the role, but she looks back on that film with nostalgia. The incense-laden church, and having Rome spread out before her at dawn: such things, says Catherine Malfitano, will always for her be the essence of Tosca.

Indeed, it was seeing the great Renata Tebaldi sing it in New York that turned her on to opera in the first place. "As a girl, I hated opera - none of it seemed remotely believable. Tebaldi wasn't a wonderful actress, but she was so sincere, so impassioned, that it came through."

What exactly is this it? "Something passionate, generous, tumultuous. To make the role work, you can't just sing beautifully, you can't just be a diva: it needs a real personality to fill it, blood and guts. You have to be a woman."

According to Carlo Rizzi, who will be officiating in the orchestra pit, this Sicilian-Siberian-Irish American will be all of that: he's conducted her in Madama Butterfly, and knows what she's made of. "She is a complete artist - a singer with insight," he says. "In the deadly cat-and-mouse game in Act Two, where Scarpia tries to bend her to his will, she will particularly shine."

Ensconced in her temporary Covent Garden flat, with the tools of her trade at her elbow - a keyboard, a laptop - the feline star subjects that duet to further analysis. "Tosca belongs in the theatre, it's where her work is, but her life outside the theatre is also theatrical. The trick is to differentiate the woman from the stage performer she's supposed to be. Scarpia, the chief of police, wants to go to bed with her, and in this scene he's writing the script. And she, who is so used to controlling her own script, must seem totally at a loss."

The challenge of that act's denouement, says Malfitano, is to make the change from actress to murderess credible. "The murder of Scarpia must seem like a surprise even to her - like a cornered animal lashing out. But even after that, when she thinks she has a foolproof plan to save her lover, she thinks she can control the drama - until the script goes wrong for the last time. It's like real life - the people who survive are the ones who can adapt to the changes in the script, who can go with the flow. Those who can't, go under." Or in Tosca's case, over the battlements.

Does Malfitano say this from personal experience? "Oh, nothing so stellar and dramatic. More a matter of seeing failures as hidden blessings." Like a clutch of bad reviews? "Well, the only seriously bad ones I've had were for an ill-fated Manon I did in Paris. But that was when I'd not got my strength back after giving birth, and when I was also re-tooling my voice. I was looking for a new way of singing."

This, it emerges, was as a result of her realisation, after 12 years in the business, that her vocal style was wrong for her increasingly dramatic roles. And that wrongness resided in an unevenness - flashes of her full voice, interspersed with moments of what she calls fakery: a common problem with young singers. So she began intensive training with a voice-coach. "Singers can't really hear themselves, so they are very bad judges of the way their sound comes across. If you want to change your sound, you have to replace the ear with the sensation of your own resonance, feeling your head as a sound-box."

This evenness of sensation, she adds, can be quite hard to find, as each singer's sound-box is different. Clear? Well, sort of. But this technical analysis certainly got her off the rocks, and into the deep dramatic waters where she has been triumphing ever since.

How does she compare the challenge of Tosca with that of Madama Butterfly? "Cio-Cio-San is a question of stamina, to get through the second act and arrive at the Flower Duet with reserves of energy." And the heroine of La Traviata? "Violetta demands more introspection. It's not that Tosca doesn't have an inner life, but Violetta is full of hidden depths. She has to conceal things - her humble origins, her illness, her despair."

And Tatyana in Eugene Onegin? "Like Tosca, she's a woman I could practically pick off the street. But in Tatyana's case, it's the tragedy of book-inspired dreams which can never be fulfilled."

And Salome, whom she played to stunning effect opposite Bryn Terfel at Covent Garden four years ago? "Ah, that was harder. I had to find the character by psychological means. I saw Salome as being at a critical moment in her life - she's like anyone who's had a rotten childhood, and such people do sometimes manage to turn their lives around. She has spent her life in a maze of darkness, and John the Baptist seems like light at the end of the tunnel; her obsession with his mouth becomes a metaphor for truth and clarity. When things go gruesomely wrong, I try to live that scene as she herself experiences it, from moment to moment. Her madness is beautiful to her, as most people's mad states are. And that's the moment when I dance with the head in the sheet."

Malfitano's near-naked dance in the London production was largely her own choreography; the physicality of all her performances is founded on a fitness regime that includes running and weights. But that dance was also imbued with something she'd gleaned through watching her four-year-old daughter at play. "I used what I observed in her - her unselfconscious freedom of being, which allowed her to dance around the house naked, as Strauss's heroine does. Salome doesn't edit herself, any more than young children do."

Malfitano spends a fair amount of time teaching, and is keeping a tutorial eye on this daughter who, at 14, is now at stage school. "She hates opera as much as I did at her age, but I think that, as with me and my parents' enthusiasms, some feeling for it may develop through osmosis." Whereupon she digs out an album full of mother-and-daughter snaps: the diva we know, and a radiant sylph - looking more than a bit like the young Liza Minelli.

'Tosca' opens at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London WC2 (020-7304 4000) on 12 September, and will be relayed live that night to a giant screen in Covent Garden Piazza, free of charge, courtesy of BP. The video of Andrea Andermann's 'Tosca' is available on the Teldec label