Tosca's Kiss: Sardou, Puccini, and the Secret Agent

Questo e il bacio di Tosca!1- Floria Tosca upon stabbing Baron Scarpia, Puccini, Tosca, II.vCONRAD'S KNOWLEDGE and use of opera has been the focus of several discussions, and as Laurence Davies has stated, knew enough about nineteenth-century opera to refer to its techniques, and even to adapt them to his own purposes (forthcoming).2 Our intention here is to extend the range to which Davies refers to include Giacomo Puccini's Tosca (1900), based upon the French play from which his librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica drew their libretto, and Victorien Sardou's La Tosca (1887), written as a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt. We wish to suggest that this work - in both its forms - may influence not only the technique but also the themes, plotting, and characterization of the murder scene and its aftermath in The Secret Agent.The Play and Opera in LondonDid Conrad ever see Tosca or La Tosca? His correspondence provides no evidence that he saw either or both works. It would, however, have been scarcely possible for anyone with a passing interest in the London theatre of the 1890s and the early twentieth century to be unaware of the play or the opera. Conrad had several opportunities to see the former with Bernhardt herself in the title-role and to hear what Bernard Shaw famously called Puccini's shabby little shocker. It was Shaw, too, who coined the term Sardoodledom to describe plays where action dwarfs character (Carner 1985: 1). For his part, Conrad described Sardou as a good mechanic when advising Edward Garnett to learn playcraft from him (CL4 428).Bernhardt's triumphant London debut in the role occurred in July 1888, the first performances having taken place at the Theâtre de Porte St-Martin, Paris, the previous November. During the play's first London run Conrad was in the Antipodes, but Bernhardt returned in La Tosca in the summers of 1889, 1890, and 1892, annually during the London seasons of 1894-99, and again in the summers of 1901-03 (Wearing 1976 and 1981).3 December 1889 saw an English language version of the play at the Garrick Theatre (Times), and a parody, Tra-la-la Tosca, or The High-Tone d Soprano and the Villain Bass, A Perversion of Tosca' by F. C. Burnard with music by Florian Pascal, ran for 45 performances at the Royalty Theatre in January and February 1890.4The accolades during Bernhardt's second season in the play were even warmer than those for the first. The Times reviewer commented that Never, indeed, has she played with greater witchery, charm, or emotional power (19 July 1889: 4). She thereafter toured the play, a staple of her annual repertoire (in French), in Canada and the United States as well as in South America. The American novelist and shortstory writer Willa Cather, who travelled to Omaha, Nebraska, to see it (Funda and Andersen 2004: 10), was so struck by Bernhardt's acting and famous voix d'or that she vividly (if with slight inaccuracy), recalls the play in her first short story, Peter (1892):Once, a French woman came and played for weeks, he did not remember her name now. He did not remember her face very well either, for it changed so, it was never twice the same. But the beauty of it, and the great hunger men felt at the sight of it, that he remembered. Most of all he remembered her voice. He did not know French, and could not understand a word she said, but it seemed to him that she must be talking the music of Chopin. And her voice, he thought he should know that in the other world. The last night she played a play in which a man touched her arm, and she stabbed him. (1970: 542)The opera based on the play was first performed in England by the Royal Opera, Co vent Garden, with the composer in attendance, on 12 July 1900, not long after the Roman premiere at the Teatro Costanzi of 14 January and the La Scala premiere, under Arturo Toscanini, of 17 March.5 It was reprised in London in June 1901 (with Bernhardt appearing in the play shortly thereafter and thus giving theatre-goers the opportunity of seeing both versions of the work in rapid succession). …

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