Arguing about arias

[sawyl]

Today's Guardian asserts that, "Recondite Armonia may be the best known aria in Puccini's masterpiece", before going to claim that there's not much harmony behind the scenes at the Sydney Opera production of Tosca. While I appreciate what they're trying to do with thing whole harmony/disharmony thing, surely they could have done something similar with Vissi d'arte and thus have been on sturdier ground when making their claim about it being the most popular aria.

Now that I've got that out of my system, it's confession time. I only know the names of two arias from Tosca — Vissi d'arte and E lucevan le stelle — but since I'm not really much of a fan of Puccini, I feel fully justified in leveraging my savage ignorance in order to use it to complain about something...