Guest Speaker
Dr. Erin Brooks
PhD in Musicology, 2010
Washington University in St. Louis
Location: Humanities 2441
In November 1887, Sarah Bernhardt first performed La Tosca at Paris’s Théâtre Porte Saint-Martin. The play was Victorien Sardou’s third vehicle for Bernhardt and was, as usual, a smash hit—Bernhardt appeared as Floria Tosca at least one hundred fifty times in Paris during the 1887, 1888, and 1889 seasons, not including innumerable performances outside of the French capital. La Tosca was a garment tailor-made for Bernhardt; Sardou not only fashioned lengthy scenes of pantomime to suit her style, he also tantalized the audience with hints that Bernhardt might actually sing.
Giacomo Puccini saw Bernhardt in La Tosca several times in the 1880s and ’90s, as he struggled with Giacosa and Illica to fashion an operatic Tosca. Indeed, Puccini’s opera is a rich example of what Fauser and Everist (2009) call “cultural transfer,” a work transposed from one geographic locale to another with attendant shifts in language, institution, and artistic domain. While the operatic Tosca has been intensely studied, these transfers between spoken theater and opera in fin-de-siècle France and Italy remain overlooked or too easily isolated by genre. Fauser and Everist also note that individuals are powerful agents in cultural transfer. Sarah Bernhardt’s traces certainly permeate Tosca, as well as dozens of other operas based on her performances. Her influence on operatic culture, however, is largely unacknowledged.
Using previously undiscussed archival materials, I reveal new perspectives not just on the manifold bonds between Sardou’s play, Bernhardt’s interpretation, and Puccini’s opera, but also on the spiderwebbed relationships between genres, individuals, institutions, and nations. This paper highlights a newly discovered incidental music score by Louis-Jules Pister (1845–1929), used in Bernhardt’s productions of La Tosca. As Puccini listened to Sardou’s play, did Pister’s music—ranging from a Te Deum to diegetic party music to quotations from Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony—affect his own understanding of musical moments in Tosca? Ultimately, I look beyond La Tosca/ Tosca to a larger analysis of cultural transfers by individual artists and between drama, incidental music, and opera.
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