and with supporting soloists; ;

As early as May 1889 Puccini told his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, that he wanted to make an opera out of a melodrama which the highly regarded French playwright Victorien Sardou had written as a sensational acting vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt. Her gift for mime, incidentally, accounts for the long wordless scene in the opera's second act, after the villainous police chief has been murdered. Set in Rome in 1800 during the struggle between the repressive royalist regime and the republican revolutionaries, the play was called La Tosca.

The opera was a success at the box office, but the critics generally turned thumbs down on it, finding its sadism and scenes of attempted rape and physical and mental torture repulsive. The same criticism surfaced in England after the opera's first performance at Covent Garden in July, which was attended by Puccini himself, but the general reaction was highly enthusiastic.