Tosca: From Forgotten Play to Timeless Opera
By Thomas May

La Tosca, the drama by French playwright Victorien Sardou, was a hit when it premiered in 1887 but has long since faded into obscurity. Yet the opera which Puccini based on Sardou's work is firmly entrenched as a repertory icon.

Tosca the opera has even been a victim of its enormous popularity. You can see this in the legacy of vehement attacks by critics deriding the composer as a calculating sensationalist. On the other side, casual fans who reckon on nothing more than an encounter with some searingly beautiful tunes take Tosca for granted. They reinforce (however unwittingly) a similarly dismissive attitude toward Puccini's achievement.

That the opera remains popular thanks to Puccini's music is a truism. Superficially, Tosca appears to be just another variation on the verismo staples of hot-blooded emotionalism and the tragic love triangle-a formula, as the composer's detractors tend to see it, that borders on cliché and is meant to evoke predictable reactions (not unlike Sardou's play in fact).

The story itself gains much of its power by plugging into a fundamental political myth rooted in the French Revolution and its aftermath. In an utterly fascinating study of the setting's context, Tosca's Rome, cultural historian Susan Vandiver Nicassio defines this as the central political myth of modernity-a paradigm which views history in terms of the clash between the "good guys" (progressive revolutionaries) and the "bad guys" (repressive and authoritarian reactionaries).

But Puccini's intricate musical strategy heightens the tensions at work in his source so that we experience them as a timeless, ever present threat. In the process he transforms Sardou's familiar political paradigm into a bleaker vision of human illusions. What drew Puccini to create such a powerful score in response to Sardou's drama? How did he endow the latter's dated theatrical gestures with a universal resonance which still speaks to us today?

One key can be found in Puccini's first reaction to La Tosca. He begged his publisher Giulio Ricordi to obtain the rights to adapt the play since it seemed "the opera that is just right for me: one without excessive proportions, neither of decorative spectacle, nor such as occasion the usual musical excesses." A convoluted genesis would follow, as Puccini lost himself in the world of La Bohème before returning to the Tosca idea seven years later. But from the start he could foresee its potential. Puccini immediately zoomed in on the prospect of a relentlessly paced musico-dramatic structure that would push beyond conventional operatic rhetoric.

Sardou, after all, was known as the purveyor of the "well-made" play. His specialty was in crafting airtight, plot-driven dramas mixing fictional characters, often based on real-life figures, with plausible historical settings. In his emphasis on momentary effects over substance, Sardou might be compared to a master of the Hollywood thriller. He applied his success-tested formula from one play to the next. La Tosca-written primarily as a vehicle for celebrity actress Sarah Bernhardt-appeared in anticipation of the centenary of the French Revolution. It was in fact one of several plays by Sardou set in that volatile period.

Sardou went to great lengths to give his drama the appearance of historical verisimilitude-though, as Nicassio clearly shows, he readily confounded fiction and fact to reaffirm his own perspective on the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic myth, in which corrupt state power and the Church are perceived as dual aspects of a superstitious ancien régime. Curiously, Sardou was less interested in ensuring that the details of his Roman setting looked right. During one of his visits with the playwright in the opera's early stages, Puccini reported with bemusement that Sardou assumed St. Peter's and the Castel Sant'Angelo were on opposite sides of the Tiber. Sardou was "quite a fellow, all life and fire," in Puccini's description, but "full of historic-topographico-panoramic inexactitudes."

The composer's own attention became fixated on the specific, local elements which are so integral to Tosca's milieu. Indeed a signature of Puccini's operatic world is his reliance on local color. Time and again a particular ambience-one in which Puccini can envelope his characters-stimulates his musical imagination: the Latin Quarter in Paris for La Bohème, Japan and the American Wild West for Madama Butterfly and La Fanciulla del West (albeit with predominantly stereotypical imagery), or the fairytale China of Turandot. This habit may trace its origin to an epiphany Puccini once described: it was a performance of Aida, with all of its exotic ambience, that first kindled his desire as a youth to devote himself to opera.

Tosca carries this obsession with local color to an extreme. Opera loving tourists in Rome have only to glance at their guidebooks to find the specific landmarks indispensable to the drama. Puccini's concern for musical realism in particular details is an aspect of his approach to operatic verismo. For example, he consulted with an authority to determine the fundamental pitch (a low E) of the great bell of St. Peter's for the prelude to Act Three-one of numerous places where bells play a significant role in Tosca's sound world. Puccini even spent a night at the Castel Sant'Angelo to hear firsthand the panoply of dawn bells from the perspective of the fortress. He similarly sought out the particular local Roman variant on the Te Deum plainchant as he worked on the tour de force finale to Act One.

While some productions have effectively changed the opera's historical setting (to the clash between Fascists and the Resistance in Rome during the Second World War, for example), the Eternal City's presence serves as more than a backdrop to the drama of Tosca. The left-leaning Sardou could easily push the buttons he wanted to by playing the setting of Papal Rome off the short-lived Roman Republic inspired by the French Revolution.

But for Puccini, who shared Sardou's anti-clericalism but was politically apathetic, Rome itself-with all its contradictions-becomes a principal character. The city's resonance as a microcosm for the loftiest and basest human impulses alike unleashed Puccini's imagination. His Rome involves a continually shifting atmosphere of private intrigue, grand public ceremonials, aristocratic decadence, and even a natural idyll of shepherd's song and lucidly shining stars. This is a place where art and love hold out the secular equivalent of the promise of salvation; but they are also overshadowed by the corruption of power-not as an ideological abstraction but as a personified force, in the figure of Scarpia. In him Puccini could recognize what he once acknowledged as his own "Neronic instinct."

Puccini's librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, had a hard time of it adapting Sardou's play not only into a viable opera text but into one that also met the composer's painstakingly worked-out musical vision (they had begun the project tailoring the libretto for another composer who was soon displaced by Puccini). Giacosa complained that the source was essentially unsuitable for opera. "The more one gets inside the action and penetrates into each scene," he wrote, "trying to extract lyric and poetic passages, the more one is persuaded of its absolute inadaptability to musical theater."

Giacosa was referring to the well oiled, machine-like efficiency of Sardou's construction, which is driven by cause and effect from the moment of Angelotti's breathless entrance and leaves little room for lyrical reflection. But Puccini turns this unyielding momentum to his advantage. In fact, Sardou's play is further compressed so that its classical unities of time and place-the action spans less than a day, from noon of June 17, 1800, to the following dawn-acquire a modernist urgency that allows him to experiment with a network of recurring thematic ideas. Michele Girardi, in his insightful book Puccini: His International Art, observes that Puccini tones down the lyricism which predominated in his previous operas and that "the harmonic palette in Tosca is more dissonant" while "orchestration, tempo, and dynamics are often pushed to extremes."

While Tosca compresses the essential plot from Sardou, the opera also expands on several pivotal episodes that serve to enrich the fundamental conflicts at stake-most notably the thrilling Act One finale in which Scarpia's warped, Iago-like outburst is foregrounded against an ecclesiastical celebration, and the beginning of Act Three, where the depiction of a beautiful dawn only intensifies Cavaradossi's desperation as he faces death.

What the librettists had in mind was the room needed for the traditional lyrical expressiveness of Italian opera. They, along with Puccini, had even toyed with the well worn device of a mad scene at the end instead of having Tosca leap from the fortress parapets. Fortunately, Sardou prevailed in his insistence that the heroine die (the playwright, to his credit, even acknowledged the superiority of the opera to his original creation).

But Puccini's score brilliantly plays its lyrical moments off against the unyielding rush of the narrative. No one who experiences Tosca in performance can fail to notice the often jarring alternations between intense lyricism and a kind of violence of momentum-this is one of the opera's real innovations.

Look at the love duet in Act Three, for example. Puccini's publisher registered dismay when he first saw the score for this passage, finding it too choppy and unsustained. The composer replied that he had no use for the "amorous slobberings" his librettists had provided in their poetic effusion. The fragmentary effect was deliberate, since this final, hectic reunion of the lovers "can't be a uniform and tranquil situation, as in other exchanges of love." Puccini was even on the verge of cutting Tosca's most celebrated solo, "Vissi d'arte," on the grounds that it halted the action. Thankfully he recognized the aria's strength as a kind of interior monologue.

Such psychological realism-even more than the details of musical realism mentioned above-is central to Puccini's brand of verismo in Tosca. And his portrayal of Scarpia brings this trait to the fore with terrifying vividness. Long before his Darth Vader-like entrance in the second half of Act One, his all-seeing presence reaches out from the musical fabric, giving him an eerie omniscience (could the entire story be seen as one of his sick fantasies?). The three major chords that open the opera (B-flat, A-flat, E) sound a harmonically unsettling emblem. Brutal and brassy, they signify not only the police chief but, in their multiple permutations, the terror he insinuates in others. This motif will continue to cast Scarpia's shadow, even after his death, into the final act.

Scarpia lacks the melody given to the lovers in abundance but remains in some ways the character who is most interestingly revealed in musical terms. What makes him frightening above all-apart from his abuse of power and his sexual sadism-is that he represents the intelligence of evil. Scarpia prides himself on his expertise in manipulating human psychology, and his motif appropriately wheedles its way into the musical framework even when he isn't physically present. If lyricism represents the vulnerability of the lovers he destroys, Scarpia deforms even this musical symbol in his parody of bel canto during his monologue at the top of Act Two.

Cavaradossi's revolutionary virtue in Sardou is relatively muted (save for his outburst in Act Two on the news of Napoleon's victory) in favor of the painter as a secularist, given to the evidence of the senses alone (note the enumeration of the senses in his lamenting "E lucevan le stelle"). The aria "Recondita armonia" is Cavaradossi's ode to the deceptions of art, which are able to reconcile desires into a harmonious unity (ironically, Puccini's truly "recondite" harmonies lie in the indeterminate, whole-tone, modernistic vocabulary associated with Scarpia).

Puccini plays up a process of reversal from sacred to secular in each of Cavaradossi's appearances, where art becomes a counterpart to religion. The Mary Magdalene he is painting is (to the Sacristan's outrage) only ostensibly religious. Later, the torture scene in Act Two hints at the painter as a Christ-like figure, suffering to spare his friend. This image becomes even clearer in the final act, where Cavaradossi endures a kind of Gethsemane of doubt-but one without redemption to come. A fascinating performance tradition based on hints in the score (apparently initiated by Beniamino Gigli and also seen in Plácido Domingo's interpretation of the role) suggests that Cavaradossi is not deceived by Tosca's news that his life will be spared and knows that the firing squad is real.

Tosca-and this is part of what makes her role such a fascinating challenge-encompasses the most dramatic changes in the opera. It is she who is most crushed by the opposing forces that generate the opera's tension-love and power, truth and deception, sincerity and artifice, faith and disillusionment.

Her tragic education doesn't end with Scarpia's corrupt, fascistic power. Part of the overwhelming effect of her aria "Vissi d'arte"-despite its essential musical simplicity-is in how the aria plays out what Scarpia sadistically enjoys, which is to see the process of disillusionment set in. Yet even worse is to come when Tosca learns that everything-her artistry, her bravery, her lover's suffering-has been a black joke.

Puccini seems to show us lyricism itself-of the sort associated with old fashioned opera-as a metaphor for the weakness of human illusions. Its function becomes rather like that of the sheltering, private "nest" Tosca imagines before the tragedy unfolds as a protection for her and Cavaradossi against the intruding world. Tosca has to improvise, with all her art, to protect her love. But in her final lines, the lyrical elation that haloes the diva through so much of the opera is cast aside. In its place she takes up the violent declamation characteristic of Scarpia. Only briefly can the lyrical deflect the drama's relentless momentum.

Puccini's single most controversial musical choice, to end the opera with the theme of "E lucevan le stelle," has been ridiculed as a ham-fisted ploy to ring out the last of the evening's big tunes, at the expense of dramatic truth. (Tosca, after all, never heard her lover singing his lament.) Yet such critiques seem doggedly literal minded. By avoiding the symmetry of ending his final act with Scarpia's motif (as the first two did), Puccini seems to opt for pessimism over nihilism. The final say is given not to Scarpia's destructive power but to the sad melody of what is remembered from a life richly lived, in the here and now.

Thomas May writes and lectures about music and theater. He is the author of Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader.