«Opera without politics?» Per una interpretazione storica (e politico-contestuale) della Tosca di Giacomo Puccini

It is not really clear why, to date, a firmly accredited and well-defended interpretation insists on pointing to Tosca as a well-known example of a “work without politics”. Twenty five years ago, the proposal put forward by M. Girardi to consider religion, as well as politics, among the main themes of Puccini’s work, caused an almost unanimous closing of ranks by Italian musicologists. What did politics have to do with art? Is art not in itself eternal, a timeless abstraction? The idea was confirmed that the massacre of all the protagonists plus a supporting actor, the escape (a rather rare result, even in melodrama), torture and all that physical and psychological sadism exercised both on and off the stage in the name of the Pope King, served mainly as a pretext for seasoning the usual plot of an opera, functional to the reiteration of the eternal sequence of cause effect love-jealousy-revenge. On the contrary, Tosca presents numerous elements of continuity with a patriotic operatic dramaturgy that runs through our whole Risorgimento; and in many respects it constitutes the most extreme, striking and perhaps final example. Puccini’s work is yet another deliberate and conscious example of the use of national history for purposes related to the urgencies of an ongoing political conflict, in that precise present of Holy Year 1900. In that case, it was a decades-long and still unresolved clash between the unified State and a religious authority that claimed a millennial right to temporal power. Not that this is very difficult to see: Tosca is the only fully anticlerical work that has climbed the top of the planetary canon of our melodramma. No other plot in our opera repertoire is so explicit in relieving the viewer from the effort of finding analogies, seeking and recomposing political overtones. The Rome mentioned in Tosca is the Rome of the popes – the critical target is there in front of us, on the stage and out in the open: nor is there really any point in looking for it elsewhere, because its name is the Holy Roman Church. Better still, it is the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church of the age of Illica and Puccini, in the late nineteenth century. Roman Catholicism as it had been bequeathed by the last of the Pope Kings, Pius IX, Mastai Ferretti, thirty years earlier as his inheritance: the promulgator of the Syllabus of Errors and the dogma of papal infallibility. The same that suffered in the aftermath of Porta Pia, but that also imposed the forced cohabitation in the same city of a pontiff–self-proclaimed a victim and prisoner in the Vatican–and a king of Italy whom he himself had excommunicated.