It Sounds So Natural
“Last night I went to see Puccini’s opera Tosca. … What a work! In the first act there is a religious parade accompanied by the endless clanging of bells. … In the second act a man is tortured (horrible screams!), while another is stabbed by a sharp bread knife. In the third act we see, from the roof of a citadel, a view of Rome—accompanied by more bing-bang-bonging of bells—and then a man is shot by a firing squad.”
This is how the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler described Tosca in a 1903 letter to his wife. The description was not meant to be complimentary. Mahler, like many critics in the years after Tosca’s premiere, found the opera to be filled with cheap thrills. Yet to focus on the pejorative tone of the description is to overlook a fascinating aspect of Tosca, one that Mahler himself clearly noticed—the inclusion of “natural” sounds.
Many Italian opera composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries subscribed to an aesthetic philosophy known as verismo, or “realism” (from the Italian word “vero,” meaning “true”). The idea was adopted from French literature, which in the 19th century took special pains to tell “realistic” stories of poverty and the deprivations of the destitute. For opera composers, this new ideal was a major departure from the status quo: Since its inception, the genre had been neatly split into “serious opera,” which focused on mythological figures and ancient nobility, and “comic opera,” which depicted clever members of the lower classes outwitting their idiotic rich counterparts. Composers of verismo opera, on the other hand, sought to show the urban poor as they “really” lived, and explored areas of society previously ignored on the stage: in addition to the poor, the lower class and the criminal. As in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana—one of the paradigms of verismo opera—such characters could be driven by passion to defy reason, morality, and the law.
Yet Tosca is not a story of dire poverty or social ills, as most of the characters come from noble families. Nevertheless, Puccini wished to tell his story as realistically as possible, and in this case, that meant including sounds that would make the opera seem true to life. In addition to the bells, gunshots, and screams that Mahler mentions, audiences hear a cannon shot (when Angelotti’s escape is discovered) and a shepherd boy singing on the hills outside Rome. In fact, Puccini took pains to make the sounds as realistic as possible. He asked a priest for details about the Te Deum, the celebratory sacred hymn sung at the conclusion of Act I. He asked a musician at the Vatican about the exact pitches of the bells at St. Peter’s and even took a special journey to hear what Rome’s bells sounded like from the roof of the Castel Sant’Angelo. And the song of the shepherd boy in Act III (which, along with the morning bells, signals to Cavaradossi and the audience that dawn is approaching) is not in standard Italian but in the Roman dialect that would have been spoken by a simple local boy minding his flock of sheep.