"Tosca" and Puccini's fondness for tone poems of dawn

Puccini's three masterpieces created with librettists Illica and Giacosa (La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly) have various elements in common. For instance (as I noted in a recent post) in all three works the lead soprano character is heard off-stage before making her entrance.

Bell tower in Rome
(photo by Jorge Royan)

But did you ever notice that in all three, the third act begins with a musical portrait of dawn? I can't tell you if this was a theme dictated by Illica (who constructed plot lines) or if Puccini enjoyed composing atmospheric early-morning music and requested these scenarios.

Act 3 of Bohème begins at dawn with workers entering the outskirts of Paris with goods to sell while the orchestra paints a delicate and graphic depiction of frosty temperatures, icy snowflakes and a suitably bleak atmosphere for the sad break-up of Rodolfo and Mimi that soon follows.

Butterfly's third act (in the 3-act version most commonly staged) has a fully-developed orchestral tone-poem describing the first stirrings of life in Nagasaki as night passes to day. This includes the use of recorded bird calls, a feature that contributed to the colossal failure of the premiere performance when the audience broke into derisive laughter.

I've always enjoyed the particularly effective touch of the distant voices of sailors lading cargo onto ships in the harbor, their voices calling out the Italian version of "heave-ho": o-eh, o-eh. o-eh. (Confession: whenever I hear those sailors, it makes me think of the army of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz: "o-ee-o, o-EEEE-o". But I digress...)

As for Tosca, Puccini's procedures are interesting; he did a lot of research and took great pains to present an authentic depiction of Rome at break of day. Here's a run-down on the chief points of interest. I'm providing a link to the Callas/Di Stefano audio recording of Act 3. The timings indicated refer to that recording.

• A distant song in dialect. (1:26) Puccini again utilized the device of a far-off voice to create the early-dawn ambience he wanted, this time in the form of a young shepherd boy tending sheep in one of the seven hills surrounding the city. This is the one moment in the opera NOT written by the librettists. The composer wanted a text in authentic Roman dialect. After asking around, he selected the writer Luigi Zanazzo (who went by the irresistable nickname "Giggi") who supplied something appropriate.
• The eerie orchestral introduction to that song (1:00) This is one of the coolest moments not just in Tosca, but in all of Puccini. It's a masterstroke of subtle musical meaning. The orchestra alternates playful, whimsical figures in dotted rhythm - a foreshadowing of the boy's solo about to begin - with a sotto voce sequence of three chords: 

As marked above, those three chords happen to be the chord progression associated with Scarpia's motif as well as (as posited in an earlier post) the musical symbol of the combined power of the Bourbon monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church, which Puccini portrays as agents of tyranny and oppression.

Here's the thing, though: at this point Scarpia has been dead for a few hours. Tosca murdered him the previous evening in his apartment at the Farnese Palace.

So what are these chords doing here? The shepherd begins his solo moments later. Is he an evil, tyrannical shepherd boy, oppressing his flock? Denying justice to his sheep?

Of course not. What's happening is a master-stroke. The presence of the Scarpia chords, heard in such a whispered, fragmentary form, drained of all their intimidating sonority, clearly suggest this:

Scarpia's malevolent spirit is hovering over Rome this fateful morning in the sense that his schemes will come to pass even after his death. He remains in control, his will outlives him. His essence, contained in these chords, hangs suspended in the mist.

He lied to Tosca. The firing squad will not use blank ammunition. Cavaradossi will die. The presence of these chords can produce chills when heard in context. 

And one more item of interest in our tone-poem of daybreak:

• Bells! (2:33) Once the shepherd is out of earshot, nearby Roman churches greet the dawn with a gentle cacophony of chimes, bongs and dings. For this effect, Puccini took pains that few composers would have bothered with, all for the sake of authenticity.

Bells are percussion instruments; every orchestra carries an arsenal of them, ranging from gongs to sleigh-bells at Christmastime. But generic bells would not recreate the specific sounds of the specific bells of the specific cathedrals that can be heard from the Castel Sant'Angelo in early morning.

So Puccini traveled to Rome. He listened. He took notes: pitches, timbres, the way in which they all combined in a mass sonority. Since borrowing the bells was clearly out of the question, he brought his specs to a foundry and ordered bells made that would duplicate the real things.

This was an extravagance! Giuseppe Verdi was thunderstruck; the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (never a Puccini fan) was contemptuous, referring dismissively to the opera's "tintinabulation".

The bells die down. The jailer bluntly informs Cavaradossi he has one hour remaining to live. The sun has arisen on our hero's final moments. 

By the way, for all the attempts at natural, authentic realism throughout this piece, the jailer's pronouncement "Vi resta un'ora" is puzzling in light of the inescapable fact that Act 3 has a running time of less than thirty minutes. I guess his watch was running slow. Better get that thing repaired...

The photo above is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.