Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered Author(s): Arman Schwartz Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring 2008), pp. 228-244 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2008.31.3.228 Accessed: 20-08-2018 22:57 UTC

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH CENTURY MUSIC

Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered

ARMAN SCHWARTZ

If, seeking refuge from the frenzy of a Roman obelisks, expropriated tombs—but this recourse morning, you find yourself in the basilica of to pure fiction is remarkable: one wonders with Sant’Andrea della Valle and upon entering the what resistance (or what pleasure) the priests church turn left, you will arrive at the foot of a sell postcards of “la Cappella della Tosca,” iden- gloomy chapel concealed behind a sable gate. A tifying their church with the most anticlerical sign, with the usual pedantry, identifies the of operas. And the chapel’s double name is but chamber as the Barberini family crypt; yet it one aspect of the strange shadow cast over Rome also describes the space, more fancifully, as the by Puccini’s opera. The Castel Sant’Angelo has chapel of the Attavanti clan, the setting of the been known to hire dancers to incarnate the first act of Tosca. The surfaces of Rome are operatic ghosts who haunt the place. Perhaps thick with layers of historical revision—moved more wisely, the Palazzo Farnese keeps its doors locked to tourists, yet this only intensifies the eerie light that shines nightly from Scarpia’s supposed office. Research on primary sources was conducted at the Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Roma as well as the Centro The promise of contact with the “authen- internazionale per ricerca sui periodici musicali (Parma), tic” Rome of Tosca supports a minor industry and supported by the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Rome of morbid fascination. Any ambitious guide- Prize in Modern Italian Studies from the American Acad- emy in Rome. I am very much indebted to the extraordi- book to the city will propose a walk that re- nary generosity of the Academy, and to everyone I had the traces the paths of Puccini’s ill-starred protago- pleasure of meeting within its walls. I would also like to nists. Susan Vandiver Nicassio’s study Tosca’s thank Roger Parker, Emanuele Senici, Mary Ann Smart, Heather Wiebe, and my readers at this journal: all provided Rome leads the reader on a different sort of helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. tour, using a wealth of primary sources to imag-

228 19th-Century Music, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 228–44. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2008 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2008.31.3.228.

This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ine the daily lives of these fictional characters wrongly, that the sounds of modern Rome ARMAN 1 SCHWARTZ in vivid historical detail. To similar ends a (church bells and Latin choruses) provide un- Tosca and 1992 television production filmed the drama in mediated access to the past. Verismo the historic sites themselves. The singers were This aural specificity departs from an earlier connected with a studio orchestra via an elabo- scale of operatic value, one that had persisted rate system of headsets and microphones, and in Italy through much of the nineteenth cen- the whole thing was televised internationally tury.4 An art that prized virtuosity and melo- in real time, giving the opera the feel of an drama above all else, Italian opera had at times unfolding newscast.2 been blithely indifferent to place, creating a This obsession with authenticity began with world where Alpine peaks could dot the land- Puccini himself: Tosca’s compositional history scape of southern England, and where it was is full of letters to priests and ethnographers, conceivable for a Swedish king to be refash- inquiries about the details of Catholic rites, ioned as the “governor” of Boston. Tosca’s re- about the pitch of Saint Peter’s bell, and the jection of this model may have been inspired intricacies of Roman dialect. In the third-act by a larger vogue for “spectacular realities,” yet “depiction of the dawn,” Puccini used fourteen it also proved (at least temporarily) to be the bells in eight different locations to reproduce, first major misstep of Puccini’s career.5 The as faithfully as possible, the soundscape of the premiere in Rome’s Teatro Costanzi must have Eternal City as heard at a specific time of day seemed like an invitation for audiences to com- from a specific vantage point. In all this, and pare the sights and sounds of the stage world although a history of opera’s attraction to com- with the ambiance of their own lives, and local mercial tourism and other forms of mass spec- critics were quick to point out a host of inaccu- tacle largely remains to be written, Tosca was racies in the work (starting with the church in clearly a child of its time. Think of Verdi’s the first act, incorrectly named “Sant’Andrea Aida, whose representation of ancient Egypt alla Valle”). More significantly, the mere fact was heavily influenced by the pavilions of the of the opera’s meticulous soundscape was found 1867 World’s Fair, or of Gustave Charpentier’s to be not only unmusical, but inimical to crit- Louise, with its images of Montmartre clearly ics’ most deeply held convictions about the designed to delight the fairgoers to Paris in nature of opera itself. These early responses 1900.3 While it feeds a similar appetite for the have largely been forgotten, a sign perhaps that hyperreal, Puccini’s opera might be seen as Puccini’s values are now more completely our treading an uneasy middle ground between own. Today, Tosca’s Rome occupies a comfort- these other works. Like Aida, it tries to re- able, if at times embarrassing, place within the create a vanished world, the Rome of 1800. operatic landscape, yet something important Yet, like Louise, it attempts to do so through a has been lost in this process of assimilation. By contemporary soundscape, assuming, rightly or attempting to reconstruct some of Tosca’s early reception history here, I thus aim to open up a lost avenue into the interpretation of the work, but also to raise larger questions about the 1Susan Vandiver Nicassio, Tosca’s Rome: The Play and opera’s relationship with its historical moment, the Opera in Historical Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). and with the culture of musical modernism 2The production, advertised as “nei luoghi e nelle ore di more generally. To begin this investigation, I Tosca,” was directed by Brian Large, and featured Catherine would like first to turn down another over- Malfitano, Placido Domingo, and Ruggero Raimondi as the unlucky trio. 3On Aida’s relationship with the Paris exposition, see Katherine Bergeron, “Verdi’s Egyptian Spectacle: On the Colonial Subject of Aida,” Cambridge Opera Journal 14 4For a discussion of “realistic” sound in earlier Italian (2002), 149–59; and Gabriela Cruz, “Aida’s Flutes,” Cam- opera, however, see Luca Zoppelli, “‘Stage Music’ in Early bridge Opera Journal 14 (2002), 177–200. For a discussion Nineteenth-Century Opera,” trans. Arthur Groos and Roger of the representation of Paris in Louise, see Steven Huebner, Parker, Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990), 29–39. French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, National- 5I borrow this term from Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacu- ism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. lar Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris 436–67. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH grown path and reexamine the question of for a medium that had concerned itself almost CENTURY MUSIC Tosca’s relationship with the phenomenon that exclusively with noble characters and with suit- scholars have identified, with considerable dis- ably glamorous, and historically remote, locales. comfort, as operatic verismo. Verismo operas are easy to spot from their libretti, yet scholars have had more difficulty I explaining the relation between their musical The term verismo has its origins in Italian language and their innovative drama. Although literature of the 1870s, where it describes the it is possible to isolate a number of stylistic work of a number of writers, Giovanni Verga features shared by the composers of the so- most prominently, who attempted to apply the called giovane scuola—jagged vocal declama- “scientific” and “objective” techniques of tion, a tendency to conclude acts with massive French Naturalism to the depiction of their orchestral groundswells—it is harder to describe nation’s rural poor. When, in 1890, the young these techniques as shared responses to their composer Pietro Mascagni adapted one of subject matter. Composers like Mascagni, Verga’s Sicilian tales into his one-act opera Giordano, and Leoncavallo did not write in an Cavalleria rusticana, he set in motion a trend obviously different style when composing works that would influence Italian opera for at least with more conventionally aristocratic themes. the next twenty years. In 1892 two operas that What is more, the roots of their language can closely followed Cavalleria rusticana’s model all be found in the music of Amilcare Ponchielli, premiered: Umberto Giordano’s Mala vita, set the by-no-means adventurous composer with in Neapolitan slums, and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s whom many stars of the giovane scuola had Pagliacci, which unfolds in the backwaters of studied. Not surprisingly, many scholars have Calabria. Before long the interest in “low” sub- urged caution in any use of the term verismo. jects extended to more exotic climes, including Comparing Verga’s programmatic preface to his the Left Bank garrets depicted in Puccini’s and novel L’amante di Gramigna with the aesthet- Leoncavallo’s versions of La bohème (premiered ics of the giovane scuola, Egon Voss even in 1896 and 1897 respectively), and the world claimed that no significant affinity exists be- of Japanese prostitutes imagined in Puccini’s tween the aims of literary and operatic real- Madama Butterfly (1904) and Mascagni’s Iris ism.7 (1898). At times, these works come remarkably More recently, Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol close to the modish excesses of the Zeitopern has put the question on a new footing, by argu- popular in the Weimar Republic. Giordano’s ing, through a detailed formal analysis, that Fedora (1898) features a plot involving anar- what verismo novels and operas do share is “a chist assassinations, draws heavily on the con- poetics, as well as a practice, of anti-subjectiv- ventions of popular murder mysteries, and in- ity.” For Guarnieri Corazzol, both novelists and cludes a scene where major characters enter composers worked to undo assumptions about the stage on bicycles.6 Leoncavallo’s Zazà the proper relationship between an author and (1900), which opens in a working-class café- his characters, “lowering the linguistic level chantant, engages the idioms of Parisian popu- [of the work] to match the social level of the lar music. All this must be considered radical plot.”8 She describes this attempted collapse of

6It is tempting to imagine Giordano’s opera as a direct model for Kurt Weill’s opera buffa Der Zar lässt sich 7Egon Voss, “Il verismo nell’opera,” in Cavalleria rusticana, photographieren (1928), which also concerns anarchist as- 1890–1990: cento anni di un capolavoro, ed. Piero and sassinations of Russian aristocrats: the notorious scene in Nandi Ostali (Milan: Sonzogno, 1990), pp. 47–55. For an- which Weill’s characters listen to an onstage gramophone other important recent attempt to call verismo into ques- recording has a parallel in the second act of Fedora, where tion, see Virgilio Bernardoni, “Le ‘tinte’ del vero nel characters at a party delight in the virtuoso stylings of an melodramma dell’Ottocento,” Il saggiatore musicale 5 onstage pianist. For a broader consideration of modernist (1998), 43–68. irony in Fedora, see Emanuele Senici, Landscape and Gen- 8Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, “Opera and Verismo: Regres- der in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to sive Points of View and the Artifice of Alienation,” trans. Puccini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Roger Parker, Cambridge Opera Journal 5 (1993), 39–53, pp. 181–227. here 42, 43.

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms subject into object as the adoption of a “regres- critics, Untersteiner complained, had responded ARMAN SCHWARTZ sive” point of view. Although I will want to to the success of Mascagni and Leoncavallo’s Tosca and draw on this concept of regression below, I operas by dismissing them as “crass realism”; Verismo would first caution that Guarnieri Corazzol and it was time to bring these arguments to a halt. Voss share a basic problem. Both begin by as- “I confess that the whole question of the musi- suming the possibility of an easy equivalence cal realism of the modern Italian school strikes between prose fiction and opera and, in so do- me as a word without substance,” he declared, ing, have underplayed the differences between “and I would be happy to hear even once, in- the two media, undermining how strange and stead of idle chatter, a good definition of this unnatural the idea of operatic realism origi- verismo.”11 In the ensuing months six Italian nally was. In other words, what may be most writers published essays in response. Despite interesting in these operas are the ways in which the appearance of a debate, however, the judg- their music and staging often pull in opposite ment of these critics was unanimous: music directions, in which these works might inscribe was an abstract and universalizing idiom, and the difficulty of a tradition-bound, “irrational,” the notion of any close affinity between the art form entering a self-consciously objective style of the giovane scuola and the subjects of aesthetic order. these operas was simply absurd. The most To gain a sense of this difficulty, a critic overtly religious commentators were willing to might take his or her bearings not from novels allow for operatic verismo in a more eccentric from the 1870s, but rather from the Italian sense: since humanity, they argued, was di- musical press of the 1890s, where the topic of vided between divine and material essences, verismo was actively discussed. It is important then the dichotomy of noble music and base to note that the word does not seem to have plot might be considered a sort of spiritual real- been used, in any substantive sense, in the first ism.12 (Valeriano Valeriani, pushing this rea- reviews of either Cavalleria rusticana or soning to its bizarre conclusion, argued that Pagliacci; it was not until around 1895—after a Palestrina might be considered the greatest re- rash of new works, and a significant interest on alist of all.) But, in general, critics insisted that the part of foreign audiences—that Italian writ- the only type of musical realism was what they ers realized they had a problem on their hands.9 termed musica descrittiva, the imitation of On 13 August 1896, the Gazzetta musicale di thunderstorms and birdcalls, and that this was Milano published an essay by Alfredo hardly worth mentioning at all.13 The whole Untersteiner written in the form of “an open discussion could be summarized with the words letter to certain German music critics.”10 These of the critic Arnaldo Bonaventura: “If music cannot signify, even less can it be realistic: and

9Recently, Andreas Giger (“Verismo: Origin, Corruption, and Redemption of an Operatic Term,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60 [2007], 271–316) has in Sergio Viglino, La fortuna italiana della “Carmen” di suggested that the term verismo, as applied to opera, en- Bizet (1879–1900) (Turin: De Sono, 2003), pp. 119–46. tered circulation in the 1870s, where it referred (and, in 11“Alla musica drammatica italiana moderna viene, quasi subsequent decades, would continue to refer) to any “break senza eccezione, da musicisti e da non musicisti, rinfacciato with convention” (289). Although Giger may be correct il crasso realismo e fu ed è questo che le recò maggiormente about the earliest uses of the word verismo, it seems to danno. me that its meaning changed decisively in the 1890s, tak- Io confesso che tutta la questione del realismo musi- ing on something like its current sense. Giger’s larger pro- cale della scuola italiana moderna mi sembra una parola posal, that we expand our current definition of verismo to vuota di sostanza e sarei contento di sentire una volta include any type of late-nineteenth-century operatic inno- invece di lunghe chiacchiere una bella e buona definizione vation, is not just overly broad: it risks reinscribing the di questo verismo” (Untersteiner, “Un’accusa ingiusta,” p. very old story about Italian composers gradually freeing 121). themselves of past conventions in the service of dramatic 12See Anton Giulio Corrieri, “Pel verismo musicale,” pp. truth. 125–28; and Valeriano Valeriani, “Del verismo nell’arte 10Alfredo Untersteiner, “Un’accusa ingiusta: lettera aperta musicale,” pp. 129–31. a certi critici musicali tedeschi,” Gazzetta musicale di 13Musica descrittiva is touched on in Arnaldo Bonaventura, Milano, 13 August 1896, pp. 556–58. Untersteiner’s article “Il realismo nella musica,” pp. 133–35; and Carmelo Lo and the major responses to it are reprinted (and here cited) Re, “Sempre pel verismo,” pp. 137–39.

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH to be realistic it would have to cease being “With the excuse of realism, the true musical CENTURY 14 MUSIC music.” substance is every day becoming scarcer and The unanimity of these writers should be more pale,” Samoggia concluded.17 It was as if taken with a grain of salt. Untersteiner’s ques- Bonaventura’s worry had finally been actual- tion was couched in explicitly nationalist rheto- ized: in the process of becoming realistic, mu- ric, and few official voices were willing to con- sic had gradually ceased to be. sider the possibility that the Italian tradition It would be easy to dismiss these judgments might be under threat. Smaller, more indepen- as paranoid and conservative; yet, read in an- dent music journals wrote about verismo with other way, they are among the most perceptive a much greater sense of urgency, however, while descriptions of verismo ever written. The spe- still sharing many of the Gazzetta’s key terms. cific claims of Il mondo artistico and the Rivista A year before the Untersteiner debate, the teatrale italiana—that the new realism had Milanese journal Il mondo artistico had pub- made operatic song either implausible or sim- lished a series of hyperbolic articles with titles ply nonexistent—go a long way toward explain- like “Dangerous Tendencies” and “Opera’s De- ing some of the giovane scuola’s most distinc- cline.”15 Each was devoted to a new innovation tive, and otherwise baffling, obsessions. For ex- of the verismo school—prose libretti, plebian ample, one of the strangest aspects of Italian subject matter, modern dress—and each came music in the 1890s is that operatic plots sud- to an identical conclusion: although all opera denly begin to rely heavily on characters who was based on the unsupportable fiction of hu- are themselves professional performers. The man characters who sing, an increasingly real- trend began with the itinerant comedians in istic dramaturgy threatened to render this Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, and it continued with longstanding convention ridiculous. A long es- the cabaret singers in his Zazà, the traveling say published by Giuseppe Samoggia in the performers in Mascagni’s Iris, the professional Rivista teatrale italiana went even further, actors in Franceso Cilèa’s Adriana Lecouvreur, claiming that the verismo imperative was lead- and of course the diva heroine of Tosca. (Even ing to the very death of song: in operas less overtly concerned with conflicts between life and art, classical performers make For some time now, the music in new works has a remarkable number of cameo appearances: a tended to eliminate itself, to slip away ever more: in group of madrigalists show up at the home of the culminating points of the action it abdicates, it Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, and pianists perform abstains, in order to cede its place to parlati and to at parties in Girodano’s Fedora and in Puccini’s the explosions of an orchestral artillery that inter- La rondine.) Performer-characters had long fas- venes to resolve dramatic situations of every genre cinated operatic composers, of course, but per- in the same way: it is not rare to find entire scenes, of capital importance for the action, in which song is haps only in verismo did they become subject lacking and the orchestra fills the space . . . a con- to such sustained, intense, and systematic ex- vention, that is to say, even worse than the one ploration. Keeping contemporary reviews in which it intends to abolish.16 mind, we might describe the vogue for per- former-characters as a strategy for getting con- ventional music in through the back door, or 14“La musica, se non può significare, tanto meno può essere verista: e per essere verista dovrebbe cessare di essere musica” (Bonventura, “Il realismo nella musica,” p. 135). 15See “Il dramma per musica: tendenze pericolose,” Il mondo artistico, 31 March 1895, pp. 1–2; “La decadenza importanza capitale per l’azione, in cui il canto manca e del melodramma,” Il mondo artistico, 10 May 1895, pp. l’orchestra fa l’effetto di un riempitivo, accompagna per 1–2; and “Il costume borghese nel melodramma,” Il mondo consuetudine, vale a dire per una convenzione assai peggiore artistico, 31 January 1896, pp. 1–2. di quella che si intende abolire” (Giuseppe Samoggia, “Il 16“Da qualche tempo nei nuovi lavori la musica tende ad realismo nel melodramma,” Rivista teatrale italiana, 16 eliminarsi, ad eclissarsi sempre di più: nei punti culminanti January 1901, pp. 73–76, at 75). dell’azione essa abdica, si astiene, per lasciare il luogo ai 17“Colla scusa del realismo, la vera sostanza musicale parlati ed alle esplosioni di un’artiglieria orchestrale che diventa ogni giorno più scarsa ed incolore: è tempo di interviene a risolvere nello stesso modo le situazioni di tornar indietro” (Samoggia, “Il realismo nel melodramma,” qualunque genere: non è raro trovare delle scene intere, di p. 76).

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms for providing stylized singing with a newly natu- song in an opera otherwise noteworthy for its ARMAN SCHWARTZ ralistic ground. “realistically” discursive style. In moments like Tosca and Yet even these works bear marks of unease these, Mascagni and Puccini might be described Verismo about conventional operatic performance. Con- as trying to find a place for conventional sing- sider, for example, a scene from the first act of ing apart from the exigencies of realism. At the Adriana Lecouvreur, which is set in the wings same time, however, their placement of singers backstage at the Comédie-française. Adriana, a offstage also extends the boundaries of the vi- famous actress, has just gone onstage (i.e., off- sual: sound is used in a new way to expand and stage as we in the audience see it) to deliver an delineate dramatic space, pushing its horizon important soliloquy in the evening’s perfor- beyond the confines of the literal stage, and mance of Corneille. This soliloquy could easily making characters, if briefly, into a sort of au- have been the occasion for the sort of diegetic ral scenery.19 song that operatic composers had delighted in “Sounding architecture” might also be in- for centuries; instead, we hear not Adriana’s voked to make one final point about verismo voice, but that of the stage director Michonnet, style: its tendency to make extravagant, exces- as he describes the effects of her performance sive use of bells. Bells resounding from distant (see Adriana Lecouvreur, act I, sc. 8, “Ecco il churches were first featured prominently in monologo”).18 The music Cilèa writes for Cavalleria rusticana, where a simple tonic- Michonnet is calculatedly mundane—declama- dominant peal ushers in the opening chorus, tory, antimelodic, barely accompanied by the and the techniques of Mascagni’s “Gli aranci orchestra—and instead of a virtuoso aria the olezzano” would be closely imitated by audience is left a chain of somewhat empty Leoncavallo in the bell chorus (“Don, din, don— substitutions: offstage for onstage, absence for suona vespero”) of Pagliacci. Less mediated bells presence, narration for enactment, a man’s voice chime through a host of other works: Tosca for a woman’s, and sentimental comedy instead and Iris, as well as later operas like Mascagni’s of tragic drama. A more literal example of song Isabeau (1911) and Puccini’s La rondine (1917) “slipping away” would be difficult to imagine. and Suor Angelica (1918). A good indication of Adriana’s silence is extraordinary, but she is the importance of bells for the style can be far from the only verismo character to move found by glancing at Jules Massenet’s opera La offstage at key moments. At the very end of the Navarraise: the 1894 opera, written for Covent first-act love duet in Puccini’s La bohème, Mimì Garden, was widely considered to be a shame- and Rodolfo move into the wings to sing their less imitation of the Italian style (Shaw quipped climactic high notes. And in that opera’s third that Massenet had less written an opera than act, the lovers only intone their lush last phrase “made up a prescription”), and in its final three (including a high B) after the curtain has fallen. minutes the singers are supported by almost no The most extreme example of offstage singing other sound. Like the conceit of performer-char- in the decade is, without a doubt, Cavalleria acters, the use of bells seems to have offered rusticana, whose overture is interrupted by the composers a way around opera’s basic fiction: principal tenor, who sings an entire aria behind unlike song, unlike orchestral music, the sound the curtain. Turridu’s classically poised “Sici- of bells emanating from a source within the liana” contrasts with his more rugged discourse stage world required no elaborate justification. elsewhere in the opera, much as Mimì’s and And yet, the limitations of the conceit are well Rodolfo’s concluding phrases are flashes of pure captured in Guarnieri Corazzol’s term “regres- sion.” If bells offered composers a promise of objectivity, they entailed an equally strong sac-

18The classic study of operatic mise-en-abyme is Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University 19For an important study of the uses of the offstage world Press, 1991). The qualities that Abbate celebrates in diegetic in earlier Italian opera, see Mary Ann Smart, “Bellini’s songs—most importantly, their ability to reflect on the Unseen Voices,” in Mimomania: Music and Gesture in power of live performance—are precisely those that verismo Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of Cali- operas seem to call into question. fornia Press, 2004), pp. 69–100.

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH rifice of musical richness. Unable to sing or meta-commentary, far from optimistic, on the CENTURY MUSIC develop, bells in these operas are simply, stu- operatic reforms of the previous ten years. pidly, real. This is not, though, how Puccini’s early au- diences saw it.21 Reviews of the premiere were II harsh, critic after critic despairing that Puccini The tropes that I have been describing—the had pushed the antimusical tendencies of fascination with performer-characters, the use verismo to a disastrous conclusion. A mild ex- of offstage singing, the resource to nonorchestral ample of this line appears in the Cosmorama sources of sound—are configured variously in pittorico. Commenting on the gavotte and can- different works of the 1890s, but nowhere are tata in the second act, Gustavo Macchi noted they elaborated more extensively than Tosca.20 that “it is the orchestra, the chorus that sing The opera is littered with self-justifying perfor- for themselves, more as a descriptive element mances, from the chants and Latin choruses of of the action than as a musical interpretation the first act to the shepherd’s song of the third, of it.” “These points,” he concluded rather and bells have a nearly ubiquitous presence: guardedly, were “not the least interesting” mo- they toll the Angelus and they announce the ments in the opera.22 The Socialist daily Avanti! Te Deum; they sound Matins in the “Descrip- was more forceful. tion of Dawn” in the third act, and an arsenal of sheep-bells even trails the shepherd and his At the mute scene which concludes the [second] act, flock. When, in the second act, Scarpia opens a great void opened up in the orchestra as well, and his window, allowing the sounds of Tosca’s the curtain descended on the coldness of the entire eighteenth-century cantata to waft onstage, he public. . . . Their comments were disheartening, and initiates a little allegory about the reversal of among the greater part of the spectators there was an impression of stupor. . . . One admired the elegance traditional operatic values in the work. Tosca’s of the dialogue, one appreciated the scraps of melody cantata, with its lyrical phrases, its sustained that appeared here and there; but as for the drama, high Bs and Cs, is quite unlike anything she no one could find it. The public’s coldness persisted sings elsewhere in the opera; yet this moment in the first part of the third act, so that the prelude, of unapologetic singing is treated as mere scen- the reawakening of Rome, with the sound of bells, ery, the backdrop to Scarpia’s more “empiri- the shepherd’s interlude, and the Roman dialect re- cal” pursuits. frain passed by in silence.23 A similar case could be made for the self- consciousness of the libretto, which consis- tently thematizes the conflict between reality 21For another study of the opera’s reception, see Alexandra and art. Examples range from the trivial—the Wilson, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), discussion about the “true” woman lurking be- pp. 69–96. hind Cavaradossi’s portrait—to the pathetic, 22“In altri punti—la gavotte, la cantata interna, per Cavaradossi’s “staged” execution, which turns esempio—è l’orchestra, il coro che cantano per conto loro, come elemento descrittivo dell’azione, piuttostochè come out all too real. The opera as a whole is struc- interpretazione musicale di essa. Nè sono questi i punti tured around a similar opposition: between meno interessanti” (Gustavo Macchi, “La TOSCA del Mae- Scarpia—the arch-political realist, obsessed with stro GIACOMO PUCCINI al Teatro Costanzi di ROMA: la musica,” Il cosmorama pittorico, 3 February 1900, p. 2). signs of visual and verbal truth—and Tosca, 23“Alla scena muta che chiude l’atto, un gran vuoto si fa the Italianate performer par excellence. Given anche nell’orchestrale, e la tela scende sulla freddezza di Scarpia’s monstrosity, and Tosca’s naive good- tutto il pubblico. All’autore, agli esecutori ed al maestro Mugnone due chiamate sole. I commenti qui sono ness, we might even think of the work as a sconfortanti, nella maggior parte degli spettatori è una impressione di stupore per la delusione provata, dopo sì febbrile aspettativa. Si loda l’eleganza del dialogato, si apprezzano gli spunti melodici mostratisi qua e là; ma il dramma, il dramma non si trova. La freddezza del pubblico 20For earlier considerations of Tosca’s relationship with perdura nella prima parte dell’atto terzo, sì che il preludio, verismo, see Sieghart Döhring, “Musikalischer Realismus il risveglio di Roma, col suono delle campane, il passaggio in Puccinis Tosca,” Analecta Musicologica 22 (1984), 249– del capraio e lo stornello romanesco, passano sotto silenzio” 96; and Mosco Carner, Giacomo Puccini: Tosca (Cam- (“La ‘Tosca’ del M. Puccini al Costanzi,” [author illegible], bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 6–10. Avanti!, 16 January 1900).

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This critic’s sense of the opera as a succession culty hearing anything of substance in the work. ARMAN SCHWARTZ of empty sounds, as a musical “void,” would be Among his letters to his wife, we find this Tosca and echoed by the Fanfulla della domenica, which baffled account of one early performance: “Act Verismo provided an extravagant list of Tosca’s offenses. 1. Papal pageantry with continual chiming of “The sonatinas and cantatas from the wings,” bells . . . Act 2. A man tortured; horrible cries. they complained, “and the organ, and the Another stabbed by a sharp bread knife. Act 3. Gregorian chant, and the drums that announce More of the magnificent tintinnabulations and the march to the scaffold, and the bells, and the a view over all Rome from a citadel. Followed cow bells, and the rifle shots, and the cannon by an entirely fresh onset of bell ringing. A fire, which at times constitute essential ele- man shot by a firing-party.”26 Mahler’s com- ments in the development of the opera, are not ments could, of course, be dismissed as just enough to fill the holes left by the lack of one more instance of Germanic disdain for Ital- music.”24 ian exuberance, but, given the composer’s own Not surprisingly, given their criticisms of notorious interest in all manner of crude per- verismo quoted above, the Rivista teatrale cussion, it may be more accurate to speak of a italiana published the strongest denunciation moment of shared recognition here, a worry of Tosca’s percussive sound world. that Puccini’s music may have cut too close to home. In thirty years, or—if there is a god watching our The Tosca that emerges from these reviews poor country—even before, Tosca, together with all is many things—urban soundscape, musique the other operas of its type, will be an obscure and concrète, degree zero of musical meaning—but uncertain memory of a time of confusion in which it is not the work loved by modern audiences music was subtracted, by the logic of history, from for its lyricism and sentimental pathos. The its own dominion, from its own laws, and from common sense . . . [and someone] will remember arias and duets, the elaborate leitmotivic struc- this about the third act of Tosca: a composition ture, everything in short that has interested where there were the bells of various churches, the today’s scholars and audiences: all this was great bell of St. Peter’s, cow bells, a voice in the noted by Tosca’s early critics, but it is not what distance . . . everything was there, except for mu- they found most distinctive or important. The sic.25 question, then, is how to account for these early responses without lapsing into their rheto- Even as august and (one assumes) forward-look- ric of empty parataxis; how to describe in mu- ing a commentator as Gustav Mahler had diffi- sicological detail an opera distinguished by its lack of music.

24“Ma è certo che le sonatine e le cantate dietro le quinte, e l’organo, e il canto gregoriano, e i tamburi che scandiscono III la marcia al supplizio, e le campane, e i campanacci delle One might begin by considering in more de- pecore, e le fucilate, e le cannonate che costituiscono tail those ubiquitous bells.27 As already men- talvolta elementi essenziali nello svolgimento dell’opera, non bastano a colmare i vuoti lasciati dalla deficenza di tioned, Puccini took extraordinary interest in musica” (Giorgio Barini, “‘Tosca’ Melodramma di G. the details of Rome’s sonic landscape, allegedly Puccini,” Fanfulla della domenica, 21 January 1900). spending an evening atop the Castel Sant’Angelo 25“Fra trent’anni o—se esiste un Iddio superstite per questo nostro paese—anche prima, la Tosca, insieme con tutte le while waiting to observe the tolling of Matins, opere congeneri, sarà ricordo incerto ed oscuro di un periodo and corresponding with the Vatican—through di confusione delle lingue in cui la musica fu sottratta, per the agency of his friend Don Pietro Panichelli— fatalità storica, al dominio di se stessa, delle proprie leggi e del senso commune. . . . E il nipote più erudito, a citare about the precise details of Saint Peter’s bell. un esemplare tipico di nullaggine musicale, dopo il preludio al terzo atto di Iris che merit il primo posto, ricorderà quello al terzo atto di Tosca: ‘un pezzo dove erano le campane delle chiese minori, il campanone di San Pietro, il campanaccio delle vacche, una voce in lontananza, una 26Quoted in Michele Girardi, Puccini: His International violinata, una strombonata, un caprioleggiare di terzine Art, trans. Laura Basini (Chicago: University of Chicago . . . tutto c’era, fuorchè la musica’” (Ettore Marroni, “‘La Press, 2000), p. 190, n.47. Tosca’ di Giacomo Puccini al ‘San Carlo’ di Napoli,” Rivista 27For a helpful introduction to Puccini’s use of bells in the teatrale italiana, 16 January 1901, pp. 86–89, at 86). opera, see Girardi, Puccini, pp. 165–67.

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH Panichelli’s memoir of the composer narrates studying church bells, a historically specific CENTURY MUSIC the latter story at some length: “campanomania” that has been discussed in Alain Corbin’s influential study Village Bells.30 But the most serious difficulty was finding the pitch According to Corbin, bells had, through the of the great bell of Saint Peter’s (called er campanone) early nineteenth century, been objects of fasci- that many had tried, and failed, to guess and to nation for local communities: sites of magical decipher. I asked my friend Orlando Virgili, who power, but also of civic pride and intense affec- told me, “Do you know who would be able to give tion. (A good example of this is the Roman you precise information?” “Who?” I asked. “Old dialect name, er campanone, given to Saint Maestro Meluzzi, who they tell me has carried out minute studies in this matter.” I ran immediately to Peter’s bell itself.) By the 1870s, however, this the elderly musician, a true celebrity in matters of mysticism had largely ceded to more positivist religious music, a real Roman, and connected to the pursuits: in place of Romantic poets writing traditions of his time in the manner of [the early- odes to sonic ineffability, “specialists attended nineteenth-century church composer] Gaetano conferences on the subject and contributed to Capocci.28 specialist journals.” Bells had, in short, become another object of academic discipline, with Panchielli’s conversation with Meluzzi was a much of their original fascination lost in the success, as he reported in a letter to the com- process. As Corbin writes, “The disenchant- poser: “Eureka! I have discovered it. Maestro ment of the world and the desacralizing of life Meluzzi was able to assure me that the pitch— and the environment somehow disqualified the indistinct, confused, elusive—of the great bell act of listening to bells.”31 of Saint Peter’s corresponds to an E natural. Corbin’s history might prompt us to revisit And he promised that I can inform you of this a few familiar moments in nineteenth-century with confidence, and that he takes full respon- Italian opera. A good illustration of his earlier, sibility in this matter.”29 With its delight in enchanted paradigm appears in the last act of clerical intrigue, Panchielli’s narrative makes Verdi’s Rigoletto, where a bell announces mid- for an entertaining read, but it also reveals a night, the time that Rigoletto has appointed to more suggestive tension: on the one hand, the retrieve his gruesome package. Verdi casually bell is described as mysterious and inscrutable; notates the bell’s strokes within the space of a on the other hand, it is reduced to an empirical single measure and does not bother to support object, an instrument whose exact pitch can be its chiming with any other orchestral sound. ascertained with confidence. Verdi’s scene may seem almost naïve in its In their quest to “decipher” the mysteries of simplicity, but perhaps this is a sign that the the great bell, Puccini and Panichelli were par- composer assumed his audience would react to ticipating in a late-nineteenth-century craze for the bell’s raw force. Like the musical “thunder and lightning” effects, the wordless offstage chorus, and the weird pastoral chords—all the 28“Ma la difficoltà più seria fu quella di trovare il tono agents, in short, of the uncanny magic that della campana grossa di San Pietro (er campanone) che Gary Tomlinson has argued was originally at molti avevano tentato inutilmente di indovinare e di work in Rigoletto—the bell contributes its ar- decifrare. Ne feci parola all’amico Orlando Virgili il quale mi disse: —Sai chi ti potrebbe dare informazioni precise? chaic power to the mystery and terror of the —Chi? —Il vecchio maestro Meluzzi, che mi dicono scene.32 abbia fatto ricerche minuziose a tal proposito. Corsi A bell has a similar agency in the last scene immediatamente dal vecchio musicista, una vera celebrità in fatto di musica religiosa, romano di Roma, e attacato of Verdi’s Falstaff, where the twelve strokes of alle tradizioni del suo tempo stile Gaetano Capocci” (Pietro Panichelli, Il “pretino” di Giacomo Puccini [Pisa: Nistri- Lischi, 1962], p. 52). 30Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 29“Eureka! Ho trovato. Il maestro Meluzzi ha potuto 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom assicurarmi che quel tono squarciato, indistinto, confuso, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 293–98. inafferrabile del campanone di San Pietro risponde ad un 31Corbin, Village Bells, pp. 296, 307. <> naturale. E mi ha soggiunto che posso scriverlo 32See Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on con sicurezza a lei sotto la sua responsabilità” (Panchielli, Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. Il “pretino,” p. 52). 101–02.

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms midnight mark the transition to the dangerous by the din of bell ringing: the anticipation of the ARMAN divine sacrifice, the manner in which the vibrations SCHWARTZ fairy world of Windsor Park. Unlike in Rigoletto, Tosca and however, the Falstaff bell is accompanied by a of the tenor bell from Bourges cathedral permeated Verismo series of strangely shifting string chords. Al- the Huberts’ house, the collective rejoicing, and though the sheer beauty of this latter scene, Augustine’s enraptured state followed by her flight in response to the heavenly call of the angel, which along with its palpable delight in harmonic is also that of the wedding bell. Yet the analysis has ingenuity, reflects all that Verdi had learned in a distant feel to it as if it were a clinical record. The the forty years between these two passages, emotional power of the bell, laid bare here and one also suspects that the elaborate chromatic desacralized, is simply the agency that produces the harmonies were there for a reason: greater re- dream; it is intrinsically linked to hallucination.35 sources were needed to give bells in 1893 the same numinous force they had had in 1851. A similar case could be made, I think, for the Certainly the early reception of Tosca con- description of the dawn in the third act of Tosca. tains ample evidence that bells had lost much Despite, or rather because of, the massive em- of their former charm. The critics cited earlier pirical effort expended on realistic scene paint- treat bells as just another type of what Corbin ing, the final result is curiously unmoving, dead. terms “rough music”—equivalent to drum rolls, or (for Mahler) brutal cries—an equation that IV would have been impossible in the earlier audi- And yet, to return to my starting point, there tory discourse. And, hearing nothing but dis- is a vast distance between a literary depiction tracting noise in the opera’s bells, critics were of bells and an actual reproduction of them also echoing a widespread unease with bells in within the space of a musical work. When an- metropolitan centers. As the modern city de- other critic for the Gazzetta teatrale italiana veloped, its independent rhythms were increas- argued that Tosca “represents the hegemony of ingly found to be incompatible with the en- materialism over music,”36 he gave some sense chanted notion of communal time that church of what this distance entails: the incursion of a bells had long solidified. Urban reformers com- foreign sound world, and an alien set of aes- plained about “torture by bells” and argued thetic criteria, into the conventional languages that modern workers needed uninterrupted of Italian opera. Drawing an opposition between sleep.33 In contrast to the sense of local attach- Puccini’s empiricist obsessions and a more tra- ment captured in the name er campanone, one ditional notion of Italian lyricism (“this Latin might quote the Fanfulla della domenica: “But substance in which music is music”37), the jour- if, at the beginning of the century, Rome had nal also anticipated an argument about realist really been so atrociously infested with the opera that would be made in 1948 by W. H. sounds of bells, it would have been quickly Auden. In an essay entitled “Cav & Pag,” Auden depopulated. Who, except for a few deaf people, noted that “the difficulty for the naturalistic would have been able to live there?”34 writer is that he cannot hold consistently to Attempting to seal the case for the disen- his principles without ceasing to be an artist chanting of the sonic landscape, Corbin de- and becoming a statistician, for an artist is by scribes at length a passage from naturalist fic- tion.

Zola, the author of Le Rêve, gave a precise descrip- 35Corbin, Village Bells, pp. 305–06. 36 tion of the range of sensations and sentiments aroused “Tosca, astrazion fatta dai pochi fronzoli melodici che Puccini vi ha sparsi qua e là come per una estrema nostal- gia di musicista, rappresenta l’egemonia del materialismo sulla musica” (Roberto Bracco, “Del teatro lirico italiano: 33Corbin discusses the rise of urban intolerance for bells in sintomi di decadenza,” Gazzetta teatrale italiana, 19 Janu- Village Bells, pp. 298–308. ary 1901, pp. 54–59, at 57). 34“Ma se al principio del secolo, Roma fosse stata davvero 37“Ebbene, proprio questo essenza, proprio questa sostanza così atrocemente infestata dal suono delle campane, si latina per la quale la musica è la musica, proprio sarebbe in breve spopolata. Chi, se non qualche sordo, quest’anima d’ogni organismo musicale è ciò che i nostri avrebbe potuto resistervi?” (Barini, “‘Tosca’ Melodramma giovani operisti tendono a rinnegare” (Bracco, “Del teatro di G. Puccini”). lirico italiano,” p. 57).

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH definition interested in uniqueness.”38 This dif- note at pitch, using it as the reciting tone for CENTURY MUSIC ficulty, he continued, was even more attenu- his subsequent prayer, during which the bell ated when naturalist fiction was remade into functions as a constant pedal point. The sacred opera. mood persists until Cavaradossi appears on stage, restoring a freer style of vocal declama- The role of impersonal necessity, the necessities of tion, and the opera’s typically restless chro- nature or the necessities of the social order in its matic motion. The Angelus episode is short, totality upon the human person can be presented in but it introduces a number of devices—a bell fiction, in epic poetry and, better still, in the movies, slowing time, halting harmonic movement, dic- because these media can verbally describe or visu- tating the melodic vocabulary of the charac- ally picture that nature and that order; but in drama, ters—which will be developed more extensively where they are forced to remain offstage . . . this is very difficult. And in opera it is impossible, firstly, later in the opera. because music is in its essence dynamic, an expres- Bells make their second appearance during sion of will and self-affirmation and, secondly, be- Tosca’s and Scarpia’s first meeting (see ex. 1). cause opera, like ballet, is a virtuoso art; whatever Once again, a metrically and harmonically shift- his role, an actor who sings is an uncommon man, ing musical texture is immediately replaced by more a master of his fate, even as a self-destroyer, a stable one; the bells first pull the music into than an actor who speaks. Passivity or collapse of E (reinterpreting Tosca’s A as a B), and then will cannot be expressed in song.39 keep it there, their measured four-note ostinato underlining the action with a steady quarter- Auden’s definition of music as “an expression note pulse. Even the adversaries are overtaken of will and self-affirmation” seems to me a by an eerie sort of stasis. At the beginning of good description of the values that Puccini’s the scene, Tosca twice exclaims “Tradirmi egli liberal-democratic audiences would have as- non può!” (He cannot betray me!), and immedi- cribed to singing, values to which Cavaradossi ately before her second iteration the evening and Tosca themselves give voice. What is most bells begin to chime. Puccini’s first setting of striking about Tosca in this context, though, is Tosca’s line is naturalistic, carefully following that—despite its apparent political program— the rhythms and inflections of the verse. The its music often seems to perform the “collapse second time, however, Tosca’s voice is subtly of will” that Auden found impossible. The made to conform with the rhythm of the bells: opera’s bells are threatening not only because syllables are squeezed together, and natural of their ubiquity, not only because of their dead- speech patterns stretched out, which produces ness, but also because of their “hegemonic” a line that is both stranger and less dynamic. power over the musical action, which at times When Scarpia enters the ensemble, his melody makes the characters into sorts of singing pup- is even more exaggeratedly pinned to the bells: pets. first stuck on their opening pitch of B, and The first time a bell sounds in Tosca is near then following the texture in mock first-spe- the beginning of act I (see mm. 186–201).40 The cies counterpoint. Imitating both the rhythm Sacristan has been puttering around the stage, 6 of the bells and their distinctive off-beat phrase accompanied by his comic 8 theme, when an structure, Scarpia’s line is awkward, breath- offstage bell announces the Angelus, suddenly less, and weirdly incantatory. Opportunities for shifting the musical discourse into a more dig- (knowing) pauses after phrases like “Tosca nified cut time (marked “Andante religioso” in divina” and “Piccola manina” are studiously the score). The bell sounds a single note (an F avoided. below middle C), and the Sacristan repeats this It is credible, perhaps, that the Sacristan would unconsciously imitate the sound of a 38W. H. Auden, “Cav & Pag,” in The Dyer’s Hand and single bell resonating in the church; but Tosca’s Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1968 [orig. 1948]), and Scarpia’s possession is more difficult to pp. 475–82, here 477. explain. In terms of dramatic logic, the first-act 39Auden, “Cav & Pag,” pp. 477–78. 40All references are to the critical edition of the piano- finale is even more demonically mysterious. vocal score, ed. Roger Parker (Milan: Ricordi, 1995). The finale begins with bells sounding the

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1079 Tosca ARMAN SCHWARTZ Tosca and Verismo na - ta? No! No! tra - dir - mi e - gli - non ceived me? No! No!68 He could not do that to

Andante mosso = 100 (quasi piangendo) 1085 (almost weeping) T

può! tra - dir - mi e - gli - non può! me! he would not be un - true! (Campane) (Bells) Andante mosso = 100

(a Tosca, insinuante e gentile) (to Tosca, gently and winningly) 1089 Scarpia To - sca di - vi - na la ma - no mia la vo - stra a - spet - ta, pic - co - la ma - To - sca, oh my div - ine one, I crave to touch your hand, to touch your dain - ty

Example 1: Tosca, act I, mm. 1079–1096. pitches F and B—majestically, in whole notes— Tosca!” is set each time to the falling fourth and the two-measure pattern will serve as a B–F, and the majority of his longer phrases massive ostinato in the scene, underlying a full either begin or end on those notes. Meanwhile, 175 measurers of music. The scene begins with the orchestra also takes its cues from the bells. a rushed dialogue in which Scarpia and Spoletta The conversation between Scarpia and Spoletta intone only the pitch F, and Scarpia’s ensuing is underpinned with a series of two-measure monologue is elaborately tied to the bells’ phrases that rise and fall as the bells do, and pitches: his thrice-repeated command “Va! the rest of the music in the scene—the orches-

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TH 19 1093 CENTURY MUSIC S ni - na, non per ga - lan - te - ri - a, ma per of - frir - vi l’ac-qua be - ne - det - ta fin - gers, not out of cour - te - sy, no, but just to give you drops of ho - ly wa - ter. 69 Example 1 (continued)

tral part, the diegetic organ, the onstage cho- dominant preparation, the campanone finally rus—will also be constructed out of oscillating sounds, its tone supported by the double basses, two-measure fragments.41 What Puccini has the harp, and the contrabassoon, we cannot but written, in other words, is a crude passacaglia, feel its grim inevitability. with the bells serving as an unusually primal The bell’s E may also be prepared in a much bass. Most commentary on the finale has fo- more elaborate sense. Tosca opens, famously, cused on the contrast between Scarpia’s inde- with three triads constructed from the bass cent sentiments and the piety of the chorus’s notes B, A, and E. Puccini does not notate Te Deum, but it is also possible to hear a darker these chords in any key, and it is hard to imag- message: good and evil marching together, ine any diatonic context in which they would united behind an irrational, archaic force.42 make sense. The three chords will be repeated throughout the opera—always in the same or- V der, and rarely transposed—and they are clearly The first act of Tosca unfolds like a series of linked to Scarpia: critics have referred to them increasingly complex variations of the theme as the Scarpia theme, or as a leitmotiv associ- of bells’ power and strange agency. Yet none of ated with a related but more general concept these scenes quite prepares the listener for the like “tyranny.”43 Without disagreeing with this ambition with which Puccini evokes the great interpretation, I would also suggest that the bell of Saint Peter’s in the third act. The bell’s chords function on a level less bound to seman- pitch, recall, is a low E, and its sound domi- tic meaning, as an anticipation of Saint Peter’s nates the opening of the act, well before the bell. In its first iteration, “Scarpia’s” E chord tolling of the campanone itself. The first 127 sounds at the same low pitch level as the measures of the act are written entirely in E, campanone, and it is harmonized with an open rarely straying far from its harmonic orbit, and fifth, an interval that Puccini associates with at three points the texture is underscored with bells throughout the opera. More strikingly, simple ostinatos on E and B. When, at the end the three chords appear at two points in the of the depiction of the dawn, and after a hushed third act, which have little connection with Scarpia (who is dead by this point in the drama) but which are explicitly linked to the sound of 41For a discussion of the motivic structure of this scene, bells. The orchestral introduction to act III con- see Döhring, “Musikalischer Realismus,” p. 271. 42For an extensive survey of different ways of reading the psychology of this scene, see Vandiver Nicassio, Tosca’s Rome, pp. 155–68. Girardi is perhaps unique in his claim 43For recent discussion of the use of the chords and their that the fusion of different sentiments is part of Puccini’s dramatic meaning, see Girardi, Puccini, pp. 160–63; and point. See Giacomo Puccini, p. 183. Vandiver Nicassio, Tosca’s Rome, pp. 123–26.

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms (un picchetto, comandato da un Sergente di guardia, sale sulla piattaforma accompagnando Cavaradossi. Il picchetto si arresta ed il ARMAN (a squad led by a sergeant escorts Cavaradossi onto the platform. The squad halts, the sergeant leads Cavaradossi to the casement) SCHWARTZ Tosca and 125 7 3Largo ( = ) Verismo 4 rit. 3 4 (Campana) (Camp.) (Bell) (Bell)

130 sergente conduce Cavaradossi nella casamatta) 3 4 3 4 (Camp.) (Bell)

Example 2: Tosca, act III, mm. 125–33. cludes with a repeated oscillation of the B and melody, of course, is usually associated with A chords; the E chord only sounds, after a its later appearance in Cavaradossi’s aria “E measure and a half of silence, at the beginning lucevan le stelle,” where it appears three times, of the shepherd’s song, where it both initiates first as a setting for the words “Oh! dolci baci, an ostinato on the pitches E and B and marks languide carezze” (Oh! sweet kisses, languid the first sounding of the sheep bells (see act III, caresses). Because of this coincidence of words mm. 40–44). The three chords sound again at and music, it is tempting to describe the melody the conclusion of the shepherd’s first strophe, as something like “Cavaradossi’s love theme,” where they signal a slowing of the ostinato but other evidence mitigates against this. The rhythm (from quarter-note triplets to half notes), melody is elaborated extensively by the orches- accompanied by a stage direction that “the tin- tra before entering the tenor’s orbit, and its kling of the sheep-bells dies away in the dis- simple outlining of an E-minor scale is not tance” (see act III, mm. 58–63). Just as Scarpia’s obviously languid. Much like Scarpia’s chords, presence fades from the drama, so too does the melody is linked with the character of “his” theme: transformed from triple forte to Cavaradossi without ever becoming his exclu- pianissimo, gradually integrated into a har- sive property. monic context, and, most importantly, made This point is worth stressing because the polyvalent, loosed further from its initial con- final appearance of the theme is routinely at- notations. tacked by critics, the evidence used to seal the While Scarpia’s theme vanishes into Saint case for Puccini’s crass opportunism.44 As Tosca Peter’s bell, a strange alchemy also allows the bell to give birth to one of the opera’s other central motives. The campanone’s entrance is 44Especially forceful statements of this position include accompanied by the first statement of the Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 [orig. 1952]), p. 19; Mosco Carner, opera’s most famous melody: structured around Puccini: A Critical Biography (New York: Knopf, 1959), the pitches E and B, making prominent use of pp. 377–78; and Charles Osborne, The Complete Operas of “chiming” fourths and fifths, and always sup- Puccini: A Critical Guide (London: Gollancz, 1981), p. 143. Julian Budden’s recent study is typically more fair- ported by a pedal tone, it seems to arise from minded: see Puccini: His Life and Works (Oxford: Oxford the partials of the bell itself (see ex. 2). This University Press, 2002), pp. 221–22.

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH jumps from the Castel Sant’Angelo—“throws chaic sound that interrupts the normal flow of CENTURY MUSIC herself into the void,” as the libretto puts it— time, drawing music into an undifferentiated the full orchestra plays the melody for one last stasis, and his other observations—that, sus- time, now at full volume. If we associate the pended in motion, sound becomes a sort of theme with Cavaradossi, this reprise makes space; that the freeing of sonority is linked to a little sense: there is no reason to be reminded renunciation of subjective autonomy—seem of his erotic reverie during Tosca’s suicide. If, equally apt. however, we associate the melody with Saint What interests me most about Adorno’s ar- Peter’s bell, and, by extension, the entire sonic gument, though, is his attempt to link Wagner’s landscape of Rome, then Puccini’s use of the fascination with pure sonority to later develop- tune seems rather more appropriate. Disappear- ments in twentieth-century music. At one point ing into the scenery—into the void, you might he notes that Wagner’s style “immortalizes the say, left by the lack of music—Tosca fulfills moment between the death of Romanticism the tendency of all characters in the opera to be and the birth of realism,” and at another he overtaken by primal sound, and the bell theme attempts to connect Wagner’s primal sounds rises up in the final moments to place its grim with the more brutal ones that would erupt in seal on the process. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.46 Putting these two observations together, we might describe Tosca VI as a realist stopping point between Wagner’s The best description of Tosca that I have Romantic archaism and the primitivism of come across appears—somewhat improbably, Stravinsky: as empirical objects, Puccini’s bells and certainly unintentionally—in Theodor W. look back to the faded magic of Wagner’s mythic Adorno’s book In Search of Wagner. In the worlds, while also pointing the way to the dark course of a typically abstruse attempt to de- biologism that would soon fascinate European scribe Wagner’s “regressive” style, Adorno culture. Less fancifully, Tosca might be named writes: as a key precedent for the fascination with un- The really productive element in Wagner is seen at mediated sound that would soon form such an the moments when the subject abdicates sovereignty important part of Italian Futurist aesthetics. It and passively abandons itself to the archaic, the in- is not a long distance from early descriptions of stinctual—the element which, precisely because it Puccini’s opera to a passage like this, taken has been emancipated, renounces its now unattain- from Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto. able claim to give meaningful shape to the passage of time. This element, with its two dimensions of Let us cross a great modern capital, with our ears harmony and colour, is sonority. Through sonority more alert than our eyes, and we will enjoy distin- time seems transfixed in space, and while as har- guishing the sucking of water, air, and gas in metal- mony it “fills” space, the notion of colour, for which lic pipes, the rumbling of motors that breathe and musical theory has no better name, is directly bor- pulsate with undeniable animality, the throbbing of rowed from the realm of visual space. At the same it valves, the in and out of pistons, the shrieking of is mere sonority which actually represents that mechanical saws, the bouncing of trams on tracks, unarticulated natural state into which Wagner dis- the cracking of whips, the flapping of awnings and solves.45 flags.47 What Adorno seems to have mind here is Wagner’s use of piquant but nonfunctional har- 46See Adorno, In Search of Wagner: “Despite a profound monic complexes, but his description of “mere affinity in their concern with the prehistoric, or perhaps even because of it, Stravinsky regards himself as the com- sonority” could be applied, with remarkably plete antipode of Wagner. Stravinsky is inexhaustible in little violence, to Puccini’s bells. This is most finding new forms for regression; in his aesthetic ideology, obviously true in Adorno’s evocation of an ar- as in the ideology of Fascism, the concept of progress is repudiated. Wagner, however, living a century earlier and rooted in a liberalism whose own atavism he anticipated, would like to present the regressive element as progress, 45Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney the static as the dynamic” (p. 51). Livingstone, intro. Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2005 [orig. 47Luigi Russolo, “L’arte dei rumori,” in Marinetti e i 1952]), pp. 52, 80. futuristi, ed. Luciano de Maria (Milan: Garzanti, 1994), pp.

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Russolo, it is worth noting, wrote these words cinema, Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta, ARMAN SCHWARTZ in response to a concert of Futurist music per- draws on the plot of Puccini’s opera, pitting a Tosca and formed at Tosca’s own Teatro Costanzi. barbarous police chief against a character meant Verismo Of course, the Futurists despised Puccini. to embody the strength and beauty of Italian They loathed his commercial success, his sen- womanhood. But this is less an homage to Tosca timentality, his embodiment of all they found than a staging of the distance—political as wrong with the Italian liberal state.48 There is, well as aesthetic—between neo-Realism and then, a simple, revisionist pleasure to be had in verismo. In marked contrast to Puccini’s opera, arguing for common ground between antipo- Rossellini’s film does not linger on tourist at- des. Yet Puccini’s modernity is not entirely to tractions. Spectacle, however “realistic,” is be celebrated. Russolo had high praise for “the avoided, and there is no vicarious pleasure to extremely new sounds of modern war,”49 and it be had in the film’s ghastly equivalent to the was clearly their cult of primal force that drew scene of Cavaradossi’s torture. so many Futurists to Italian fascism. Although Recent rewritings of Tosca help remind us Puccini died before Mussolini’s final imposi- that Puccini’s opera is a deeply ambivalent tion of a dictatorship, Tosca does share a real work, and perhaps it is this very confusion that affinity with many of the more sinister works testifies most eloquently to its time, while it of the fascist era, whether Italian Futurism or also explains some of its continued grip on that dark blend of mechanicity and archaism audiences. The opera simultaneously celebrates we associate with Carmina Burana. freedom and denies autonomy to its characters, Recently it has become common to praise embraces realism and calls its value into ques- Tosca as a critique of fascism avant la lettre. tion, provides the most loving portrait of a diva Both critics and stage directors have seized on ever created within an opera and somehow rel- Scarpia’s fusing of religious spectacle with state- ishes in her demise. If, seeking refuge from a sanctioned violence; they find it an anticipa- haunted city, you board a train heading north, tion of Mussolini’s own theater of power.50 you will hear a conductor call out “Civita- Cavaradossi’s resistance thus looks all the more vecchia,” and perhaps you will be reminded of heroic: it is also Puccini’s resistance against Tito Gobbi’s intonation when he sings that the tide of Italian history. Yet this interpreta- name. You may feel a chill. But was that l tion is perhaps overly optimistic, overlooking, a brush with fiction, or with the real? as I hope to have shown, some of the more complex messages sent out by the opera’s score. Abstract. It is telling that, in the immediate aftermath of This article offers a new interpretation of the oper- Mussolini’s regime, Tosca’s politics seem to atic phenomenon known as verismo, and of the rela- have been viewed in a rather more skeptical tionship of Puccini’s Tosca with that movement. In light. The first masterpiece of Italian postwar contrast to previous scholarship on verismo, which often treats the relationship between literature and music as transparent, I stress that marrying empiri- cist aesthetics to traditional operatic values was a 92–100. “Attraversiamo una grande capitale moderna, con highly unnatural process. I suggest that Italian opera le orecchie più attente che gli occhi, e godremo nel in the 1890s was pushed to a sort of crisis point, and distinguere i risucchi d’acqua, d’aria o di gas nei tubi metallici, il borbottio dei motori che fiatano e pulsano con that the very act of singing could no longer be taken una indiscutibile animalità, il palpitare delle valvole, as self-evident. Composers developed a set of new l’andirivieni degli stantuffi, gli stridori delle seghe techniques—offstage song, performer-characters, an meccaniche, i balzi dei tram sulle rotaie, lo schioccar delle extreme reliance on bells—to deal with this sudden fruste, il garrire delle tende e delle bandiere” (p. 95). 48For one Futurist critique of Puccini and the Italian music untenability of operatic convention. All of these tech- industry, see Francesco Balilla Pratella, “Manifesto dei niques were elaborated most fully in Tosca, and the musicisti futuristi,” in Marinetti e i futuristi, pp. 47–53. opera might be read as an allegory of the verismo 49“Nè bisogna dimenticare i rumori nuovissimi della Guerra moment, embodying the conflict between hard-nosed moderna” (Russolo, “L’arte dei rumori,” p. 96). realism and unapologetic singing in its two antago- 50See Girardi, Puccini, pp. 191–94; and Anthony Arblaster, Viva la libertà!: Politics in Opera (London: Verso, 1992), nists: Baron Scarpia and Floria Tosca. The plot clearly pp. 245–62. endorses Tosca’s position, but a close reading of the

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This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:57:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH opera’s music suggests a rather different interpreta- despite its overt celebration of individual freedom, CENTURY tion. By focusing on the role of bells in the opera, I and its much-lauded critique of state-sanctioned vio- MUSIC argue that realistic sound often overwhelms the au- lence—Tosca exhibits an antisubjective impulse that tonomy of the characters, at times seeming to col- has much in common with other “Fascist” and lapse them into the scenery itself. Early critics were “proto-Fascist” texts. disturbed by this aspect of the music. Listening to Key words: verismo, Tosca, bells, reception history, the opera with their ears may help us realize that— futurism

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David Trippett: Après une Lecture Liszt: Virtuosity and Werktreue in the “Dante” Sonata

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