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71 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An opera lover's delight!, November 22, 1999
This book is wonderful! The author is a former opera singer who has sung the role of Tosca; now she is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. In the book, she discusses the historical background of the opera and the play on which it was based, emphasizing the importance of the Church in Rome, and the conflict between Church and State. Then, in three chapters called "The Painter's Rome", "The Singer's Rome", and "The Policeman's Rome", she talks about Rome as each of the main characters of the opera would have seen it, and she also discusses real people who served as "models" for each character. Then she discusses each act of the opera, with a short chapter on the events that take place between Acts 1 and 2. She talks about earlier versions of the libretto, and things that were left out of the final version of the opera, as well as the arguments between Puccini and his librettists over certain parts of the opera. The author also discusses the differences between the play and the opera; in an appendix, she gives side-by-side summaries of the play and the opera. The book is also beautifully illustrated, and at the beginning of the book, there is a map that shows all the locations mentioned in the play. The detail that the author goes into is incredible! She has figured out, for example, which operas were playing in the 1800 season in Rome, and which opera Tosca would have been singing in! And she really fills in all the "gaps" in the plot of the opera. I love the opera anyway, but when I listened to it again after reading this book, I felt I was listening to it with a completely new understanding.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inside Tosca's Rome, October 24, 2005
This review is from: Tosca's Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective (Paperback)
Fans of Puccini's opera Tosca, myself included, will adore this in-depth, historically accurate study on Rome at the time of the opera's setting- Napoleonic War time Italy in the early 1800's. The author Susan Vandiver Nicassio is herself a retired soprano who sang the part of Tosca and knows not only the music but the historical background. This book is crammed with detailed information about Rome of this period. The sites mentioned in Tosca - the Church of San Andrea De La Valle, Palazzo Farnese and Castel San Angelo, are still standing in Rome today. This book takes us on a historic journey and delves into the political and cultural time set of the era. Victorien Sardou was a late 19th century playwright who upon seeing Sarah Bernhardt performing in Paris theatres wrote La Tosca as a vehicle for her. The play is long and complex, a perfect 19th century example of what we now call a "well-made" play. It is virtually an epic. Tosca was a country girl, a shepherdess who was put into a convent for her wild ways and when the Pope heard her sing he cried and decided she should be an opera singer. She comes to Rome and makes it big, renowned for her voice as well as her beauty. Tosca's theatrical world is described in historical terms and in vivid precision. In Napoleon days, opera was still the biggest form of cultural artistic expression. In Italy, Spontini was writing such hits as La Vestale. Rossini was beginning to write his first major hits. Beethoven wrote his only opera Fidelio and in Germany, Webber was writing German fantasy operas. Tosca's world was one of service to high art but she would have suffured the stigma of being lusted after by several powerful and licentious men or become the mistress of a VIP and regarded as loose. In Tosca's case, she maintains a purity despite her rich lifestyle. She attends Church and "brings flowers and prayers to the Madonna". Mario Cavaradossi, in the play, is a pupil of Jacques Louis David and is not only an artist but a revolutionary. He believed, like many artistic idealists and intellectuals did- Beethoven included- that Napoleon's rise to power signaled a new reign of Enlightenment and social progress. This was before Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and proved to be a tyrant and the European intellegentsia's vision of a Utopia was shattered. Not only do we see the life of a singer and an artist, but the life of the likes of Baron Vitellio Scarpia, the dread Chief of Police, a man for whom "all Rome trembled." Scarpia exemplifies the devoted Royalist, a ruthless and corrupt member of the empowered class that men like Cavaradossi despised. Very well made book involving the real life of characters from the opera.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tosca, Puccini and Revolutionary Rome, May 19, 2010
This review is from: Tosca's Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective (Paperback)
This book is a sumptious confection for either the opera-lover or the historian, since it can be read from either viewpoint. Susan Vandiver Nicassio has wrirren a rarity, a backgrounder on one of the world's famous operas that does not simply bog down in retelling the story as so many do. After a Preface that should on no account be overlooked, Nicassio divides the book into two halves, a social history and a musical analysis. Tosca is rare among operas in being set in a specific historic time and place: Rome during the few months between the fall of the ramshackle Roman Republic of 1798-99 and the return of Pope Pius VII, a brief interval during which Rome was occupied and ruled by the Bourbon royal family of Naples. Sketching the situation in Rome at the time and the damage inflicted on the city by the Republicans and their French tutors, she goes on to examine the contemporary scene in chapters giving the viewpoint of its three main characters: an artist, a musician, and a policeman. The result is in many ways more enlightening than a mere straight history. The second part of the book is a more orthodox musical analysis of the opera by themes, motives and motivations, but even here her dramatic analysis persistently strays back to material laid down in the first half. One of Nicassio's intriguing ideas is that Puccini in fact turned the historical situation on its head to serve his own political and philosophical agenda, something of which many opera composers have been guilty. The papal government that Puccini blames for the deaths of his hero and heroine was actually, she notes, an amiably inefficient structure that had doddered along for decades, rarely killing anybody for anything -- in fact, in less than two years the French-sponsored Republic carried out more executions than the Papacy had in the entire previous century. Americans tend to associate Scarpia in their minds with the dreaded Inquisition, but in fact the Roman Inquisition had never been nearly as cruel as that of Spain, and in any case by 1798 was a ghostly shell of itself. But Puccini (and the French author Sardou, who wrote the overheated and long-winded play on which Puccini based his opera) were writing a century later, at a time when the Popes were "prisoners of the Vatican," secluding themselves in that structure and refusing to recognize the existence of the Kingdom of Italy. Both the playwright and the composer were fiercely anti-religious and (although Puccini had to keep it discreet) republican, so they depicted their protagonists as caught in the toils of a fiendish papal government that never existed, rather than admit that the true persecutors and executioners of the time had been the Roman Republic that they both worshipped. The result is an immortal opera, but one that is founded on myths and ideology rather than historical fact.
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