How do you like your Tosca? Traditional or radical? Vienna offers both. At the Staatsoper, Margarethe Wallmann’s staging, premiered with Renata Tebaldi in the title-role in 1958, is still going strong – I saw it in October. Its most recent DVD reincarnation, with Karine Babajanyan, Piotr Beczała and Carlos Álvarez, was released two years ago (C Major Entertainment).

Clearly, nobody expected Vienna’s ‘second house’, the Theater an der Wien, to churn out a replica, but that didn’t stop the avalanche of boos that greeted director Martin Kušej when his new staging opened in January 2022. It attracted a lot of criticism and it certainly won’t appeal to everyone, but his Personenregie is convincing and he draws knockout performances from his cast. Revisiting the production on screen two years later, it still left me breathless.

Banish all scenic expectations. There is no Sant’Andrea della Valle, Palazzo Farnese or Castel Sant’Angelo. Kušej plunges the action under a deep blanket of snow in a dystopian wasteland, a brutal clerical fascist police state. Dry ice swirls and a scrim features a constant fall of snow. A rotten tree is festooned with a human torso, hanging alongside an icon of the Virgin Mary. A police dog retrieves a dismembered limb.

Scarpia’s ‘palazzo’ is a dilapidated caravan, where he listens to gavottes on his transistor radio. The signal that marks Angelotti’s escape comes not from a cannon but the rattle of a machine gun. The congregation who rejoice in the Te Deum are zombie workers, wearing goggles and carrying shovels. The role of Sciarrone, Scarpia’s henchman, sung with menace by Rafał Pawnuk, is expanded to encompass the Sacristan and Gaoler. A few words in the original libretto are changed to fit the new setting.

Kušej also places on stage a character only mentioned in Puccini’s opera: the Marchesa Attavanti, Angelotti’s sister. She lurks in Act 1, a cloaked figure whom we recognise from Cavaradossi’s portrait (Tosca smears the paint on this portrait so that it sheds a black tear – neat touch). Tosca’s instincts here seem to prove correct: perhaps Cavaradossi has been having an affair with Attavanti, who is detained and dragged in to witness Cavaradossi’s torture, a sight that makes her vomit. Before Tosca sticks the knife into Scarpia, he whispers in Attavanti’s ear, presumably to tell her that it was Tosca who gave away Angelotti’s hiding place. At the denouement, there being no castle battlements for Tosca to throw herself from, the silent Attavanti appears with a gun to trigger Scarpia’s revenge.

Kristı¯ne Opolais had her operatic big break in a Kušej production – the disturbing ‘Josef Fritzl Rusalka’ at the Bavarian State Opera – and she acts up a storm here, too. Vocally, she gets off to an uncertain start; one notes a deterioration in her soprano, which sounds scrawny and vinegary, but she soon settles. Her acting is remarkable – as the jealous diva she falls quickly into Scarpia’s trap, but in Act 2 she assesses the situation immediately, taking a slug of wine straight from the bottle, lying back and spreading her legs to Scarpia long before he names his price. Her ‘Vissi d’arte’, movingly sung, is virtually a lap dance. Opolais is as completely inside the role as Maria Callas in that astonishing 1964 film of her and Tito Gobbi in Act 2 at Covent Garden; in the lead-up to her stabbing of Scarpia, you can read the trauma in her face.

In a white three-piece suit and fur coat, Gábor Bretz is both suave and brutal as the police chief, vocally commanding, too, his rich bass-baritone resounding in the Te Deum. Jonathan Tetelman sings Cavaradossi superbly; his ringing tenor is thrilling and he cuts a dashing hero on stage. In Act 3 he also sings the shepherd’s dawn song before an impassioned ‘E lucevan le stelle’. Credit to conductor Marc Albrecht, who pushes through at the end to avert any post-aria applause (as he does with ‘Vissi d’arte’, where we get to hear Scarpia’s line, ‘Ebbene?’).

Albrecht saved this production at the last minute, substituting for a Covid-ridden Ingo Metzmacher – the fully masked audience a reminder of the times – and conducts the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, who play fantastically.

No, this is not the finest Tosca you will ever hear, nor the most opulent one you’ll ever see … but it’s possibly the one you’ll most remember.