PUCCINI’S TOSCA
A SHORT GUIDE TO A GREAT OPERA
The opera and its composer
Who’s who and what’s what
The interval: talking points
Act by act
THE OPERA AND ITS COMPOSER
Today, it is hopefully unusual for a terrorist threat to disrupt an opera première. On 14 January 1900, it was less so. In recent years, bombs had gone off in theatres in Barcelona and Pisa.
The Queen and members of the Government were expected for the first night of Tosca at Rome’s Constanzi Theatre. There had been a rumour of an attack. Indeed, the conductor Leopoldo Mugnone,1 who had himself experienced the Barcelona incident, was told to play the national anthem if there should be one. He did not. The noise of latecomers during the start so worried him that he left the podium soon after the curtain went up. Fortunately, it was only a hoax, and the performance resumed.
Puccini’s opera is based on Sardou’s ‘blood and thunder’ melodrama La Tosca (1884), which was written for the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. Although the sadism and brutality in Puccini’s opera was frowned upon at the time – the critics gave it a rather lukewarm reception – it quickly became an outstanding success. The public flocked to it then, and have ever since. It is not often one gets, in one evening, torture, an attempted rape, a murder, an execution and two suicides; and a police chief fantasising during a ‘Te Deum’ in a church. It is not surprising that it has attracted more than its fair share of mirth.
Puccini had thought of making use of Sardou’s play ten years before his Tosca première. He was prompted to return to it, largely because of the vogue for ‘realism’: Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana had been a great success ten years before, as had Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci subsequently. And the play would make a good opera. Verdi had indicated that, had he been younger, he would have been interested in using it.
The right to turn it into an opera had been given to another composer, Franchetti. But, with utter knavery and dishonesty, Puccini’s publisher Giulio Ricordi, persuaded him that it was a totally unsuitable subject, so he relinquished his rights. Ricordi immediately signed up Puccini.
Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), a loquacious raconteur – Puccini found it difficult to get a word in edgeways – was a very successful French dramatist in the second half of the 19th century. His output of more than 70 plays has attracted mixed views: the music critic and dramatist George Bernard Shaw considered them lightweight, and invented the term ‘Sardoudledom’ to characterise them. A leading 20th-century authority on Puccini has described the ingredients of Sardou’s La Tosca as ‘sex, sadism, religion and art, mixed by a master-chef with the whole dish served on the platter of an important historical event.’
Sardou recommended ‘torturing the women’ as an important ingredient of a successful play. There are four corpses in Tosca, and Puccini suggested to his publisher that perhaps Sardou, who was known as ‘the Caligula of the theatre’, would insist on killing Spoletta too. BACK
The opera took Puccini three years to compose. He collaborated with Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, in the improbable and quarrelsome team which also created La Bohème and Madama Butterfly. Illica, who was a rough republican, and who connived in the deception of Franchetti, produced the structure and first draft. Giacosa, a smooth socialite, versified and polished it despite at first thinking that Sardou’s play was very unsuitable, being ‘a drama of coarse emotional situations … all plot and no poetry.’ In his view, Sardou’s final act was ‘one interminable duet.’ Even when Puccini had finished, Ricordi panicked about the third act and Puccini had to calm him down.
It has been rightly suggested that ‘where erotic passion, sensuality, tenderness, pathos and despair meet and fuse, Puccini was an unrivalled master.’ As well as being profoundly moved, we can leave the theatre humming one of those incandescent lyrical phrases, brief, simple and thus so memorable, from arias such as Vissi d’arte, E lucevan le stelle and O dolci mani. Tosca is surely secure in its place in the top ten operas.
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) came from a musical family in Lucca, a city in Tuscany. He studied at the Milan Conservatoire, where he experienced the life he depicted in La Bohème. The prominent Milanese music publisher Giulio Ricordi brought him together with his librettists Luigi Illica (1857–1919) and Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906) – the ‘Holy Trinity’, as Ricordi called them.
Puccini modelled himself on Massenet, France’s most popular composer, a mass-producer of pleasing operas including Manon. Puccini’s first successful opera was in 1893, also based on Abbé Prévost’s novel, Manon Lescaut.
At a time when the operatic heir to Verdi was being sought, the music critic and writer Bernard Shaw thought that Puccini, with his catching melodies, was the likely candidate. His main rivals, Mascagni and Leoncavallo, the composers of Cavalleria rusticana and I Pagliacci respectively, lacked sustainability.
La Bohème (1896) was followed by Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), La Fanciulla del West (1910), and Turandot. La Rondine (1917) and Il Trittico (1918) were less remunerative.
Puccini was a chain-smoker, who lived a ‘fast’ life and chased women. He eventually settled down with Elvira, who could only be married once her husband, a schoolfriend of the composer, had died. Elvira was possessive and jealous, and hounded one of the household servants, with whom she thought Puccini was having an affair. This was Doria Manfredi, who had joined Puccini’s household five years earlier, aged sixteen. She committed suicide, and Puccini and Elvira had to settle a very difficult lawsuit relating to Elvira’s behaviour.
Puccini’s great hobby was shooting birds, especially on nearby Lake Massaciuccoli near his villa, quite close to Lucca. He also had a passion for high-speed motor cars and was lucky to survive, with just a broken leg, a crash in which the car plunged down a 15ft embankment before turning over.
His unpatriotic attitude during the First World War made him unpopular. He developed throat cancer, and died in a Brussels clinic on 29 November 1924. Turandot was incomplete at the time of his death and was finished by Franco Alfano, a minor composer of operas. BACK
WHO’S WHO AND WHAT’S WHAT
The story below is based on the libretto. Certain directors may amend opera stories to suit their production.
Most unusually for opera, the action is set on a specific day at a specific time...