KERMAN’S DISMISSAL of Tosca as the “shabby little shocker” is hardly unique. Many find the melodrama and the character of Tosca herself perfectly ridiculous. The problem, I believe, lies in the understanding of verismo, and therefore is worth looking at not only for Tosca but for the rest of Puccini’s works and a great many other Italian works of art as well. Verismo is not “realism,” but would be better defined by the inelegant term “truism.” Thus the film director Rossellini, whom we will have reason to discuss in later chapters, once remarked that neorealism was “simply the artistic form of the truth.”
But what, as the ancient question asks, is truth? Do we Americans define it the same way as the Italians, who constantly use the motto “Se non è vero, e ben trovato”? (Roughly, “If it isn’t true, then it’s well founded.”) Can there be a difference between truth and fact? And what does Rossellini’s inclusion of the word “artistic” allow within the definition?
Verismo in film and opera (cinema being the artistic heir of the Italian genius when it fled the opera house after Puccini’s death) is not, at core, about scruffy poor people who have a tendency to shout their emotions, although that is a common component of it. Indeed, Tosca, for example, would not wholly qualify as verismo (the characters may shout, but they’re very well dressed) if that were the only definition, Yet anyone who attempts to sing it can instantly recognize the work as verismo. I suggest that at the core of verismo there is a search for the mythic in everyday life. The best definition of myth I ever came across was Norman O. Brown’s: it is an old, old story. Old, old stories are more present and vibrant in Italy—even in modern, capitalist, Americanized Italy—than they are in America. And nowhere are they more alive than in the city of Rome itself.
Looking at this dimension of Tosca might open up new (actually very old) ways of appreciating this admittedly “over-the-top” work and, by implication, the rest of Puccini’s corpus as well. Specifically, Sardou’s and Puccini’s insistence on the locale of the Castel Sant’Angelo and the presence onstage of the statue of St. Michael the Archangel caused me to wonder what issues might lie beneath this “little” melodrama. It requires a look at the background as Puccini, a nineteenth-century Italian and a fourth-generation church musician, would have seen it, which entails some discussion of Catholic Church politics and mythos and their roots in the ideas of the Roman Empire. It’s also interesting to note how incomprehensible this point of view is to the Anglo-Saxon mentality, which is the prevailing mode of thought in the world today. None of these ideas were discussed openly in Sardou’s or Puccini’s correspondence. Neither of these men were theoreticians. They were men of the theater who used only the theater to say what they had to say. They weren’t Wagner. But they do remark on their immediate rapport about the story, they are in full agreement about the symbols needed to make the story come alive, and they speak much of the Romanità (Roman-ness) of Tosca. Sardou was also quite candid about the fact that this opera would have to be written by an Italian and that Puccini’s opera was infinitely better than his play. Sardou pointed the way and Puccini found the treasure, so to speak. In order to begin to mine (and this long chapter is, trust me, only a beginning) the true Romanità of Tosca, we need to spend a little time looking at someone we don’t often think about these days, Pope Saint Gregory the Great.
Gregory was born into a notable family of the senatorial class in AD 540. His maternal grandfather was Pope Felix III (taking holy orders after his widowerhood) and his mother and two aunts were later canonized as saints. The Roman Empire of the West had ceased to exist sixty years before, and the city that had once ruled the known world and boasted a population of over a million was now a half-ruined backwater with perhaps 50,000 residents. Yet the city had not vanished altogether. The aqueducts still ran with fresh water and there were even occasional meetings of the Senate. Moreover, as Gregory well knew, there was still power in the idea of Rome. And it was the seat of the pope, which counted for something at the Imperial Court of Constantinople and even with many of the barbarian tribes who were reshaping Western Europe. In this atmosphere, Gregory began his remarkable career. He became a Benedictine monk, despite the wealth of his family, and used the family palace on the Caelian Hill (near the Coliseum) to serve meals to the poor. Despite his monastic calling, Gregory’s destiny was not the cloister or the hermitage. His talents were too worldly, and he rose in the city’s decrepit but still extant administrative ranks until he became the prefect of Rome, or, in effect, the mayor. He was noted for efficiency in this capacity, sometimes bordering on the ruthlessness that the anarchic times demanded. For example, he dealt very harshly with the slaves on his family’s large estates in Sicily. The produce of these estates was used to feed the hungry of Rome, so his motives were beyond reproach. But Gregory believed in order, plain and simple. The alternatives were apparent throughout crumbling Italy, and Gregory would not tolerate them.
Gregory was sent by the pope as emissary to the Byzantine court at Constantinople, to which Rome, in theory at least, was still subject. Gregory loathed everything about the parvenu capital: its effeminacy, its luxuriousness, its endless debates about theological minutiae, and its intrigues so excessive that we still use the word “Byzantine” to describe extreme complexity. Most surprisingly, Gregory did not speak Greek while at the capital, either from ignorance (hard to imagine in a person of his class) or, more likely, from inclination. He proudly expounded the papal position in plain, untheoretical Latin, which had legal status in that city, whose official name was, after all, New Rome.
He returned to Rome after two years. When Pope Pelagius died of the plague raging through Rome in 590, the populace and the bishops alike, we are told, acclaimed Gregory pope. Three times Gregory refused but in the end accepted, with tears and lamentations. Once installed as pope, his zeal and his abilities were almost boundless. He provided for Rome itself, and the hapless Romans knew a few years of relative peace and near-prosperity but Gregory’s vision was truly international, truly “catholic.” He sent a monk named Augustine to England to introduce Christianity to the Germanic and Celtic peoples there. Augustine’s mission, based in Canterbury, met with phenomenal success. Then Gregory wrestled with the Arian heresy, which had important adherents, paradoxically, among the barbarian chieftains of the north and west and in the Imperial Court of Constantinople. His success spelled the end of Arianism as a viable movement, while the Visigothic (and Arian-leaning) kingdoms of Spain were stamped with a Catholicism so orthodox that it survived and flourished throughout the subsequent 750 years of conflict with the Moors. Gregory turned the attention of the Catholic Church away from the eastern, Greek world toward a newer world in the west and north of Europe. Either Gregory sensed that the future of the Catholic Church lay in these new directions, or his actions caused this to be true.
This much is history, or at least as historical as anything from that murky era can be. Even scholars of Gregory have complained of the lack of a critical biography of the man. Nor would it be possible, from existing contemporary evidence, to write one. Much of what we know of him was written 200 years later by the Venerable Bede, that English chronicler-monk who is the bane of early-literature students and hardly reliable as a biographer. Yet the historical facts and issues are a problem for others: what concern us are the legends of Gregory’s life and work and their implications. Whether such things “happened” or not is quite irrelevant.
Bede himself is the source of a legend dear to Englishmen. He tells us that Gregory was moved to evangelize Britain when he encountered some young boys in the slave market of Rome. Struck by their blond beauty, he asked the race of these lovely creatures. “They are Angles,” he was told. “Truly, for they have the appearance of angels. And from what country do these Angles come?” “They come from Deira,” came the answer, citing a name for Britain supposedly current at that time. “Truly, then, they must be saved de ira” (“from the wrath [of hell]”). None of this sounds remotely like the Pope Gregory of history, who had no faith in appearances, abhorred attractions of the flesh, did not think one race was closer to God than any other, and who never used puns in his writings, let alone puns as bad as these. Yet such was the legend as the English liked to hear it, and the fact remains that he was the pope who Christianized their country. Another tradition names Gregory as the tutelary saint who will call the English nation, living and dead, to judgment on the Last Day.
Aside from whatever singular memories the English nation may have of him, Gregory is primarily remembered for his accomplishments in three areas. The first is his role in church music. Most scholars will rush to tell us that the Gregorian chant, still the official music of the Church, has very little to do with Gregory. True and false. Most of the music in the Church’s official books came from France two to four centuries after the time of Gregory, Yet it was Gregory who began to codify notions of proper church music systematically. He was tireless in his attention to detail in this area, naming eight modes that were specifically approved for liturgical use (including one, the mixolydian, that is the basis of the chords in Tosca that represent Scarpia). He wrote at some length about the importance of music in worship, and a specific kind of music that would channel the Holy Spirit to the congregants. He propagated the chant as a tool of liturgy. We know he set up several Scholae cantorum (schools of singing), in churches in Rome (the term may simply have referred to what we would call choirs). One of them was in the church he had built on the site of his former monastery, now known as San Gregorio Magno, where the choir area by the altar can still be seen. Among Gregory’s possessions that are preserved as relics in this church is a whip he was said to use on lazy or unmusical choirboys. His interest in music was intense and personal. The idea that there was morally good and bad music is emblematic of Gregory.
The second area where Gregory holds a symbolic role is as the founder of the Papal State, the monarchical, independent nation of the City of Rome and its environs. This, too, is hard to prove as the sort of historical fact that would satisfy the modern scholar: popes asserted their authority in Rome as the emperors’ power declined. By Gregory’s time, any authority in Rome would have de facto independence. Even the papal tiara, the symbol of the pope as head of state, is thought to predate Gregory. Pope Leo I, who saved Rome with a prudent payment to Attila the Hun in the middle of the fifth century, is usually depicted wearing the three-tiered tiara. (Pope St. Leo is the only pope besides Gregory to be awarded the title “the Great.” He also makes an appearance in Italian opera, in Verdi’s Attila.) Yet again we must credit legend with insights that elude hard history: Gregory’s acumen and his ability to stand firm against the emperor in Constantinople made the political notion of the Papal State a fact as well as a concept. Later representations of Gregory, including famous paintings by Rubens and Goya, invariably depict him wearing the beehive-shaped tiara.
The third memory of Gregory, and the one most patently present in Tosca, is as an ender of plagues. The well-traveled legend tells us that on the day of his elevation to the papacy, while the plague that killed Pope Pelagius raged through the city, Gregory formed the people into seven processions through the city. While they chanted the Kyrie eleison (“Lord, have mercy”), eighty of the faithful died in the streets. Finally, Gregory greeted the processions at the bridge leading to St. Peter’s, and he heard the antiphon Regina caeli (“Queen of Heaven”) sounding from the skies. At that moment, the Archangel Michael was seen atop Hadrian’s Tomb, sheathing his flaming sword to signify that God’s wrath was withdrawn and the plague was over.
None of Gregory’s writings make any reference to such an event and the earliest account of it we have dates from a few centuries later. But the legend became enormously popular throughout the plague-ridden Middle Ages. The key role of music in ending the plague made perfect sense to people who saw Gregory as the man who made music itself sacred. Several representations of the miracle are to be found from all over the continent, including a particularly beautiful one in the illuminated manuscript the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. A statue depicting the appearance of the archangel adorned the top of Hadrian’s Tomb since at least the tenth century, and it has been known as the Castel Sant’Angelo since that time. The bronze statue that is there today was installed by Pope Benedict XIV in 1748.
These three aspects of Gregory—arbiter of music, head of state, and ender of plagues—are not three discrete aspects at all to the ancient, mythic mind. They are in fact one, in that they are aspects of the Roman god Apollo. Apollo is the patron of music—not of rustic music, which belonged to Pan, nor of the theater, which was the realm of the rival god Dionysus (in Greece) or Bacchus (in Rome)—but of civilized music as represented by the seven-stringed lyre, which was sacred to him. He has the power to begin and to end plagues, as we read in the Iliad, the Aeneid, and elsewhere, by the virtues of his arrows. Music also played a role in health in the Greek mind: disease was understood as a form of disharmony. Sick people went to the shrines of Asclepius, Apollo’s son, to seek cures from finely tuned lyres. Here we might pause to remember Schaunard’s escapade in Scènes de la vie de bohème, where his repeated playing of a single chord badly on the piano is meant to drive the neighbor and her offensive parrot mad, according to the Englishman who hires him and is convinced the plan will work because he “knows something about medicine.” Even today, one hears much about the “healing power of music,” and there is no disaster that is not followed by a slew of concerts intended to “begin the healing process” for the survivors. Above all, Apollo was the patron of the political state, the patriarchalist par excellence. In his benign form, Apollo was the source of the world’s refinement, of moderation, of order, of reason, of patient methodology. In his extreme avatars, his influence was suffocating, overbearing, repressive of primal human instincts.
Augustus Caesar, perhaps the greatest manipulator of symbology in history, well understood the importance of Apollonian imagery in creating his own cult of state, which had no legal basis and needed all the symbolic help it could get. Once he even appeared at the games as Apollo, but this was considered overstepping his bounds, and Augustus later contented himself with appropriating Apollonian symbols.
Gregory’s rise to political power had much in common with Augustus’s consolidation of power six centuries earlier. Like Augustus, Gregory needed the sacred attributes of a king but could not use the name of king. In effect, he had to be both more and less than a mere king: more in that he would have authority over other kings, and less in that he could maintain the fiction of humility (princeps inter paros for Augustus, “servant of the servants of God” for Gregory). Gregory appropriated the title “Pontifex Maximus,” with all its pagan connotations, from the defunct emperors of Rome. Even the title “Vicar of Christ” was boldly expropriated from Augustus’s successor, the Byzantine emperor.
Nor is the association of Apollo with Christ gratuitous: the Ovide moralisé saw the myth of Apollo and Daphne as a figure of Christ’s obsessive love for the Church, while Dante three times calls Christ the “buon Apollo” in his Paradiso. Apollo and Christ have conferred authority on rulers at various times in European history, and both their attributes have been co-opted by European rulers. Then, as now, style equaled authority. Thus Gregory, like Augustus, could perform all the acts of a sacred king without having to call himself a king. One of the most important functions of a king is to prevent disease, and so the statue atop the Castel Sant’Angelo is a sign of the divinely ordained legitimacy of temporal, political papal rule. The statue is also an implied threat: the Archangel might just as well be unsheathing his sword as sheathing it, and plague would be the result of challenging papal rule of Rome.
Similarly, Shakespeare’s Richard II, at the moment when he is forced to abdicate, says, “Yet know—my master, God omnipotent, / Is mustering in his clouds, on our behalf, / Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike / Your children yet unborn and unbegot, / That lift your vassal hands against my head, / And threat the glory of my precious crown” (Act III, Scene 3). It is a striking image, with plague as the punishment for upending the divinely ordained legitimate political structure. Conversely, the king can bestow health, and English monarchs practiced the “laying on of hands” for the health of a subject until the Stuarts. Apollo, although not originally the sun god, became identified with the sun in antiquity, and as such was appropriated by the French king Louis XIV, the Sun King, who dared to do what Augustus recoiled from, appearing in pageants as Apollo the Sun God to centralize and legitimize his shaky political authority. Nor was healing absent from the attributes of the French kings. Even many in the crowd who cheered Louis XVI’s beheading ran to the guillotine to dip their handkerchiefs in the sacred blood for use against disease. The sun stands for power, order, and health, and the sun, like Gregory’s policies, moves from east to west.
Thus St. Gregory the Great, partly by his own savvy and partly by the accretions of time, came to be identified with the Apollonian ideals of order, reason, and legitimacy. He and his institutions also came to be identified by detractors with the toxic aspects of Apollonianism in extremis: oppressiveness, abuse of power, and everything that we would now call totalitarianism. The connection of St. Gregory the Great to totalitarianism was reinforced by Pope Gregory XVI, elected in 1831. History has not been kind to this Pope Gregory: he is remembered for his use of secret police and a general obscurantism. (In fairness, it must be pointed out that Pope Gregory XVI also abolished the use of torture, once and for all, in the Papal State.) This was the era truly represented in Sardou’s play, rather than the supposed setting of 1800. There were no police, let alone secret police, in June 1800. It would have taken weeks to approve an order of torture. Mario Cavaradossi might have been shot outright in 1800, but we would not have had the play as we read it now. Men like Scarpia ruled Rome in the middle of the nineteenth century, rather than at the start, with the full support of the retrogressive Pope Gregory XVI. He famously banned gaslights and locomotive trains from the Papal State as being “prejudicial to religion.” Furthermore, he fetishized St. Gregory the Great beyond the selection of his own papal name. He founded the Order of San Gregorio Magno, which still exists, and spoke at length of the Gregorian ideals of legitimacy and submission to authority, even at the expense of Christian charity When the French reformer Lammennais finally managed to wangle an audience with this pope, and presented him with his radical ideas for the renewal of the Catholic faith, he was disappointed to be sent away with a lecture on the virtues of obedience and given a medal of St. Gregory for his troubles. The more Pope Gregory entrenched the increasing anachronism of the Papal State, the easier it became to see all Gregorian ideals critically.
All this would have been perfectly apparent to an Italian of the nineteenth century, and, to a certain extent, to the French, who were politically central to the Rome Question throughout the era. It would have been less apparent to an Englishman, who would have a different set of meanings for the symbols in question. St. Gregory the Great is not loved by the Italian people. The name Gregory does not appear on any list of the hundred most common names in Italy, but it has consistently ranked in the top fifty in English-speaking countries, landing at thirty-seven for the twentieth century. Such lists are unreliable, but the fact remains that you can live many years in Italy without ever meeting a man named Gregorio. Of course there are other factors involved in the giving of names, but affection or antipathy for the source influences, consciously or otherwise, that name’s use or neglect.
If an Englishman (or, by implication, an English speaker, since language carries with it the baggage of history) thinks of St. Gregory at all, it is as a lover of music, an efficient administrator, and a drooling admirer of the Angles/English. A recent English-language Lives of the Popes by Richard P McBrien has appendices ranking the ten best and ten worst popes (this in itself being typical of the northern European predilection for order). Number One on the list of the best is Pope John XXIII, followed in second place by Pope St. Gregory I (the Great). No Italian could come to the same conclusion. Gregory is regarded as the founder of the Papal State. Pope John XXIII officially ended it, formally retiring the tiara as “prejudicial” (interesting word) to the true mission of the papacy. Any Roman would perceive the two men as polar opposites. As much as the English maniacally loathe the papacy, the English imagination simply does not associate St. Gregory the Great with the historical fact of the Papal State as clearly as Italians do. This is part of the reason why English speakers have consistently missed the point of Tosca.
But it’s only part of the reason. Mythic significance is more accessible to the Roman mind, even today, than to the more literal Anglo-Saxon mind. (Pasolini, for one, was convinced that the ancient sense of myth survived into the modern day most authentically among the uneducated urban subproletariat of Rome—more on him later.) And the point of Tosca is in its mythic significance. Scarpia is a minister of the Papal State, which is to say he is a Gregorian minister. In short, he is a priest of Apollo, and one who has run amok in his abuse of power. Consider his entrance in Act I and its effect on the choirboys who were having fun. It is not a stretch to recall the whip on display at San Gregorio Magno. His first line is rarely translated properly: “Tal baccano in chiesa!” A baccano is a mess, a riot, but the root of course is “bacchanalia,” or an orgy in honor of Apollo’s rival god Dionysus/Bacchus. Clearly, Dionysian rites have no place in Scarpia’s worldview.
In Greek mythology, the Olympian Council of Twelve Gods sat in serene splendor until a newcomer god, Dionysus, demanded a seat. The humble Hestia, goddess of the hearth, resigned her seat in favor of the wild Dionysus, who taught men the art of winemaking and “conquered the world” with this knowledge. The priests of Apollo often resisted the raucous newcomer, whose rites included drunken orgies. When these priests denied the divinity of Dionysus, they met their death—usually by dismemberment—at the hands of his devotees: nymphs, satyrs, and other humans inflamed with wine, variously called maenads, Bacchae, or bacchantes. Most famously, this vision of worldviews in conflict is found in Euripides’ The Bacchae, where inflamed maenads tear Pentheus, king of Thebes and a priest of Apollo, to pieces. Interestingly, the battles are not fought by the gods themselves but by their devotees. The Greeks never suggested that Dionysus should replace Apollo or rule over him, only that a complete system would have to acknowledge the divinity of both ends of the spectrum.
Tosca is the maenad who challenges the absolute rule of the Apollonian Scarpia. For starters, she is a “diva,” one of remarkably few in opera. Diva means opera star (it has come to mean any notable woman), but of course it really means a pagan goddess. Tosca is called a diva in the course of the opera (though not in Sardou’s play) by Scarpia (Act I), not by Mario. Scarpia recognizes Tosca’s mythic identity in a way that eludes Mario. Even if she had not been so named explicitly, she would still qualify as a priestess of Dionysus just by virtue of being a woman of the theater. The theater is the realm of Dionysus: the Athenian Drama Festivals of antiquity were sacred liturgies performed in honor of Dionysus, a channeling of the spirit of the earlier drunken orgies into a (barely) more respectable form when the god attained Olympian recognition. The Athenian dramas were sung to some extent—how much is not known—and accompanied by percussion and other instruments. It was the desire to recreate the spirit, if not the details, of the Athenian Festivals that led to the creation of opera itself by the Florentine Camerata in 1597. At the same time Sardou was writing, Wagner was attempting to redefine opera with his Bayreuth Festival, the clear model of which was the ancient Athenian Drama Festival. Nietzsche wrote at great length (and with some twisting of history) of the ancient Athenian rites, of the Apollonian and Dionysian urges, and of Richard Wagner as the long-awaited synthesis of these conflicting urges. Later, of course, Nietzsche choked back all his words and pronounced Bizet’s Carmen the salvation of mankind, but the damage was done and we still speak of the Apollonian and the Dionysian much as Nietzsche imagined them. To this day, people speak of “music purists” as very distinct from mere “opera fans”—a distinction of Apollonian versus Dionysian allegiances.
Nietzsche was not the only one who strove to see a resolution of the ancient conflict in the theater: infusing the theater with a modicum of Apollonian reason and moderation was a goal then and still is today. The old Tor di Nona Theater of Rome, founded in the seventeenth century by the remarkable émigré Queen Christina of Sweden in direct violation of the pope’s wishes, was in constant trouble with the censors and frequently shut down. Finally, someone had the bright idea to rename it the Teatro Apollo, and as such it flourished under papal rule until it was finally demolished in the 1880s to make room for the Tiber River embankments. But the name is an oxymoron. You can’t have an Apollo Theater any more than you can have a Bacchus Health Clinic. The name was meant, consciously or not, as a sop to those who found theater itself inherently immoral and anarchic. Perhaps this was deep in the subconscious of the people who opened the Apollo Theater in Harlem and all the other Apollo Theaters in the world as well. Even the august Paris Opera House, the Palais Gamier, was officially known as the Académie Nationale de Musique, as if they hoped no one would notice it would be an opera house. A statue of Apollo holding his lyre tops the grandiose edifice.
There is more that associates Tosca with Dionysus. Her name, Floria, is not a standard Italian name. It identifies her as a vegetation goddess, as Dionysus was a vegetation god, and allies her with all the dismemberment and bloodletting rituals once reserved for the Powers who brought forth nourishment from the earth. She even makes her entrance carrying flowers, a detail no director can ignore, no matter how iconoclastic the production. She does not shoot Scarpia, nor poison him, but cuts him open and makes him choke to death on blood. She traditionally wears a red dress in the second and third acts, as do the bacchante in paintings of Burne-Jones and others from Sardou’s era. The blood color is known to designers as “opera red.”
Then there is the whole issue of wine. In the libretto, we read that Tosca, in the climax of Act II, goes to the table to take the glass of wine Scarpia poured for her, with a trembling hand, and sees the knife. No further details. Maria Callas and the director Franco Zeffirelli famously worked out a compelling bit of stage business for this moment in an important production at London’s Covent Garden in 1964. Tosca poured herself the glass of wine, trembling, and knocked it over. Tracing the flow of the wine on the white tablecloth with her fingertips led her eyes to land on the knife. Supposedly, Callas worked for hours on this bit to make sure the timing would be exact with the music. It was a thrilling moment, and not only because it was executed with her legendary attention to detail. She imbued the wine with a greater significance than the libretto recognized explicitly. In fact, the wine reminds Tosca, as a Dionysian, of her own true identity. It is as if it reminds her that no maenad need suffer abuse from any skanky little priest of Apollo—she can always dismember him! This would explain the otherwise puzzling lines Tosca then utters: “Killed by a woman! … Look at me! I am Tosca!” Why the sudden need to identify herself? Might Scarpia perhaps have mistaken her for, say, Lizzie Borden, wandering onstage from another opera? No, this moment is a bloodletting orgy of Tosca’s self-actualization as a maenad whose trail was, as ever, blazed by wine.
Calias, like Pasolini (the only director with whom she made a film, Medea), always grasped the mythic dimension of her characters, and in fact a greatly disproportionate number of her most celebrated roles involved a pagan priestess performing a ritual: Norma, La vestale, Medea (in both operatic and cinematic incarnations). Even Lucia di Lamermoor and Lady Macbeth dwell, as archetypes, on this same plane. If there was an inherent “Greekness” in any character, Callas would reveal it, and she understood that Tosca’s Greekness is one of the attributes that put her at odds with the Westernized Gregorian, Scarpia. Their conflict is not situational. It’s not about who’s doing what to whom. Tosca never mentions Mario as she hurls abuse at the dying Scarpia. Theirs is a conflict of opposing natures.
If Tosca and Scarpia represent the conflict of Dionysus and Apollo (or Isis and Osiris, or Yin and Yang, or Gestalt and Reason, or Nature and Culture, or Id and Ego, or however one chooses to define it), then why not simply write an opera about Dionysus and Apollo? One could—some have—but this would not be the Roman way to address the issue. Everyone from Sardou to the present has stressed that Tosca is a Roman story. Surely they mean something more than the setting: Tosca is Roman in a deeper way than, say, Bohème is Parisian.
There is a line across western Europe that separates the northern and southern sectors. It is not a perfect line, much less a visible border like those prized by modern mapmakers, but it exists all the same. It follows, very roughly, the ancient border of the Roman Empire. This is also the line that divides—again roughly, with aberrations—the Protestant North from the Catholic South. Historians tend to focus on the political reasons that caused the religious rift of the Reformation, but the primary reasons were actually cultural, perhaps racial, in the broadest sense of the term, and it would seem determined, to some extent, by which countries were once part of the Roman Empire and which were based on Germanic inhabitants. The two camps, to oversimplify grotesquely, had and have two different ways of looking at things, which in turn engender different religious beliefs (rather than vice versa, as many people tend to believe if they think about such things at all).
Greek mythology does not separate human endeavors into discrete spheres of the sexual, the political, the spiritual, and so forth: all are mixed together in a holistic vision of the human condition. In many ways, the Roman mind held on to this. Bernini, the man who basically created the baroque Rome we still love to visit, caused a scandal with his statue of Saint Teresa in Ecstasy in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria. The saint is being prodded by an angel with a spear, and is frankly and undeniably experiencing a very fleshy orgasm, amplified by the shimmering ripples in her robes. The setting of the statue is even more shocking to some than the action depicted: the chapel has trompe l’oeil boxes along the sides, containing members of the Cornaro family sitting in contemplation of the miracle. It is a theater, which, in Italy, traditionally meant an opera house. The various Cornaros are not in fact watching the saint. Their heads are turned elsewhere, yet they appear to be paying attention. In fact, they appear to be hearing the miracle, as if it were an opera. The statue and setting were castigated by many for its theatricality. The melding of sexual and spiritual was shocking enough for many visitors, but it is the addition of the theatrical that threw the most rabid critics over the edge. And most of these critics were from the hordes of transalpine art junkies who descended on Rome in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Romans themselves seemed to take it all in stride. To this day, one sees pious Roman women praying in the chapel as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
When Luther preached his message of emphasis on the Word, the Germanic peoples responded. Some went even further than Luther in their literalism. The literalist message felt right to northern Europeans, and literal interpretation of Scripture (and therefore, by implication, of everything else) became a hallmark of some strains of the Protestant movement. It fell on deaf ears south of the Alps. You can’t make an Italian believe in the literal truth of anything, least of all a text. Catholic theologians maintained (and still officially maintain) the Quadriga, the fourfold layers of interpretation of Scripture (and therefore of everything else). The layers of the Quadriga are (r) literal/ historical, (2) allegorical, (3) moral/theological, and (4) anagogical. This last meaning is perhaps the most interesting for critical purposes. This split survives—is emphasized, even—in English translations of Catholic and Protestant ideas. Catholics speak in English of the Holy Spirit, a living, breathing (spira) entity, while the traditional Protestant term is the Holy Ghost, with all its implications of something that is not alive in quite the same way it once had been.
The nature of the Eucharist was the focus of a great debate that reveals the divergent predilections of Protestant and Catholic Europe. Luther favored the literal/historical aspect of scriptural exegesis, and though he believed Christ was present in the Eucharist others went further: Calvin taught that Christ was present spiritually but not physically, and Zwingli taught that the Eucharist was symbolic only, taking literalism to its natural conclusions and rejecting any other possibilities of interpretation. The literalist strain in Protestantism has at times far exceeded that of the founders of the movement. The idea one encounters among literalists is that bread and wine on the altar, being bread and wine, cannot be anything else. The Roman theologians agreed that of course they are bread and wine (meaning #1 of the Quadriga), which means that they are something else as well (#2), which is crucial for us to do over and over again for our own salvation (#3), and, since this was so many times before—at the Last Supper, the manna in the desert—then it can continue to happen all over again every time the rite is performed (#4). This is the difference between Protestant and Catholic Europe. It’s really not about the pope. It’s about the best way to interpret a text—and everything is a text.
This duality continues today and is still the chief reason “Latins” and “Anglo-Saxons” often fail to understand each other. Rome remains the place where multiple layers of interpretation are most possible, and therefore where the term verismo will have a different implication than our word “realism.” Look at the great movie Bicycle Thief. Is it a veristic, near-documentary made with an invisible, non-editorializing hand of the director about an ordinary person facing quotidian problems, or is it an allegory of the cyclical alienation of the human condition? Of course it is entirely and authentically both at the same time, which is why the movie must take place in Rome. In director DeSica’s subsequent film, Miracle in Milan, he tells a fable, clearly “framed” as such. It even has a “magical” ending, with all the homeless of Milan being chased on bicycles [!] by the police and taking off into the sky, a vision that must have been very clear in the mind of Steven Spielberg for his American übermyth, E.T. Such an ending would make more sense in the industrial Lombard city of Milan, while Bicycle Thief is only possible in the equally gritty yet mythically vibrant city of Rome.
This is why Rome has always been regarded as a sacred city. It is not, even for Catholics, because the pope lives there. There are many more convenient, pleasant places for the pope to live. That was tried. It didn’t work. No, the pope must live in Rome because it is a sacred city. Likewise, some of us were taught that Rome is sacred because St. Peter was martyred there and the Church was literally and figuratively [!] built upon him. Perhaps, but that puts the cart before the horse. Peter could have been—and nearly was—martyred in any number of spots throughout the empire. The legend says that Peter, already an old man, was leaving Rome to escape the persecutions of Nero when he encountered a mysterious stranger. Asking the stranger where he was going (“quo vadis?”) he was told, “I am going to Rome to be crucified again.” The stranger immediately vanished and Peter realized he had encountered the risen Christ. He knew he had to return to Rome to face his death. A small chapel on the Appian Way marks the spot, although I must tell you that it is usually surrounded, in classic Roman fashion, with prostitutes and drug dealers. But the point, I maintain, was not that Peter had to die. He could have identified himself as the leader of the Christians to any soldier or official anywhere and been dispatched on the spot without further ceremony. The point was that he had to do so in the city of Rome in order for his martyrdom to have anagogical resonance with Jesus’ own death. In Rome, Peter can become Jesus, or some version of him. For some reason, events and ideas in the city of Rome resonate in a unique way, and have done so for a very long time.
So the Romanità of Tosca is more than a travelogue of picturesque locations. And the fact that it is about the Sleazy Police Chief and the Jealous Opera Singer does not prevent it, in the Latin mind, from being about great cosmic confrontations. Northern Europeans would—and have—treated the same issues quite differently. Germans (and Germanics) excel at fairy tales and fables: you can tell an “impossible” story and remain a literalist if you draw a frame, so to speak, around the action and say something along the lines of “Once, in the Magic Kingdom of____,” or, for that matter, “A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….” Italians have been faulted for failing at the genres of fantasy, science fiction, or anything dealing with the supernatural. (Recently, in our homogeneous world, this is of course less so, as witnessed by the magical realism of Italo Calvino—which is, significantly, more highly regarded in America than in Italy.) The fact is that Italians have not traditionally needed to place their tales “out there” to tell tall tales. A very ordinary person walking down the streets of Rome, viewed through the methods of the Quadriga, contains all possible universes within himself or herself.
The conflict of Apollo and Dionysus appears in the opera Death in Venice, composed by the Englishman Benjamin Britten and based on the novella by the German Thomas Mann. The hero Aschenbach looks at the boys playing on the beach and has a frank hallucination of a contest between the rival gods. The dream sequence is further identified as surreal by balletic choreography. One of the very few operas in which an opera diva makes an appearance is Richard Strauss’s and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos, in which Dionysus (Bacchus) also appears. In its original form, Ariadne presented an opera based in the mythic world of antiquity in which the action was invaded by a “lost” troupe of Italian commedia dell’arte performers. It was not a success, although there were several reasons besides incomprehensibility for its failure. Hofmannsthal and Strauss went back to the drawing board and added a prologue dealing with the backstage politics before the “opera” itself. The Diva appears, and the Tenor (albeit briefly) in their “normal” forms in the prologue before they “reveal” their mythic identities as Ariadne and Bacchus in the opera-within-the-opera. At the end, we have a type of mystical marriage between Ariadne, formerly the Diva, and Bacchus. A frame—quite literally, in most productions—must be drawn around the real-life characters before their mythic identities can be explored. The Italian clowns, significantly, move freely between both worlds without any great change in their manner.
So the Anglo-Saxon critics say that Italians fail at the supernatural, when the failure is actually a different point of view. There are many cases of this in opera. Everyone dumps on Verdi’s witches in his Macbeth. They’re right. Verdi wasn’t interested in witches. He was more interested in an actual human being, Lady Macbeth, acting like a deranged witch, and he certainly did not fail in creating her character. Budden, usually astute in issues of Italian cultural perceptions, finds Verdi’s devils’ choruses in Giovanna d’Arco pathetic compared to what Weber and Wagner were achieving with the supernatural in their operas. The Giovanna devils’ music, he sniffs, “reeks of the Neapolitan café.” Quite right. Where better to encounter the Devil than a café in Naples? The idea that the Devil must wear black and act spooky is a specifically German idea: “Gothic,” as they used to say, or even “Goth,” as the hipsters now say. But since the German notion is at the root of the American mentality (even more than the English, due to the huge numbers of Americans who trace their recent ancestry to Germany), it becomes to us the right notion. As the world becomes more and more American, it becomes the only notion. All Americans are Protestants—even those of us who are not Protestants. We have complete faith in The Word. The Italians who do not rush to emulate seem to have fallen behind and gotten “lost in the past.” You can imagine the gulf this creates in German and Italian notions of opera productions, which will be explored further in the appropriate chapter.
Let’s assume that people in Rome in 1900 understood Tosca as a conflict of archetypes rather than a mere bodice ripper. What did they make of it? Above all, what did the archpriest of Apollo make of this? Pope St. Pius X was elected in 1903. He was regarded as an intellectual and had been known for piety in his time in Treviso, Mantua, and Venice. He was also a reactionary. He regarded the presence of the Italian government in Rome as a foreign occupation, railed against Modernism in all its forms, and set about to “restore all things in Christ.” In short, he was a perfect Gregorian. Only those popes who fit the oppressive Gregorian mold got canonized these last hundred years. Pius received his enrollment in the Canon of Saints in 1954 by Pope Pius XII, another Gregorian whose beatification process is being rushed through its various stages at present despite his highly questionable role during World War II. (Pope John XXIII, the most popular, charismatic, and probably most holy pope in memory, languishes in the process. Perhaps he should have held on to that blasted tiara.) Nothing was more important to Pius X than music. Among his very first acts was the issuance of a papal bull Tra le sollecitudine, the famous Motu proprio of 1903. (A Motu proprio is a bull issued by a pope who is self-moved to speak on a given topic, which shows the personal stake Pius X had in this area.)
In the first paragraph, Pius maintains the necessity of spelling out the proper rules for liturgical music due in part to the “fatal influence exercised on sacred art by profane and theatrical art,” and warns of the “pleasure that music directly produces, which cannot be easily contained within the right limits.” He lays out the principle that the Gregorian chant is the official music of the Church and all other music must be considered in how closely it “approaches in its movement, inspiration and savor the Gregorian form.” He admits the polyphony of Palestrina, saying it agrees with the Gregorian model. Those who debated Palestrina’s music in his own day (the sixteenth century, in which it was a terrific cause célèbre) would have been surprised to hear a pope say so, but Pius could hardly be so reactionary as to bar Palestrina. Besides, he would have been instantly denounced even by conservatives as ignorant and coarse, which he was not. Pius also recognizes that the Church has a role in fostering new art, but spends two paragraphs making sure that any new music “be free from reminiscences of motifs adopted in the theaters, and be not fashioned even in their external forms after the manner of profane pieces.” He then states the case bluntly: “Among the different kinds of modern music, that which appears less suitable for accompanying the functions of public worship is the theatrical style, which was in the greatest vogue, especially in Italy, during the last century. This of its very nature is diametrically opposed to Gregorian Chant… and therefore to the most important law of all good sacred music.” The theatrical meant the operatic, plain and simple. It is an issue of sound, not sight, for how else can a pope as addicted to pageantry as Pius rail against the theatrical? Then comes a list of prohibitions: women’s voices, the mainstay of the opera, are barred from church. The piano is likewise barred in a sentence where it is ranked with “noisy or frivolous instruments such as drums, cymbals, bells and the like.” The use of woodwinds is severely curtailed. Pius sent this encyclical to the vicar-general of Rome with an official letter wherein he continues his complaints about the influence of the music of “our Italian theaters” (lowercase, meaning “yours and mine,” not the royal “We”) and says, “We are overjoyed to be able to give these regulations at a time when We are about to celebrate the fifteenth centenary of the death of the glorious and incomparable Pontiff St. Gregory the Great, to whom an ecclesiastical tradition dating back many centuries has attributed the composition of these sacred melodies and from whom they have derived their name.”
None of this makes any logical sense at all unless we attribute ancient, mythic significance to music in its various forms. All of Pius’s prohibitions (women’s voices, percussion instruments—including the piano, which the musicologists assure us it is, and which is why it is lumped with drums and cymbals—and woodwinds) are immediately recognizable as instruments of the ancient Dionysian rites, both in the woods and in the theater of Athens, and therefore abhorrent to Apollo. It is not based on Scripture—indeed, Hebrew Scripture (which Gregory claimed as his basis of proper liturgical music) specifically instructs worshippers to make a “glad noise unto the Lord on cymbals and tambourines.” Psalm 150 even instructs the congregation to praise the Lord with pipes and harps and specifically “loud, crashing” cymbals! Pius ignores this as blithely as Gregory had. And what could the problem with woodwinds be except Apollo’s disdain of the rustic rites, the age-old hatred of the refined for the raw (even though woodwinds have become as sophisticated as anything else: Pius’s prejudices are based not in the modern world but in the ancient). Pius, Pentheus-like, would admit nothing of the Dionysian to his temple, and he knew the enemy when he saw it. Furthermore, the line about Italian theaters shows that Pius was not ignorant of the opera, and the opera that people were talking about in Rome at that time was Tosca. The issues at stake in the opera did not escape him. In short, the Motu proprio of 1903 is a hysterical reaction to Tosca. There have been several important papal pronouncements on music throughout the twentieth century, but the Motu proprio remains the point of departure and recently has been reiterated as a tonic against the freedoms allowed by Vatican II. The Church is still reacting against Tosca.
At this point the reader might fairly object, “But I’m not interested in the liturgical music of the Catholic Church!” Keep reading: there’s much more going on here than what Catholics listen to while praying. We’re looking at some very intelligent people exploring the meanings of music itself. And attitudes about music are never merely about music.
In our own day, the conservative Gregorian point of view is strongly articulated by no less a personage than Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. This notable has written many of the Vatican’s pronouncements on various issues, human sexuality in particular, over the last twenty years, with a consistent steering toward the Right. He has also penned two books and several articles on music, in which his tastes are apparent. Nothing would satisfy Pope Benedict more than a steady diet of Gregorian chant with occasional flings into such cutting-edge modernity as Palestrina’s polyphony. He has no stomach for the reforms of Vatican II, which in fact were only half-earted reforms (they allowed for diversity in music but still acknowledged the primacy of the Motu proprio of 1903, which gives a lot of wiggle room for conservatives). In fact, then-Cardinal Ratzinger stated plainly that only the spirit of obedience (a Gregorian virtue) compelled him to accept such reforms at all. But his greatest enemy is anything that smacks of the theatrical. He equally loathes opera and rock in the church. It’s hard to know what a man of Ratzinger’s background considers “rock music,” but he is definitely on to something. Rock has something in common with opera in that it is first of all theater and second of all musical. An extremely educated man with a fine nose for historical subtext, the erstwhile Cardinal Ratzinger wrote at some length about sacred music in precisely the same terms of Apollonian/Dionysian duality that we are employing here. He stated that only the Apollonian can have a rightful place in worship, because it elevates the spirit. Dionysian music, conversely, “drags man into the intoxication of the senses, crushes rationality, and subjects the spirit to the sense.” Whatever the parameters of proper worship music are or should be, the implication is clearly that “rational” music is beneficial to people while “sensual” music is malignant. Pope Benedict dismisses Hebraic precedence just as Pius and Gregory had. That same Psalm 150 urges “all that breathes” to praise God. Presumably, “all that breathes” includes sopranos and rock stars, and David himself speaks and acts more like an ecstatically tanked habitué of the Burning Man festival than the Platonic ideal of a philosopher-king, but no matter. Absolute authority (Pentheus and Scarpia in literature; Augustus, Gregory, Louis XIV, et al, in history) has no room for any Dionysiac uncertainty principle.
Of course, one doesn’t generally encounter rock, operatic music (whatever that means), Palestrina, or Gregorian chant in American Catholic churches. One is usually confronted with the guitar and some well-intentioned “leader of song” plugging away through the Mass. This genre is best represented by Marty Haugen, a wildly popular composer of songs for church usage. Although Haugen is himself a Lutheran, his music holds a virtual monopoly on Catholic churches in America. If you have been in a Catholic, Episcopalian, or Lutheran (among others) church in the last twenty years, you have probably heard his music. He is perhaps the most played composer in the world today.
Haugen and Pope Benedict XVI might be considered the polar opposites of the issue, but I question that. Haugen, predictably, writes and lectures much. He, too, despises the operatic, frankly blaming it for the demise of Catholic church music. He calls all Catholic music between the council of Trent (mid-sixteenth century) and Vatican II “unspiritual.” So much for Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Gounod, Dvořák, Janáˇek Poulenc, and God knows who else, but of course those composers all wrote operas as well as writing liturgical music. Their spiritual credentials are compromised. He further dismisses anything classical as elitist—a point of view that surely would have shocked Verdi, among others. The notion is that the appearance of a guitar and an unbearably sincere, unschooled, corn-fed American singer in front of an altar is supposed to imply something about the goals of that particular congregation: populist, nonelitist, and so on. The conflict of Apollo and Dionysus does not exactly follow the political divisions of Right and Left, tempting as it often is to see it in this way. And for all the intended populist intentions of the so-called Folk Mass, the guiding spirit is Apollonian. The true nature of the Folk Mass is revealed in its meticulous excision of everything remotely erotic. The need for church music to be innocuous is akin to the need for it to imitate the calm cadences of the Gregorian chant. Both represent Apollonian fears of the anarchy and sensuality that might ensue if congregants heard music that stirred rather than calmed (repressed?) the soul. The ubiquitous guitar in American Catholic churches today is nothing but Apollo’s seven-stringed lyre in its latest incarnation.
King David played the lyre like Apollo but also employed every other kind of musician and even danced in ecstatic nudity, bacchante-like, before the Ark. David knew what eluded Pius and continues to elude many: that one must seek a balance between the two poles, not try to quash one with the other.
The finale of the opera makes the case plain. Giacosa, typically, thought the idea of having Tosca jump off the parapets simply too vulgar to contemplate, and suggested a mad scene instead. Puccini would have none of it. For starters, mad scenes were not Puccini’s “thing.” He never wrote an actual one, and the one time he employed something that could arguably be filed under that heading—the finale to Suor Angelica—everyone found it ineffective. But there was more to it than that. There is no reason for Tosca to “go mad” at the end of the opera. Mario’s death is very annoying to her, no doubt, but not enough to change her character. Tosca had to leap off the Castel Sant’Angelo in order to fulfill her character.
She was not the first soprano to fly offstage at a finale. Wagner’s Senta (The Flying Dutchman) and Brünnhilde (The Ring of the Nibelung) each take some sort of redemptive jump to their deaths at the end of their respective operas. Gounod’s Sapho jumps to her death over the lost love of a young man (she isn’t that Sappho). There are others. But two are direct antecedents of Tosca, one a nonsinging woman and the other a tenor. The first requires a bit of staging that makes Tosca seem subdued by comparison. Auber’s La muette de Portici (1828) tells the story of a doomed love affair set against Masaniello’s Neapolitan uprising against the Spaniards in 1637 Just as the plot machinations become unmanageable, Vesuvius erupts. The mute girl of the title (written as a mime/dance role) brings down the final curtain by twirling out the window to her death, presumably in the lava floes below. The difficulties in staging this opera are obvious, and it rarely gets performed in concert because of the singular muteness of the lead. It is quite good, however, and in its day it was a great scandal, to say the least. The opera’s 1830 premiere in Brussels, under the title Masaniello, stirred the audience to such a pitch that a riot ensued, which in turn is credited for lighting the spark that resulted in Belgian independence from the United Netherlands. There must have been something implicitly political in la muette’s self-sacrifice.
Verdi understood the orgasmic implications of a heroic jump, nineteen years later, and applied them to his opera La battaglia di Legnano. This work was written for the Teatro Argentina (the theater where Tosca is singing, according to Sardou) in Rome at a time of great tumult. The revolutions that had upset the status quo throughout Europe in 1848 finally reached Rome itself. Pope Pius IX escaped the city, and hordes of volunteers (including Garibaldi) convened to defend the city against the inevitable backlash of the French and the Austrians. Just two weeks before the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849 was declared, Verdi’s opera received its premiere. Legnano was an out-and-out propaganda piece, calculated to move the audience to a frenzy of patriotic fervor. There is a love triangle: two friends, Rolando and Arrigo, both in love with Lida, Rolando’s wife, set against the great conflict of the Lombard League and the Holy Roman (German) Emperor Barbarossa in 1182. The parallel to current events was hardly coincidental. Rolando discovers Arrigo’s intentions just as the Lombards are uniting for the decisive battle of the title. Rather than kill Arrigo, Rolando decides to disgrace him by locking him in a tower so he will have to miss the most important battle in Italian history. Arrigo’s patriotism forbids this, however, and the tenor wraps himself in the red, white, and green Italian flag (an obvious anachronism), cries “Viva Italia!” (on a high C), and jumps out the window. He survives the fall (Verdi had discreetly written a rippling little woodwind prelude to the act to suggest that there might be a moat) but is mortally wounded at the (offstage) battle. In the short final act, he is reconciled to Rolando before he dies, and the crowd, amid celebrating their victory, pronounces that any man who would do such a thing must be a hero. The audience at the January 1849 premiere went literally bonkers. One young patriot during that run was so moved that he emulated the Big Moment, wrapping himself in an Italian flag, crying “Viva Italia!” and leaping out of a fourth-tier proscenium box to land, unharmed, in the orchestra pit below. (I cannot verify this story, but se non è vero …)
This story is often treated by English-speaking writers with a certain condescending indulgence typical of our culture’s attitude as a whole toward these cute but hotheaded and rather childish Latins. But there were other reasons why Verdi’s spectacular stage effect would have resonated with a Roman audience in 1849, meanings that continue to elude the Anglo-Saxon nations today. The battle of Chapultepec had occurred a mere two years previously between American forces and the cadets of the Mexican military academy outside Mexico City. What we call the Mexican War was, in a sense, another clash of Latin and Anglo-Saxon points of view (as was the actual battle of Legnano) transferred to a New World. It is not much remembered in the United States, but the war and especially the battle of Chapultepec continue to figure in the Mexican national consciousness today. After defeating the regular Mexican troops, General Win-field Scott attacked the hilltop Chapultepec Palace, which was defended bravely by young cadets. When defeat became inevitable, the remaining eleven cadets wrapped themselves in the red, white, and green Mexican flags and leaped off the ramparts to their deaths below rather than surrender to the yanquís The Americans won the war, but the moral victory, by virtue of this suicidal jump, remains Mexico’s. Mexicans visit the spot as a place of patriotic pilgrimage, and every year the top eleven cadets in the military academy are wrapped in national flags and symbolically entombed as national martyrs, the highest honor that can be attained at the academy. Rome, with its active diplomatic community that included, at that time, a Mexican ambassador, must have been abuzz with this story and recognized a symbolic analogue in La battaglia di Legnano. Even the flags were (and are) the same colors. Within a few months of the wild premiere of the opera, the Roman Republic was gone and there was no chance to produce the opera again except under heavy disguise, which was not successful. Legnano had to be fully itself in all its over-the-top (literally) glory or it was nothing at all. It was put aside and Verdi, characteristically, spoke of it little or not at all. But few Romans who lived through those heady days could have forgotten about the exciting events at the Teatro Argentina, and Verdi’s opera became part of the vast mythos that is the city of Rome.
With all this in mind, it seems rather impotent to criticize the score of Tosca as vulgar, crass, or turgid. That is exactly the point of the score. The notion of decorum (rather than sensual abandon—St. Gregory’s and Pope Benedict’s writings are clear on this) in music is at the very core of the Gregorian ideal, which extends into the political fact of the city of Rome and the monarchical conception of the papacy. To have written a “tasteful” score would have been to ratify the tainted ideals under attack in this work. Tosca as a Dionysian revels in an earthy vulgarity as a statement of purpose and rejects the implications of seemly music.
The much-misunderstood finale of the work illustrates this perfectly. As we have seen, Tosca climbs the parapet by the statue of St. Michael the Archangel, cries out to Scarpia to meet her before God, and jumps, presumably (in Sardou’s imagination) into the Tiber. The orchestra blasts out (fortississimo) the “big theme” from “E lucevan le stelle.” No English-speaking writer has been able to make heads or tails out of this. Kerman, whose brain apparently fevered at the mere mention of this opera, calls this the final insult in an evening full of personal violations. “The orchestra plays the first thing that pops into its head,” he says of this (as if Puccini, of all people, couldn’t have come up with another bang-’em-up melody for this moment had he been so inclined). I wonder if Kerman had the same gripe with Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, where the whole weeklong affair ends with a reiteration of the Big Theme (admittedly, one of many great themes). Other commentators have twisted common sense into absurd apologies that make Tosca a more likable gal-next-door but still miss the point in a big way, saying that the Big Theme from the tenor’s aria demonstrates that Tosca’s thoughts are with her dear departed Mario at the supreme moment. Really? She doesn’t say so. It would have been perfectly logical and within operatic convention to have Tosca exclaim, before her grande jeté, “Oh Mario! I’ll see you again in heaven!” or some such line. But of course her thoughts are not with Mario at that moment, but rather with the true representative of her eternal struggle, Scarpia. In fact her thoughts are never entirely with Mario, even when she is making love to him (“Falle gli occhi neri”). In a way, Kerman is closer to the truth. The Big Theme has meaning simply by being what it is, a sensual gush of shameless melody. The operatic word for this is slancio, always translated as a rush or even a fit. There is a better translation that is generally avoided: an ejaculation (from the Latin jacula, a spear, which in Italian is lancia). When she jumps off the parapet—away from the statue of the archangel—she is saying (1) I do not believe that Gregory and his ilk have the power of life and death over us, (2) therefore he and they are not the legitimate rulers of Rome, and therefore, (3) their authority to dictate appropriate music is nulled. A lovely, redemptive plunk on the harp would hardly have illustrated that point as well as a blasting reiteration of the Big Hit Theme. Tosca is not shocking because it is a “searing indictment” of the Roman Catholic Church—plenty of other operas do that and no one seems too upset by it anymore (Boris Godunov, Palestrina, and Don Carlos spring to mind). Directors who caricature the Church and its clergy reduce rather than augment the scope of the opera. Tosca is scandalous because it is a battle for, not against, the soul of the Church. In demanding a hearing before God, Tosca claims legal parity with Scarpia. Apollo is Christ but so is Dionysus: the man/god born of a human mother and divine father, who experienced death, harrowed hell, and rose to the heavens, seated at the “right hand of the Father,” rejected by conservative religious opinion before assuming his divine stature, and whose sacrament is wine. Tosca’s case before God is an echo of Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy, an orgasm of cosmic dimensions in a setting that acknowledges the common Dionysian provenance of church and theater. Let us recall here that Puccini said he was told by God that his vocation (his term) was in the theater and only in the theater. The curtain falls on Tosca’s orgasm of victory, a victory that is political, spiritual, and, pace Kerman, musical.
Puccini is always credited with “theatrical instinct,” but there really is no such thing. There is, instead, the ability to manipulate myth skillfully, whether conscious or not of the degree that this is happening in one’s art. Myth resonates more vibrantly in Rome than in most places, so artists use Rome to explore them, but the issues are not confined to the actual fact of the city of Rome. It’s not (only) about whether the pope or the Italian government is the legitimate ruler of Rome and the surrounding area. That was basically (although not entirely) solved by the time Tosca hit the operatic stage. It’s about differing views of human nature and human validity. Tosca’s leap is a consummate act of faith in the human condition; that the whole being, in its messy, unrefined carnality, has a right to stand before God in judgment with confidence. It’s a message of hope.