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which, at first, is loud, violent, and
consistently moving off the beat.
gradually diminishes into a
downward slither that ends up,
with a feeling of exhaustion, on
another tritone. This image of
disheveled flight and collapse
serves as a second harbinger
of what is to come in the opera.
The opera’s action is based
on the play La Tosca (1887) by the
Frenchman Victorien Sardou,
which was criticized at the time for
its dizzying tempo of unrelenting
action and reaction. Puccini’s
librettists despaired of making a
viable libretto from it, but the
composer was able to use daring
harmonic instability not only to
contain but also to hold together,
and even magnify, the play’s helter-
skelter ride of swiftly changing
events as part of his overall
musical strategy.
Tosca’s three central characters
all begin the drama with their lives
apparently secure, yet through an
unpredictable and unstoppable
sequence of cause and effect, all
three are dead by the curtain, in
less than 24 hours. Yet Puccini
still manages to give all three of
his chief characters their momentsof lyrical reflection, not simply as
opportunities for aria or duet but
to voice the hopes, desires, and
memories that motivate them and
drive the plot. The drama’s final
impression is of individuals hurtled
along by events over which they
have little control, and certainly far
less than they believe they have.
Its emotional and musical power
helped to redefine the English
tradition of choral music. ■Puccini’s Verismo creates a
musical naturalism that
reflects real life.He places the emphasis on
psychological reality, with
emotionally charged arias.He uses atmospheric music to
suggest a sense of character
and inner conflict.He uses familiar sounds,
such as church bells, to mimic
everyday reality.The ultimate effect is
to make the music
and drama more
personal, immediate,
and effective.Verismo
fifth (a semitone less than a fifth)
below it, resulting in a tritone (an
interval of three tones). Medieval
musical theorists regarded this
interval as highly disruptive and
forbade its use, calling it diabolus
in musica (“the devil in music”).
Puccini, who came from a long line
of distinguished church musicians,
would certainly have been familiar
with the nickname.
In a clear break with harmonic
orthodoxies, Puccini not only
uses the motif to characterize his
secular devil-figure in the opera but
also employs the theme throughout
the opera as an emblem of Scarpia’s
influence on events that take place
when he is not present, or even
alive. The impact of this is to place
harmonic instability at the center
of the musical action.Real drama
Immediately after the Scarpia
theme, the curtain rises on the
church of Sant’Andrea della Valle,
and we see the fleeing figure of
Cesare Angelotti, a political
prisoner on the run. Beginning in
another unrelated key (G minor),
the harmonic movement here is
much faster. The chord sequence,Opera and the rise of the new reality
Verismo owed its philosophical
basis to a literary movement
begun in France by the novelists
Émile Zola (1840–1902) and
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850).
It was represented in Italy by
the Sicilian Giovanni Verga,
whose short story and play
Cavalleria rusticana inspired
Mascagni’s opera of the same
name. The premise of verismo
lay in a scrutiny of the lives of
“ordinary people”—usually
urban or rural workers—in a
local and everyday setting andoften allied to a corresponding
focus on the social evils of
poverty, crime, and violence.
In opera, the new style’s
emotional extremities were
realized in taxing vocal writing,
which threw away the remnants
of the display and niceties of bel
canto (“beautiful singing”) in
favor of hard-hitting directness.
Musical continuity was
increased with the dissolution
of the old divisions between
recitative (speechlike singing),
arias, and other set pieces.ROMANTIC 1810 –1920
US_194-197_Giacomo_puccini.indd 197 26/03/18 1:01 PM