Book Review

Methods/Theory

Susan Vandiver Nicassio's book is a creative and innovative attempt to combine the themes of religion, history, and music in telling the story of Tosca's Rome, a city that was at once Italian and French, the combined artistic achievements of Victorien Sardou's play and Giacomo Puccini's opera. Nicassio insists that the opera was deeply embedded in the transition between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries just as the opera's setting straddled the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author wonders why two late nineteenth-century artists such as Sardou and Puccini based their writing and music on the ill-fated Roman Republic of 1798–1800. While acknowledging that playwrights and composers often made use of the conventions of historical representation and melodramatic plots to sell their art, Nicassio's book focuses on reading Tosca as a historical document that "tells us less about 1800 than about the perception of 1800 that was current in France in the late 1880s (Sardou's play was first produced in November 1887) and in Italy a decade later (the opera Tosca was premiered in Rome in January 1900)" (p. 3). She does not analyze the meanings of those perceptions very well for the late nineteenth century, however. She spends much more time describing and narrating the events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries so as to give historical context to the opera's plot, for it is her aim to explore in an interdisciplinary way the times, places, and ideas of Tosca.

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