Many years ago I got into a heated argument with my dental hygienist about the merits of opera. I still can’t figure out how I was able to carry on a discussion in the dentist's chair with so much junk in my mouth! In any event, the lady dismissed opera disdainfully as a spectacle disconnected from ordinary reality. “I go for things that are much more basic,” she exclaimed. “Well,” I replied with all the sang-froid I could muster, “in the second act of Puccini’s Tosca there is a torture scene, an attempted rape and a murder all within forty minutes. I can’t think of anything more basic than that.” My answer left her speechless, but it will never disarm those musicologists who harbour a great deal of animosity against Puccini precisely because they view Tosca as a grand guignol melodrama fuelled by café-concert music. The most famous and vehement of Puccini’s detractors, Joseph Kerman, called the opera a “shabby little shocker,” and expressed the hope that opera lovers would somehow, someday, come to their senses and realize that Tosca was a piece of trash. Obviously, I couldn’t disagree more. Using the technique of escalating tension worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, Puccini and his librettists have, in my opinion, created a very exciting confrontation in this opera between noble art and evil art. I would like to view Tosca with you from this angle to vindicate the composer.
The painter, Mario Cavaradossi and his mistress, the Roman diva, Floria Tosca represent art in all its nobility. They are pitted against the sinister chief of police, Baron Scarpia, whose cynical cunning and brutality make him the larger-than-life embodiment of evil. Throughout the opera, they are engaged in a struggle leading inexorably to the death of all three.
Of the three protagonists, Mario Cavaradossi is the least complex. Yet when brought to life by an outstanding singing actor, he never fails to elicit the audience’s sympathy. Mario’s presence signals the end of an era, that of the hero as Giuseppe Verdi conceived him. In many operas of the great nineteenth-century Italian composer, the tenor identifies with an ideal that transcends his personal existence, be it religion, patriotism or honour. An Alvaro in La Forza del destino, Ricardo in Un ballo in maschera or a Radamès in Aïda may have a very intense love life, but they are all committed to a value outside of their individual existences. Puccini’s hero is also an ardent idealist in his own way. Nevertheless, his ideal remains intensely personal. He will lend himself to the outside world while drawing his deepest fulfilment from the dream of beauty he succeeds in creating through his heart and imagination.
Mario’s two celebrated arias, “Recondita armonia” (“Secret harmony”) in Act I and “E lucevan le stelle” (“And the stars were shining”) in Act III, illustrate this radical change in mentality. In the first, he waxes lyrical—literally—over the mysterious harmony he perceives between the blonde, blue-eyed Marquise Attavanti he had painted one day in the church, and his black-haired, dark-eyed mistress, Floria Tosca. The Marquise had come ostensibly to pray but served unwittingly as a model for his picture of Mary Magdalene. Nevertheless, although the painting incorporates the eyes and hair of the Attavanti woman, it also bears a striking resemblance to Mario’s beloved. Enthralled by his artistic reverie, he comments on the mysterious laws of aesthetic creation that make possible the synthesis between two extremely divergent forms of beauty. Puccini’s music masterfully reflects this synthesis by harmonizing the series of downward-moving intervals that symbolize Tosca with the majestically expanding theme of the Attavanti woman based on a four-note scale. The second aria, a poignant farewell to life Mario sings an hour before his execution, reaffirms the very subjective nature of his values. Life for the painter is supremely beautiful because of the woman he loves. Tosca is not only an entrancing aesthetic vision, she embodies the earthly delights he has always cherished. As he reminisces about their nights of sensual bliss, he remembers his beloved Floria through each of his senses. The stars he saw, the perfume he breathed in the night air, the footsteps of the woman who fell into his arms, all return to him in his final moments on earth. Once more he experiences through his memory their kisses and embraces, and once more he removes the veils covering her marvellous physical presence. But now his dream of love and beauty has vanished, and he will die in despair.
Some very prominent Puccini scholars such as Mosco Carner find it incongruous that a man with only an hour left to live should abandon himself exclusively to recollections of the erotic joys he had experienced in the arms of a beloved mistress. For them, it would have been far more plausible for Mario to invoke the gods of justice to avenge his cruel death and punish his persecutors. But would it really have been? In the second act, Mario had already spewed out his contempt for the tyrannical regime that had tortured him. He had already taunted the brutal chief of police and prophesized the eventual triumph of freedom. In his final hour, it is natural for him to concentrate on the person who had mattered most to him precisely because she gave such a marvellously tangible form to his dual ideal of love and beauty.
Obviously, Mario pales in comparison to the flamboyant prima donna who so fascinates him. Puccini and his librettists were brilliantly successful in transposing Tosca’s personality from the play by Victorien Sardou to the operatic genre, especially when one bears in mind that the French playwright had designed it as a vehicle for the spectacular talents of the actress, Sarah Bernhardt. The greatest advantage Puccini’s heroine enjoys over Sardou’s is that she really sings. The composer’s music, conveyed with the throbbing urgency that only the human voice can generate, gives his Tosca an immediate intensity and power of persuasion that the playwright’s words cannot possibly duplicate. As the prima donna affirms in her celebrated second-act aria “Vissi d’arte” (“I have lived for art”), singing for her is an act of worship: “And I offered my voice to the heavens, to the stars/ With which, smilingly, they adorned themselves.” In fact, so compelling is this declaration of faith—and invention of Puccini and his librettists—that we are more than willing to overlook the heroine’s rather juvenile behaviour in the first act. Both the composer’s and the playwright’s Floria Tosca indulge in rather feather-brained jealous posturing and childish caprices. But whereas the actions of Sardou’s prima donna remain unmitigatedly infantile, the conduct of Puccini’s heroine is redeemed by the beguiling music he provides for her. The phrases in which she voices her jealous fury and swiftly changing moods have a ring of passionate sincerity. We can thus accept the operatic Tosca as an artist who is always putting on a show. Being an integral part of her temperament, her histrionics are a manifestation of her authenticity.
Various critics such as Jean-Michel Brèque and William Ashbrook view Puccini’s Tosca as the prototype of the elemental Italian woman, a species the extremely seductive and philandering composer probably understood better than many of his male contemporaries. There is a succulent anecdote I found in David Ewen’s Opera Encyclopaedia that confirms Puccini’s powers of seduction. One morning, a lady admirer came to pay him a visit at his home. Puccini was still in his dressing gown and felt rather embarrassed to receive her in this attire. He excused himself to change. He returned to the drawing room ten minutes later fully dressed, only to discover his admirer waiting for him on the sofa, fully undressed. The book doesn’t tell us what happened afterwards, but knowing Puccini, there is every reason to believe that he rose splendidly to the occasion.
While not denying the validity of this interpretation of Tosca as the quintessential Italian woman, I would propose another. I see Tosca as the archetypical diva. This term of Italian origin means literally “goddess.” It is reserved for operatic superstars. It is also applied to world-famous sopranos whose theatrics are as exciting off-stage as on. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the role of Floria Tosca was always one of the most congenial in the repertoire of the great Maria Callas. Puccini’s diva is such an exciting woman because just about everything she does has a larger-than-life dimension to it, and it is precisely his music that confers upon her various actions and attitudes their theatrical aura. In the opera, we readily accept that the heroine is always “on stage” so to speak, since her persona as defined by Puccini’s music appears inseparable from her personality. She may be always acting, but her acting wells from the very depths of her nature. Consequently, it carries with it a power of conviction that can move audiences very much.
Perhaps the most important key to understanding Tosca’s character lies in her ardent sensuality. It explains her intense love for Mario, her irrational fits of jealousy with all their disastrous consequences and—strange as it may seem—her special brand of religious faith. Love for the diva signifies an expansion of life force, a fusing of heart and mind with all the vital manifestations of the universe. As she conjures up for Mario the night of ecstasy she expects to spend with him in his villa just outside Rome, she practically stages it in her imagination. The girlish excitement of her arioso in the first act reaches a feverish climax as she invokes the forces of nature, calling upon them to join her in celebrating this erotic rite. In the third act, her imagination again soars magnificently as she evokes for Mario the vision of happiness that will be theirs once the mock execution is over. Guided by love, their pilot on land as well as at sea, their life will be a thing of beauty until, like the lightest of clouds, their souls will dissolve at death into the heavenly spheres.
With her idealistic nature, vivid imagination and awareness of her, Mario’s sensitivity to feminine beauty, it is inevitable that Tosca’s heart is ravaged by jealousy. Being a great singing actress doesn’t help matters either. Tosca has a natural propensity for dramatic posturing, and this tendency simply adds fuel to the fire. When in the throes of a jealous paroxysm, the possessive diva seems possessed herself. The most striking example of how she is dominated by irrational fury occurs during her encounter with Scarpia near the end of the first act. Tosca is so fixated on the idea of Mario’s infidelity that she simply cannot realize with what diabolical cleverness the chief of police is manipulating her in order to track down the escaped prisoner, Angelotti. She is too blinded by her rage to be aware that she may be jeopardizing her lover’s life in the bargain.
The ardent sensuality that gives rise to Tosca’s love and jealousy also accounts for the extremely personal form of religion she practices. Being a viscerally intense, emotional woman, she considers the Virgin Mary and the Almighty Himself as members of her immediate family with whom she has a very special give-and-take relationship. She expects them to be understanding and forgiving of her human weakness. The diva feels no embarrassment whatsoever in embracing her lover before the statue of the Madonna. “She is so good,” Tosca assures Mario. Nor does she think for one moment she has offended God by venting her jealous rage in the church. “He will forgive me,” she replies to a disapproving Scarpia, “for he sees that I am weeping.” Tosca expects reciprocity from them for good conduct. Her aria “Vissi d’arte” is, for me, far more a cry of anguish and despair than a prayer. She reminds God of her many acts of piety and charity. Why, then, in her hour of greatest need, does He abandon her to the sadistic, lecherous chief of police. And when she cries out, “O Scarpia, avanti a Dio” (Scarpia, God will judge us) just before leaping to her death, we can be sure that in her eyes at least, Scarpia will have far more explaining to do before the Almighty than she will!
It is significant that Scarpia, the man for whom she feels an almost physical revulsion as well as fascination, provides her with the most thrilling role of her career: the avenging angel slaying the hydra of tyranny. The words and music she spits out at the chief of police after stabbing him reflect the hatred, disgust and jubilant ferocity of a diva who submits to no one. “This is Tosca’s kiss,” she shouts when slashing his throat in this production by the Canadian Opera Company with the sharp edge of a crucifix. As Scarpia writhes in agony, she forces him to realize that on the verge of death, he is now the victim: “Are you choking on your blood,” she asks him repeatedly. “Can you still hear me? Speak! Look at me, I am Tosca, Oh, Scarpia.” And as he breathes his last, she disdainfully consigns him to non-being: “Die and be damned!/Die, die, die.” Incidentally, it is quite appropriate that Tosca murders Scarpia with the crucifix in the Canadian Opera Production. It is, after all, the symbol of the religion he used cynically to satisfy his craving for power and sex.
From the archetypical point of view, Scarpia can be interpreted as the perverse mirror image of Tosca. This is evident at the very beginning of the opera. His motif rises from the orchestra as though to cast a toxic pall over the action. This motif is musically inhuman in that it consists of a harmonic progression of parallel chords based on the whole tone scale. It sends shudders down one’s spine every time it appears. The diva summons up her artistry to celebrate life. The chief of police, very much like Shakespeare’s Iago to whom he compares himself, cynically exploits his intellectual powers to desecrate it. Tosca’s theatricality may magnify whatever she feels, but it reflects her passionate sincerity. Scarpia’s art serves to dissimulate as well as to simultaneously satisfy an insatiable need for power both political and erotic. For this reason, he cuts a more striking figure in Puccini’s opera than in Sardou’s play. In the play, we do not learn of his sexual lusts until the fourth act. Up till then, he projects the image of a ruthless religious fanatic. In the opera, both his secret motives and the hypocritical façade that disguises them reveal themselves at the outset. Like many men driven by an all-consuming ambition, he uses a system he does not really believe in. Or if he believes in it, it is only to the extent that the system will allow him to satisfy his ferociously egocentric nature. The closing scene of Act I offers us a gripping illustration of this attitude. As the crowd of worshippers are expressing their gratitude for the supposed victory of the Austrian army over Napoleon, Scarpia gloats over the diabolical scheme he has devised to ensnare both Tosca and her lover. Mario will hang from the gallows and Tosca will be forced into his arms. Mesmerized by his sado-erotic fantasy, he almost forgets he is in the church until the throng begins chanting the Te Deum. “Tosca, you make me forget God,” he cries out, kneeling hypocritically with the others as he joins them in the hymn of praise to a divinity whose existence no doubt leaves him indifferent.
At the conclusion of the opera when Mario is killed by the firing squad and Tosca leaps from the parapet to avoid capture by Scarpia’s henchmen, it would appear that the chief of police has triumphed beyond death through his evil art. He resembles a satanic divinity that you can kill yet never destroy. But it is the noble art of the lovers that achieves the moral victory. Scarpia dies as an enemy of life and beauty. Mario and Tosca are destroyed because for them life and beauty are ideals worth fighting and dying for.
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