Tosca's Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective (review)

Tosca's Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective. By Susan Vandiver Nicassio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. [xix, 335 p. ISBN 0-226-57971-9. $45.]

There is apparently an addiction to Giacomo Puccini's Tosca that can lure a career in its wake after even a brief exposure to the opera. The author of Tosca's Rome, historian Susan Vandiver Nicassio, was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome when, with the help of a broken leg, she dropped a "normal" academic inquiry and began to research the historical background of this opera and the play by Victorien Sardou on which it is based. This engrossing book is the result of that work.

Tosca dependence has a peculiar side effect: the desire to make the opera "realer" than realistic, more vera than veristic. Nicassio's opus accomplishes this by tracking down the facts behind every detail of the plot. But she is not alone in this endeavor. Take the case of Tito Schipa Jr. (son of the famous tenor), who advocated only rock opera until the Callas-Gobbi-Di Stefano recording of Tosca (Angel 3508 BL, 1953) crossed his path: since then, he has dedicated years of his life to recreating that historic performance in computer-generated virtual reality. Witness, too, Susan Sontag's historical novel The Volcano Lover: A Romance (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992), in which the Tosca character Scarpia interacts with the real Lady Emma Hamilton. And a recent Italian book, La Tosca: Resoconto attorno a quei famosi fatti, by Giorgio Bosello (Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1997; 2d ed., 1999) out-Sardoodles Sardou (pace G. B. Shaw) by tying up every loose end left by the author. (If you ever wondered what happened to Tosca's jewels, Bosello will tell you.) Bosello's work is a fantasy, but his copious historical notes, time-lines, and contemporary maps bring his book into the same territory as Nicassio's.

What if Tosca were rewritten to be historically accurate? Nicassio informs us that the escaped prisoner Angelotti would have had the right of sanctuary in the church of Sant'Andrea and so would not have needed to flee (p. 131), and that, since there was no pope in Rome at the time, the Te Deum spectacle held there could not have included a papal procession (p. 166). Further, Cavaradossi would not have died "disperato" on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo facing a firing squad, but instead would probably have won his legal case against the state (p. 199). But even if the opera's hero had received capital punishment, he would have been hanged, and every effort would have been made to reconcile his immortal soul to the church's teachings. Certainly the condemned man would not have heard a mournfully sweet shepherd song at dawn; according to Nicassio's research, the shepherd tunes of the time were "deafening and disagreeable," ending in a "screaming monotone" (p. 226). So much for atmospheric scene setting.

There is a lot of material to deal with here: information about the opera, the play, and all the historical items. The question is how to organize it all. Nicassio's solution was to devote the first chapter to revealing how Sardou's late-nineteenth-century viewpoint colored his historical vision, and here the author's historical sophistication shines, immediately distinguishing her book from other similar attempts. The following four chapters describe the real Rome from the perspectives of the church and the city's artists, singers, and police. This first part of the book places historical research front and center and is fascinating to read. Nicassio not only corrects the factual errors Sardou perpetrated, but places those very errors within the milieu and mindset of Sardou's own time. In other words, she shows us why the distortions are there: "If the work can be seen as a historical document (and it can), that document...