Education, Education, (Please No More) Education

Another year, another series of tinkerings with the education system.  Academies; free schools; abolish AS levels … abolish GCSEs … on and on it goes, and the teachers, slogging away in the trenches, resign themselves to yet another round of upheaval.  Indeed, for most of their professional lifetimes upheaval rather than stability has been the norm.  But does all this constant change really change anything?

There are overdue rumblings of doubt whether compulsory full-time academic education up to the age of 16 was such a good idea in the first place.  The Sunday Telegraph published figures to show that young men’s last year of schooling, whichever year that was, was the year in which they committed most offences, throughout the twentieth century.  Francis Gilbert’s book I’m a Teacher, Get Me Out Of Here blew the lid off ‘bog standard comprehensives’, revealing them to be universities of anti-social behaviour rather than nurseries of talent.  The system, as it stands, is not just failing to prepare adolescents for citizenship, it is actively encouraging them towards a life of crime.  Yet why should anyone be surprised?

Compulsory education was introduced with the best of motives – to protect children from exploitation and to equip them with skills they needed to succeed in an increasingly complex society.  In a hi-tech world it is no longer economic to employ children as agricultural labourers or sweatshop operatives; instead of an inefficiently exploited and expendable resource, a child is now a valued luxury, and in most respects this is a great blessing.  But it has a downside.  In removing children from the workforce, society declares them useless mouths.  In protecting them, we stuff them into a box in which nothing they do can make any conceivable difference to anybody – except themselves, in the remote future.  We’re more comfortable with that.  Trust spotty, giddy teenagers to do anything that matters?  No thanks.  Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, community service, as long as it’s safety-checked and sanitized, but nothing that has the rank smell of real money or real danger. 

Well-brought-up children are the imperial concubines of our society – showered with gifts, taught to show off utterly useless skills, simply because we can afford it.  Children from dysfunctional or non-existent families, badly behaved children, are society’s prisoners, banged up in schools for want of anything better to do with them, with teachers as their equally trapped warders.  Why do we expect them to like it?   School can work for docile, highly intelligent children who are good at deferring gratification.  But these are a minority, and in most ordinary schools the discontented majority will not let even them get on with it.

The perceived uselessness of children and adolescents is at the root of most of the problems in schools and many of those of society at large.  All down the ages humans have dreamed and schemed to be freed from the necessity of getting their daily bread.  But human character is formed under that necessity just as the human skeleton is formed by the force of gravity, and few people function well when it is removed.  Right from the first time a baby is plonked in front of a television screen to be entertained, through the classroom years in which passivity is rewarded and independence treated as a threat, children today are trained to the behaviour patterns of a parasitic aristocracy.  Depressive, self-destructive behaviour – excess consumption of food and alcohol, gambling, aimless violence and promiscuous sex; the languid enjoyment of possessions gained without effort; inactivity whenever possible – these used to be the preserve of the idle rich, but compulsory education followed by the welfare state have made them the condition of choice of an entire society, known by the collective, approving label of ‘cool’.

This enforced parasitism is the chief cause, for instance, of bullying in schools.  Most human tolerance and co-operation is founded on the practical realization that different people make useful contributions, in their various ways, to the group’s survival.  Unlike a baboon troop, a human society contains all kinds of niches in which people with different abilities can survive with some self-respect.  The aggressive fighter will support the weedy intellectual because the geek’s skills complement his own; even the poor, inoffensive idiot will be valued as a worker.  In school, none of this happens because survival and economic benefit are not at issue.  No one needs anyone else in a classroom.  The battle for status becomes as stark and pure as in any baboon troop.  The most aggressive and intimidating members enforce a rigid conformity; anyone who shows difference or vulnerability is persecuted without escape.  And yet some of the most horrible bullies I knew at school became helpful and affable individuals, once they got to do a job that needed doing.  Nothing combats bullying like responsibility; but without responsibility all the valiant efforts being made to combat it will do little good.  Bullying is structural.  So are many of the other behaviour patterns we deplore in teenagers.  A fourteen-year-old girl’s deliberate decision to become pregnant, for instance: what is it but a desperate assertion that she matters, that she wants to have the ultimate responsibility for something in her life, rather than simply taking what is dished out to her?

But we prefer not to notice this; having herded our children into a dysfunctional sub-society, we attempt to rationalize and gloss over their appalling behaviour as normal and inevitable.  Solemn academic studies ‘find’ that young people are ‘socialized by’ and ‘draw their values from’ their peer group, not their parents, absolving parents in retrospect from their abandoned duty to instil a sense of social obligation in opposition to the fainéant mentality of school.  In a recent Sunday Telegraph article on the suicide of a bullied schoolgirl, Jenny McCartney wished the victim could have kept her hopes up until she left school: ‘there is no workplace so vile that you will be jostled and taunted on your way to your desk’.  Why do we accept that schools are viler than workplaces?  Why do we assume that to be a teenager is to be a depressed misfit or a jeering bully, when we know perfectly well that teenagers are as various as adults, and capable, moreover, of amazing idealism, courage and generosity – if ever they get the chance to show it? 

I suppose we put up with it partly because we know deep down that it is still an improvement on what went before.  Visitors to Africa and China often comment wistfully on how much the children there value education, on their eagerness to learn compared to the sullen apathy of Britain’s well-cared-for youth.  Of course they value education: it is the best passport out of a life of squalor and miserable, back-breaking labour in societies with little compassion to spare for the poor.   We have Dickens and Kingsley to remind us how comparatively recently we were there ourselves.  We have books like Barry Hines’s Kes and Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood to remind us how far from ideal British schools were even in the nostalgically recalled 1950s.  But the fact that we don’t want to go back shouldn’t mean that we go ever further forward down a blind alley.

Young people have to be re-integrated into the world around them.  They need to feel their efforts count, and they need to be mentored and taken seriously by adults who haven’t the vested interest of parents or the crowd-control problems of teachers.  Isn’t apartheid by age group one of the strangest things about our society?  Whence this unnatural situation in which many, perhaps a majority of adults can go for days at a time without speaking to a child, foisting the duty of bringing on the next generation onto teachers?  Where did we, as adults, get the expectation of working in a ready-socialized, child-free environment?  No wonder most children, addressed by an adult, return a blank stare and seem to have no idea how to respond.  No wonder they get their own back on us on the streets, parks and buses.

Sometimes I imagine a town in which every restaurant would have a few aproned eleven-year-old waiters wishing the diners bon appetit; where accountants and estate agents would have a complement of teenage trainees applying their school maths to real life; where, once you started secondary school, you could choose to spend real time at a variety of these jobs – and get real money for them –as part of your ‘education’.  And where schools, in turn, were places you could go to at any age, to catch up on the academic subjects you saw no point in when you were a young man in a hurry.  It would not be easy to safeguard children in such a scheme from danger and exploitation, and also to ensure that the work they were given was real and not just cosmetic.  But it would be worth the effort, if it introduced them to the need for striving before they got hooked on the habit of skiving.

Marchesa Maddalena (A Tosca Story)

I based this story on one of my favourite operas, Tosca, taking some ideas from Sardou's play and some liberties with Puccini's libretto, but staying true, I hope, to the opera's spirit.  This story is told from the point of view of the Marchesa Attavanti,  a key figure of both play and opera who never appears on stage.  

For a year or two, it was the craze among all the best people in Rome to be painted by Cavaradossi.  They did not pay merely for stiff portraits, but for pictures of themselves as they dreamed of being: gods or nymphs or heroes of ancient times, in a bright swirl of dance or battle.  Yes, many of these people could be flattered into thinking they were gods.  But it was the painter’s visit, as much as the pictures they were left with, that made them feel favoured beyond the ordinary run of men.  The spice of danger, the teasing charm: having Mario’s intent eyes all to oneself, for as long as the sitting took … it was heady wine.  Who would know that better than I? 

And I never kept any of his sketches.  Perhaps I really thought he was immortal.

I was surprised when he asked me to be his model for a sacred subject.  He did not usually go in for saints and angels.  It turned out that someone had reported him for owning forbidden books, the works of Voltaire, as it happened.  To avoid being thrown out of Rome, he had offered his services to the Cardinal Priest of Sant’Andrea delle Valle, to paint a mural of Mary Magdalene in his church, and the Cardinal, in return, had pulled strings.  When I saw his sketch, I observed that there was no sense in his currying favour by painting a pious picture, if he was going to make it look as unorthodox as that.  He said:

‘Nonsense, Francesca. The kind of people who will be looking at this picture won’t notice.  As long as the Magdalene is on her knees, and her hair and robes are the right colour, no one gives a fig.  If my Magdalene shows the face of an avenging angel, instead of simpering weak-chinned submission, and if her hands are raised to accuse God of his cruelty to humanity, instead of pleading for forgiveness … in fact, if she looks like my wonderful Francesca, instead of Magdalene, what’s that to them?  People like the good Sacristan here are completely blind.’

Between sentences, he was glancing at me, and then putting more strokes on his picture, with his thumb poised to smudge the charcoal.  I kept my smile distant, and merely said, 

‘Perhaps so.  But, you know, you shouldn’t tease the Sacristan.  It’s dangerous.  Don’t go thinking he isn’t important enough to matter.  The spite of a put-upon servant has ruined many a great man and lady before now.’

‘Tease him?  Me?’ protested Mario, all wide-eyed innocence.

‘Yes.  You know what I mean,’ I said severely.  ‘Dallying with your dusky diva under his nose, and that sort of thing.  He’s not that blind.’

Mario’s mistress was a bone of contention between us.  The celebrated singer Floria Tosca … I admit I was not always kind about her.  The dusky diva, the godly goat-girl, the brainless brunette.  I couldn’t understand what he saw in her, and feared she would do him no good.  Even then, he was having to lie to her about painting me, because the mere thought of another woman posing for him would send her into fits of fury.  My modelling sessions were carefully timed during her opera rehearsals.

‘This senseless jealousy of hers must be exhausting for you,’ I would say.  ‘How on earth do you put up with it?’

‘First of all,’ he answered, sketching away as always, ‘you must realise that there is nothing senseless about her jealousy.  Marchesa, you were born and bred in the purple.  You always know what to say and what to do in refined company, without a moment’s thought.  Floria grew up herding goats, as you point out.  She knows how to behave like a lady now, because she has worked at it, and is not, as you imply, stupid, but a very quick learner.  But she knows her position is not secure.  She knows that, at her very next performance, if she disappoints her audience, their adoration will turn to hissing, her contract will not be renewed, and back she will go to the goats.  I mean to stay with Floria, but how can she know that?  All her friends at the stage door will be telling her that she had better line up another rich lover or two, because it can only be a matter of time before the Cavaliere tires of her, and of course he will be looking for a bride, a well-bred girl of his own rank in life … it would be astonishing if she were not jealous.’

I had nothing to say to that.  I only thought: yes, she has every reason to be jealous, except one.  He is staying in Rome, in danger, just to be with her.  He is spending the night with her, every night that they can.  And all I ever had were a few gallant kisses.  So do I have no reason to be jealous?

I did not show any of this.  Like every celebrated beauty, I had practised from an early age making my face a mask, and now it was second nature.  Being a beauty is an exacting task for a woman.  Mario, now … when you looked at him you did not see his face, but his laughter, his quicksilver mind, his headlong enthusiasm for his work, for good company, for everything.  He never gave his looks a thought.  Whereas I – I could rarely afford to forget mine.

I am the Marchesa Attavanti.  My husband, the stiff-backed old Marquis Ottavio, is as it were the yardstick and the guarantor of the Roman nobility, and I am the ornament of his house, the tireless arbiter of taste, oiler of wheels, stifler of discord and distributor of favours among the people who matter.  Invitations to my balls and levées are the sign that one has arrived at the pinnacle of society.  The Queen is my personal friend, and I know exactly how to approach the upper clergy, demurely in black, with meek ring-kissing and precisely judged almsgiving.  Even the Pope himself unbent a little in audience with me.  But of course a great beauty also has to know how to practise galanteria: especially the young wife of an elderly husband.  People would be disappointed if there were no exercise for wagging tongues: with whom did the Marchesa dance last night, on whom did she smile, who kissed her hand with particular fervour?  The popular notion is that the Marchesa takes her pleasures freely though discreetly, and that the dear old Marquis is an acquiescent cuckold – perhaps even a pander, who furthers his own influence through his wife’s satisfied lovers.  And this reputation was no hindrance at all to the life I really wished to lead.

For it allowed people to forget that my own family, the Angelotti, were “tainted with treachery”.  That my brother, Cesare, had been a consul in the Roman Republic, and then had become a fugitive, never heard from again, after the King of Naples invaded.  Faced with my beautiful blank mask, no one would be so indiscreet as to accuse me of republican sympathies.  How could politics ever enter so utterly feminine a mind?  How could such a mercenary goddess even remember that she had a brother? 

And so I went everywhere, and spoke to everyone.  I knew exactly the place to stand in the white-gilt salon, so that the trusty servant, behind the panelling designed to hide his plebeian presence from the company, would hear every word and go unnoticed on his errand.  I had a splendid ally in Mario, the society painter, the fascinating half-French chevalier. He, as a foreigner, was licensed to talk mild heresy with a jesting air, often bringing hidden dangers into the open.  I was the severe sphinx before whom anything could be said.  What I really thought was such a mystery, Mario used to nickname me Beltade Ignota – the unknown beauty.  Together, we warned quite a few people, hid them and helped them to flee the city before they could be arrested.  We sheltered the secret groups who met to read forbidden books and plan the return of a rational secular state. 

We were allies, we were friends, we flirted, but we were never lovers.  Tosca got there before me, and I was not quite unscrupulous enough to do my utmost to cut her out.  Perhaps I could not have done, even if I had tried.  If it was hard for Mario to resist the temptation, he never showed it.  It was quite difficult for me.  But the dissembling, the play-acting, that was easy.  Until the person to be hidden mattered too much: until it was my brother.

Things were worse than ever in Rome.  Napoleon, the embodiment of revolution, was threatening Italy and everyone believed our defeated republicans would stage a revolt in his support.  To repress it, the city governor brought in a new chief of police, a Sicilian: Baron Vitellio Scarpia.  He came with a ready-made entourage of cut-throats, and soon added to them from the scum of the city.  Spies were everywhere.  Gossip had it that Scarpia even controlled a network of priests who disregarded the seal of the confessional and told him people’s secrets – especially women’s.  The gossip went further: if Scarpia heard of a lady’s peccadillo, he would ‘invite’ her to his office and suggest that, in return for his silence, she should give him, too, a share in her favours.  He was bored with prostitutes and courtesans, and found this a more invigorating way of gratifying his appetites.  I dismissed the talk at the time.  But what was certain and worse, people were seized and imprisoned secretly, and, in the Palazzo Farnese itself, the very heart of Roman civility and grace, Scarpia’s men used the extortion methods of Sicilian bandits.  I met him once or twice.  I found his religious observance punctilious, his manners impeccable.  He made me shudder.  Two of his lieutenants were always with him, and I saw their dead eyes assessing me, passing on and taking the reckoning of everyone in the company.  To them, cruelty was what card-playing is to a hardened gambler.  He hardly cares for it any more, but he cares for nothing else.  Breaking men, destroying human souls, was their one, trivial pastime and they could never stop thinking about it.  But Scarpia could sip it like wine, enjoy it like a connoisseur, and discourse civilly while he planned his next trap: which made him even more terrifying.

And I got the message, by roundabout ways, that Cesare had fallen into his hands.  Trying to return secretly to Rome, he had been betrayed and was a prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo.  At once I determined that I would never rest until I had saved him.  It was of no use to plead for his release, even to the royal couple themselves.  To pardon Cesare would be to strike at the heart of everything they stood for.  But to free him by stealth would be a difficult and deadly game.  Cesare was almost the biggest prey that Scarpia had ever hunted: to lose him would be more than his own life was worth, although he perhaps dared not execute him openly.  I trusted, nevertheless, that I, the Marchesa Attavanti, was too high for even Scarpia to touch.  If I were caught helping my brother, I might be banished or locked in ‘protective custody’ in a convent, but I would survive, and nothing would happen to the Marquis.  He was indispensable.  Not that he ever did anything: his simple existence was a corner-stone of the Roman state.  For Mario, though, a few places further down the ladder, it would have been much too dangerous.  So I determined I would not tell him.  That was my great mistake.  If only I had confided in him, and if he in turn hadn’t lied to Tosca... We were afraid.  Fear destroys the best-laid plans, more than anything else.

I put out feelers, and proferred money, and a wonderful rogue of a tavern-keeper, whom my coachman knew, found a weak point among the jailers.  I was able to send Cesare food and clothing, and at last risked a message, a slip of paper inside a loaf of bread.  I got word back, too: when my packages first reached him, Cesare was more dead than alive, too weak even to attempt to escape, but after a month or two, with a better cell and better food, he gained a little strength.  The jailer, already prospering thanks to my bribes, was promised enough to leave Rome as a rich man, if he happened to forget to lock the door one evening, and arranged for the guards to stay out of a particular passage. 

The Attavanti have a private chapel in Sant’Andrea della Valle, although we do not use it much.  It worked well that I was posing for Mario’s painting.  As I knelt in prayer, being Mary Magdalene, it was easy to slip a key to the chapel under an altar cloth without even Mario being aware of it.  And my maid and I had sorted out a basket of women’s clothes, which I brought to the church, ‘to give to charity’.  They were spirited into the Attavanti chapel and hidden behind a family tomb.  Cesare was to escape from the castle at dusk, make for the church, let himself into the walled, railed chapel, disguise himself, and hide there until one of our brotherhood met him and helped him out of the city.  There should have been several hours of darkness to make use of (and in Rome, the night is dark).  He did not know the whole plan: I was only able to send him a very short message, naming the day and telling him where the key was hidden.

And it all went wrong.  For some reason he escaped at midday, instead of at nightfall, and I did not find out.  Perhaps the message was unclear.  Perhaps an unexpected chance presented itself and he thought it better to take it than to wait.  Perhaps the jailer knew that he was suspected, and insisted on haste: in any case, he collected his money and was gone.  And was too obvious about it, so that Cesare’s flight was discovered almost at once.  When Cesare staggered into the church, I should think he had already been seen in the street, by one of Scarpia’s spies who loitered at corners, even in the noonday heat, when almost no one was about.  Certainly none of my people were there: only Mario, taking advantage of the afternoon quiet to paint in peace.

Mario should have gone home for the night, and never have known.  But even if I had foreseen this accident, I did not realise that Mario would actually risk his life for my brother.  He knew Cesare, respected him for what he had done, and knew perfectly well what was at stake if he helped him.  I treasured Mario so much.  I thought that he would value himself, see that his life was more important than other men’s, a thing of beauty.  He was an artist.  How I underestimated him.

Mario didn’t hesitate.  He realised that they couldn’t afford to wait in the church.  Knowing of no other plan, he took Cesare to his villa.  This wasn’t his family property, it was a little place just inside the city walls that he rented under an assumed name, for political purposes … and lately, it turned out, for amorous purposes as well: he had got into the habit of meeting Tosca there.  Otherwise it might have been safe enough: it could have taken Scarpia a long time to find out where it was, even though suspicion fell on Mario.  But with Tosca on the scent …

I did not know any of this until much later.  I had a full day of engagements.  In the early morning, though, I had slipped into the church to make sure that everything was still in place.  Mario was not at work yet, but he had finished roughing out his picture after I left the previous day.  I was struck by astonishment, seeing the composition complete for the first time. 

Mario used to say, ruefully, that he would be a better painter if he were not a gentleman of leisure but had to earn his bread by it: he would have less time for finicking.  I always thought he underrated himself.  He had learned from David, but David’s pictures, however brilliantly composed, always strike me as marmoreal, cold.  In Mario’s pictures everything seemed to be breathing, about to take wing.  His Magdalene, larger than life, filled the space between two pillars with the balance of a piece of expert calligraphy.  She was kneeling on one knee as if she had just flung herself down, or was about to leap up: she knelt as much like Diana as Magdalene.  Her hands, stretched towards heaven, might have been holding a bow.  The hair was my fair hair, in disorder, flowing in waves.  The face was my face, but not my beautiful calm mask.  It was unguarded, full of a wild, proud sorrow.  I looked long at the picture, deeply moved and disturbed.

Mario had painted me as much more beautiful than I saw myself as being, and it was because he had painted me as if I were free.

I pretended to say a decade of the Rosary, still looking covertly at the picture, and then I stood up to leave.  My maid, waiting behind, made some un-called-for joke about the Cavaliere and his paintbrush.  She was an impudent wench whom I had had to correct several times already.   I stared at her coldly.

‘If I have to tell you to watch your tongue so much as once more, Lucia, I shall send you packing without a character,’ I said. 

‘Your pardon, signora,’ she said sulkily.

We went home, and I dealt with some charity work and met several distinguished guests.  In the middle of the day, news came by courier.  The Austrians had defeated Napoleon in Piedmont: it looked as if Rome was safe from the French.  At once my time was further taken up with a grand celebration in the Palazzo Farnese, where the Queen would be present, and Floria Tosca would sing a new cantata in praise of victory and peace.  I went to my rooms to put on evening dress.  My coiffeuse was waiting to thread pearls in my hair, while I collected together my scent-bottle, reticule and fan with Lucia’s help. 

‘Where is my fan?’ I asked her.  ‘The black one with the family crest on it.  I thought I had it yesterday.’

‘That fan, signora?’ she asked, with surprise that seemed feigned.

‘Yes, that one.  Why do you ask?’

‘I left it in the church this morning,’ she said deliberately.  ‘It’s an old one.  I thought you wanted it to go with the other things we left for charity.’

I felt a deep stab of fear go through me.  There was nothing else in the basket that could be proved to come from the Attavanti, but if the fan was found, it would give me away instantly.  This girl had betrayed me, and she did not care if I knew it. 

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said indifferently.  ‘Just find me the one with the feathers: that will go with my gown well enough.’

As we drove to the Farnese, I was in a ferment of worry and indecision.  As far as I knew, Cesare’s escape would take place that evening.  The key and the clothes would only have to lie unseen for a few more hours, at most, I told myself.  The fan added very little to what was already a high risk, and I had been taking it quietly up to then … but this trivial mishap awoke me to all that could go wrong with the plan.  Perhaps, somehow, I knew that it already had. 

The Diva was late.  We had to listen to an endless speech from the Governor’s deputy, and then converse politely while the orchestra played gavottes.  My face ached from smiling.  I was relieved when at last the audience took their seats and Paisiello tapped his baton to begin.  Tosca looked beautiful, I had to admit, with a dignity well suited to a state occasion.  The Cantata might be an undistinguished piece that the maestro had pulled out of a drawer and dusted off to look new, but I had never heard Tosca sing better.  I preferred this sacred music to the histrionics of her stage roles.  The calm discipline with which her voice rode the trills and runs, soaring evenly to a high C, took my mind from my fears and set it on other thoughts.

‘She is not stupid,’ Mario had said.  Evidently not.  She had mastered her craft and, working within its rules, she had complete freedom.  Just as Mario had.  No wonder they understood one another.  But also, she was vivid, passionate, and did not dissemble.

He loved her best, and for good reasons.  I would simply have to accept it.  But he did love me too.  I hugged the thought of his Magdalene to myself.  For him to see and paint that grief that I could not allow myself to show, that depth of feeling that I could not see in myself … it was an act of more than ordinary love.  And yet … I was suddenly struck by doubt.  I remembered some artistic conversation I had not properly understood at the time, when Mario had been babbling (it had seemed to me) about harmonious contrasts, and the possibility of blending the features of different people in the same portrait.  What if the face and figure were mine, but the soul was Tosca’s?   What if he had used her stage grief, that she could pour out so freely when she was Dido or Cassandra, to give life to his Magdalene, and my part in her was no more than that of a frigid mannequin?

And I, shallow egoist that I was, was worrying about this, when already … well, you shall hear.  I will say for myself that I had decided to speak to Tosca at the end of the performance, to assure her of my friendship, and perhaps to let her know, somehow, that I was not her rival, that it was only politics that involved me with her lover.  But as the audience gathered round to congratulate her, a lackey handed her a small piece of paper, and she looked at it and her olive skin became ashen.  She turned on her heel without a word and left the room.  The maestro had to cover for her.  ‘A thousand apologies, signori, signore … the artistic temperament … the nerves sometimes overwhelm her when the performance is over …’

Now I was really afraid.  Something had happened: what was it?  I dared not ask anybody.  I went outside without waiting for the Marquis or my maid, and walked to our carriage where the coachman and horses had been waiting throughout the reception.  This man was my unfailing contact with the world of the streets.  Without turning his head he said as I came up: ‘It’s bad news, signora.  We think that Signor Cesare is out.  He was in the church, but he’s vanished … he’s not taken yet.  But the Cavalier Cavaradossi has been arrested: Giuseppe saw them take him into the palace.’

Oh God.  So that was what Tosca knew.  I feared the worst at once.

‘Please tell the Marquis,’ I said, ‘that the Queen has asked me to stay behind to speak to her.  He should go home without me.  I am going back into the palace.’

‘God be with you, signora,’ he said.  He understood well enough.

I was indeed going to speak to the Queen.  Before she left, I was going to ask her for a private audience, and beg her to intervene to secure Mario’s release.  Maria Carolina was a capricious woman, and not over-bright, but she had her kindly side.  I was already composing my speech in my mind … how to pull at her heartstrings, without sounding in the least like a supporter of revolution.  

As I entered the salon, my eyes went straight to her seat of honour.  For a moment I could not see her for the crowd.  The room looked like a kicked anthill.  The Queen was sprawled backwards with her arms dangling towards the floor, apparently in a faint.  Her ladies were chafing her hands and holding salts under her nose.  An equerry stood by with a piece of paper in his hand, and nobles, beribboned officers, plum-coloured monsignors, were milling around him, shouting: ‘Let us hear it!’ ‘Silence!’ ‘Treason!’ ‘Read it again!’ ‘No, it’s a lie!’  The equerry cleared his throat and there was dead silence.

‘Fifteenth June … Your Royal Highness … At the close of day the enemy was reinforced by a fresh army and after fighting on the plain of Marengo for the greater part of the night, our forces were beaten.  At the present moment, encamped with the remains of our army, we are seeking terms with …’

Cries of ‘No!’  ‘Shame!’  ‘Villainy!’ drowned the rest of the dispatch.  I stood rooted to the spot.  So Bonaparte had won, after all.  The French, not the Austrians or the crown of Naples, would decide what happened in Italy.  Perhaps they would get as far as Rome and set up a second Republic.  If the Pope returned at all, it would be on their terms.  The Jacobins might revolt in anticipation … oh, dear God.  What a night to be asking the Queen to pull strings for a half-French Jacobin!

Her ladies had raised her to her feet and, in a brightly coloured clump, fussing and shuffling, began to help her out of the room.  I pushed shamelessly in among them.  ‘Your Royal Highness,’ I said urgently. ‘Signora …’

She opened her eyes and looked at me.  ‘You,’ she said theatrically.  (She could have given even Tosca a few lessons.) ‘Francesca Angelotti.  You and your brother should be happy now.  Power to traitors and infidels!  Leave my sight.’

She soon left mine; I stayed standing there. 

The crowd of courtiers surged this way and that, broke up, reformed in random circles.  For the next hour, I went from pillar to post through the palace.  Would Governor Naselli honour the Marchesa Attavanti with an audience?  No, he was with the Neapolitan captains, deciding what terms to offer to Bonaparte.  Perhaps: he would be briefing members of the court in an hour.  No, he was taking measures to place extra soldiers on the street.  Would the Queen perhaps change her mind and see an old friend?  Yes, perhaps … and I got some way towards her apartments, only to have my way blocked by guards.  No, the Queen was still indisposed.  By this time I would have resembled Mario’s Magdalene, though less beautiful, if I could have found anyone to fall on my knees in front of.  At last, frantic, I decided there was nothing for it but to brave Baron Scarpia himself.  He would have to answer to me.  I walked round to the opposite side of the quadrangle, to the foot of the staircase that led to his suite of rooms, lit by a dully burning oil lamp mounted on the wall.  There were soldiers with fixed bayonets standing on either side.  They saluted, but moved to stand in my way.

‘May I pass?’ I said, loudly, but my voice quivered.  ‘I am the Marchesa Attavanti.’

‘Here she is!’ shouted one of the soldiers. 

A squad of eight, in uniform with cockades, jogged up from the other side of the courtyard.  I made as if to push past the ones on the stairs, but they easily barred my way and the others surrounded me.

‘Come with us, signora,’said their corporal, shamefacedly but doggedly.

‘By whose orders?’ I demanded.

‘Baron Scarpia’s,’ he replied.

So I was to meet Scarpia by his own choice.  My heart beat even faster.  I knew what I would say to him … I would see if he dared molest the Marchesa Attavanti … But instead of going up the stairs, we moved in a hollow square across the courtyard and out under the high archway, to where a carriage awaited … my carriage.

My husband the Marquis got down and extended his hand to me.

‘Please enter, Francesca.  We are going home.’

I stared at him, between the heads of the soldiers.  ‘But Baron Scarpia wants to see me.’

‘No.  The Baron has been kind enough to communicate with me … he simply wishes you to go home.  Come, Francesca.’

I felt as if I had been a child playing alone in a dimly lit room, convincing himself that he is fighting monsters and pursued by spectres, while all the time his parents have been looking on indulgently, and at last come in with a light and tell him it is time for bed.  I no longer knew what was real.  I was utterly at a loss.

My husband took my hand; I pulled back.  It was time to scream, shout, fight, refuse to leave this place until I was assured of some safety for the men I loved … I actually drew in my breath to cry out.  Yet it seemed false, dingy, theatrical.  The sort of thing Tosca would do.  I was supposed to have dignity: I was a Marchesa.

Like an obedient child, I climbed into the carriage and sat back in the cushions beside my husband.  The soldiers made way for me, and saluted as the carriage moved off.

We did not speak a word on the way home; perhaps Ottavio knew that he could not trust the coachman.  I sat there trembling.  Once we were home, he suavely sent the servants this way and that and then ushered me into his study.

‘Francesca,’ he said as he closed the door, ‘it is time to be frank.  I do not mind your amours and vagaries, but you must stay out of politics from now on.  It is much too dangerous.’

‘But Cesare is my brother!’ I cried.

‘Yes,’ he said heavily.  ‘But Cesare has made one false move too many.  He did not have to return to Rome – unless he wanted to cause further trouble, in the pay of a foreign power.  On his own head be it.  I hear he has escaped.  I do not know what you may have had to do with that and I do not ask.  But it has to stop here.  It was as much as I could do, this afternoon, to persuade Scarpia not to arrest you.  I cannot save your brother from being hanged, if he is caught.  But I can save you, and by Heaven I will, whether you like it or not.’

‘He is not caught?’

‘Not as far as I know, not yet.  But he must fend for himself.’

I couldn’t hold back the words.  ‘But the Cavalier Cavaradossi!  Scarpia has him …’

The Marquis’s lips tightened.  ‘I don’t really want to hear about your hot-headed young cavalier.  But I advise you to put your mind at rest.  He has been arrested … so are many people, when there is a threat to the State.  Scarpia probably wants to remove as many crazy Jacobins as he can from the streets until their enthusiasm for Napoleon’s victory has cooled.  I don’t suppose any harm will come to your Mario: he will simply be interviewed and released.  As long as he is not mixed up in anything seriously treasonable.’

I felt the flood of relief I wanted to feel.  Ottavio’s words sounded so wise.  I had sprung to the conclusion that Mario had been caught helping Cesare: but how did I know that?  After all, Cesare was still free … and surely, surely, Mario would not have taken such a risk, he would have known how to extricate himself at the right moment, if only for Tosca’s sake …

‘Tosca has something to do with it as well,’ I muttered.  ‘She had a message after the concert and ran away in a panic …’

‘As to that,’ said Ottavio wryly, ‘who knows the ways of actresses?  They are not really a fit topic for marital conversation …good night, my dear … do stay in your room, by the way.  I shall take precautions but I had rather there was no need of them.’

I was speechless.  He bowed me out, and mechanically I followed a footman who was waiting to carry a candlestick ahead of me, up the stairs. 

Actresses … how extraordinary was the aristocratic mindset.  If the Marquis was barely concerned about Mario, he cared less than nothing for Tosca, for all her artistry and stately dignity.  I resented that, yet I remembered when I had used exactly the same word about her to Mario’s face.  Usually, I kept my tone very light when discussing Tosca with him, but this time we had got into deeper water … too deep.  I had been indignant at some jealous tantrum of hers. 

‘Who does she think she is?’ I had demanded.  ‘If she had her way you would cut yourself off from all civility, be some kind of brute who only meets women in the bedroom … it’s not only coarse and ill-bred, it’s utterly presumptuous the way she tries to control you.  And you let her … she makes you look like a besotted henpecked fool, if you want my opinion.’

‘What the devil do you know about it, Marchesa?’ he replied furiously.  ‘Do you realise that in all her life no one, no one has ever kept faith with Floria?  Her family sold her to the nuns, the nuns sold her to the maestro … money for a lovely voice … no one cared for her.   Of course she snatches at love as a starving child snatches bread!  She needs loyalty, she needs care, she needs to be told that she is loved twenty times a day, and then she will grow into the great and happy woman she truly is …’

‘And this will take how long?’ I demanded.  ‘How much of your life are you going to devote to this actress? A year?  Five years?  A lifetime?  Mario, you are …’

‘A lifetime.  Yes, if she wants it,’ he interrupted in a choked voice, as if daring me to laugh.

I nearly did laugh.  A cool, musical, sympathetic laugh was welling up in my throat, together with the words, ‘Oh, Mario.  You are such a sweet, romantic boy …’

But I bit them back.  He did not just then look either sweet or romantic, and certainly not like a boy.  It was probably as well that I said nothing.  That was the nearest Tosca ever came to causing a complete breach between us.  It passed over, but it seemed that it was only now that I really understood what he had said.

I went to my room, made ready for bed and sent away the maids, but I did not get under the sheets.  I sat and shivered in a kind of stupor.  It was a sultry midsummer night, with no moon, and there were no lights in the streets.  As the night wore on I heard drunken singing, bellowing and the occasional rifle shot from the direction of the Castel Sant’ Angelo.  The Jacobins were indeed celebrating, as Ottavio had said, but it was a dismal sound.

In the small hours I got up and quietly opened the bedroom door and peered out.  At the end of the passage stood a footman, leaning against the wall and yawning.  He saw me, hurriedly straightened himself and bowed.  I went back in, closing the door, and looked out of the window instead.   It was two storeys up.  I could not see anyone, but I heard a throat-clearing and the sound of someone shifting from foot to foot in the space I could not see directly below the window.  Ottavio had put a close watch on me, all right.

No one had ever kept faith with Tosca, Mario had said. 

Keep faith … it was not a phrase much used in the world of galanteria.  I realised at last what he must have meant by it.  What mattered most was not whether he found Tosca or me more charming, or which of us he might be happiest with: it was that Tosca needed him, and he was going to stay with her if it killed him … but that was the very reason why he would have risked helping Cesare.  I felt certain of it.  When he saw someone who would be lost and undone without him, my exquisite Mario would keep faith even though it was insane: something that I would not do, and had not done.  And now it might anyhow be too late.

Dawn began to break, but before the sun rose, I fell into sleep without being aware of it.  I did not wake until the sun was high and my room bright.  A maid was tapping on the door and saying urgently, ‘Signora … signora …’

I got up.  The Marquis wished to speak with me, she said.  I threw on a peignoir and let him into my dressing-room.  I will give him credit: he showed warmth and sympathy.  Taking my two hands, he said, ‘I am sorry, Francesca … Cesare is dead.’

I slumped into a chair.  I felt no surprise: if anything, a kind of dull relief.  He would not know how I had betrayed him.

‘He was found in hiding and when they tried to arrest him, he swallowed poison.’

Yes, I knew that.  I myself had put the vial of poison in the basket of clothes we left in the church.  I knew that Cesare had had enough; that he would rather die than be taken prisoner again.  At least I had been able to do that much for my brother.  His troubles were over.

Ottavio saw that I was weeping quietly.  He touched my shoulder.  ‘The police will release his body to us, Francesca,’ he said.  ‘We can pay our last respects to him.  Baron Scarpia, I think, had … other plans, but … that is the other news.  Baron Scarpia has been murdered, stabbed.  No one knows by whom.’

He saw my expression.  ‘No, I cannot pretend to any great grief either.  But it does make things difficult.  The French on their way, the Jacobins rioting, no chief of police and the agents all much too busy covering their traces and knifing each other to keep order in the city … I have had a time of it already this morning while you have been sleeping, believe me, Francesca.’

I still said nothing, only managed to bend my head towards him by way of thanks.

He moved towards the door and then said, ‘You needn’t despair of your Cavalier Cavaradossi.  With Baron Scarpia gone, there won’t be any executions … he can sit safely in jail, if the Jacobins haven’t let him out already.  He will probably turn up in a day or two as good as new.’ 

‘Where did they find Cesare?’ I managed to ask.

‘In the grounds of a villa just inside the city walls.  Hiding in a well, apparently.’ He sighed.  ‘I am sorry, my dear.’

As I still didn’t reply, he left the room, merely saying, ‘I will tell everyone you are indisposed.  The maid will bring you something warm to drink.  Try not to grieve too much.’

And that was all I knew for the next two days: I was guarded in the house and rumours were kept from me.  While riots swept the streets and the leaderless troops tried weakly to keep order, I swung between wild hope and despair.  Cesare had been found in Mario’s garden.  Surely that meant Mario was implicated.  Was he not in mortal danger even though Scarpia was dead?  Or had he fled or been spirited out of the city?  And who had killed Scarpia?  My mind ground round this useless circle day and night. 

At last things began to settle.  The Jacobins realised that despite Napoleon’s victory, there was no prospect of the French seizing Rome; the crown of Naples would relinquish control, but only to let the Pope return.  Their ardour cooled accordingly, and the authorities, chastened and uncertain, refrained from reprisals.  On the third day the streets were thought safe enough for noble ladies to venture out, properly escorted: and so I decided to go to church, to Sant’Andrea della Valle, dressed in deep black, to pray for my brother’s soul and seek comfort in the Mass.  And also to see Mario’s picture again, and hope that if it survived, so might he.  It might never be finished now, I supposed, but at least I might hire a copyist to take a likeness of it …

But as we entered, several minutes before the service began, I saw nothing in that space between the pillars but fresh, gleaming whitewash.  The old sacristan was walking down the aisle towards the vestry with a paint pot and a broad brush in his hand, and my memory has it that he was whistling, although he cannot have been, in church.  I swept towards him.

‘What have you done,’ I demanded, ‘with the painting of the Magdalene?’

‘What do you ask, my lady?’ he cackled.  ‘What?  About that blasphemous picture?’ (Or it might have been “blasphemer’s picture”.)  ‘Oh, the Cardinal said we must cover it over.  It would be quite unfitting to be showing a picture by a criminal who has just been executed.’

He looked me in the eye, triumphantly.  He knew.  It was clear that he knew.  So that was that.

The church went dark around me.  I sat on a bench between my servants, and heard the whole Mass sitting down.  I neither stood nor knelt.  The girls did their best to draw attention away from me.  The words flapped and echoed meaninglessly in my ears.  I stared at things for minutes on end and could not have said what I was looking at.

Mario was dead, and I had nothing to remember him by.

********

After some time, I found out what had happened, from the new Chief of Police, a reasonable man … I will not say he was not corrupt, all police officers are, but he was corrupt to the extent of sometimes allowing himself to be bribed to do things that one proposed to him, rather than only to refrain from abusing his powers.  And he in turn was able to put pressure on Baron Scarpia’s chief jackal, one Enrico Spoletta, to give a full account of his master’s doings in return for immunity for himself, for all kinds of scandal was coming out about Scarpia’s time in command now that he was safely dead.  I sold a pearl necklace to have an especially detailed interview on the Angelotti case recorded by a clerk, and to be allowed to read it in the police chief’s office, although not to copy it or take it away.  Yet when it was ready, I delayed going to read it.  And when it was open in front of me, my glance would not stay on the words, but rebounded everywhere like drops of water on hot metal.  My heart pounded and my hands were cold.  What was I so afraid of? I asked myself.  They were dead.  It was all over.  I at least was safe.  But as I forced myself to read, I realised I was right to be afraid.

I begin at noon on the day of the failed escape.  From what Spoletta said, he and Scarpia must have arrived in the church only a few minutes after Mario and Cesare had fled from it.  But the trail would have been cold, except that the sacristan, curse him, was eager to imply that the infidel painter must have had something to do with the escape of the republican traitor.  And then there was the fan.  Lucia couldn’t even have put it in the basket.  It was lying on the floor in the chapel, where Scarpia found it.  Scarpia suspected me in any case, but he was able to use the fan as bait for Tosca.

Tosca came in just then, to tell Mario that she would have to sing at the reception that evening, instead of meeting him as they had planned.  She found him gone, and she would have been suspicious at once.  Scarpia knew all about the painter Cavaradossi’s jealous mistress.  It was not just the professional knowledge of a good chief of police, nor yet of a connoisseur of opera: his interest was much more pressing.  But of course he did not reveal it then.  He practised his oily graces on her.  He pretended that he had seen Mario leave with me – Marchesa Attavanti – and showed her the dropped fan by way of proof, in case the painting wasn’t enough.  The stupid bitch fell right into the trap.  Instead of asking herself why the Chief of Police should be so interested in Mario and me, she believed him and stormed off.  Straight to the villa, about which Scarpia would otherwise have known nothing – and he had Spoletta follow her.

Now, Mario and Tosca had each treated the other badly, but no worse than other foolish young lovers do every day.  In any wholesome city in the world, one without Scarpia in it, you can imagine what would have happened when she arrived at the villa.  There would have been a fierce quarrel.  The words ‘selfish liar’ and ‘jealous fool’ would have filled the air.  And then they could have made love all night and been happy again.  For their misjudgments to be the death of them … for that, it took Scarpia.  And me.

When she got there, God only knows what she thought, to see a ragged desperate fugitive instead of the demon Marchesa.  Mario must have known at once that they were in imminent danger.  As far as he knew, there was not a moment to waste – the police might be right on her heels.  I suppose that was how she came to see where he hid Cesare.  Or perhaps she had heard him talk of the well in the past.  It was a terrible mistake, either way.  In point of fact, Spoletta hung back and let Tosca leave the villa and set off back to the city before he sprang his trap.  He kept watch but stayed hidden: he was waiting for reinforcements, and he wanted her to think it was a false alarm.  Mario, for his part, must have wanted Tosca gone for her own safety, and once she was convinced that the Marchesa wasn’t there she would have been quite ready to go.  She didn’t understand politics: perhaps, even then, she didn’t grasp how serious the business was.  She left unmolested.  But she was late for the reception.

And when she had gone, then came the raid, the search: Spoletta and his rabble found no sign of Cesare, but laid hands on Mario, who was being ‘insolent and obstructive’.  (I went there afterwards.  All his painting gear had been thrown on the ground, the unfinished canvases slashed, the sketchbooks torn and scattered.  No wonder he was insolent, but if they thought he would give up a man’s life to save his work, they were mistaken.  He could have given them a hint so easily.  Oh Mario.)  They brought him to Scarpia at the Palazzo Farnese and, while I admired Tosca’s singing in the cantata, they questioned him.  He told them nothing.  But Scarpia had the answer: he sent for Tosca.  He mentioned Mario’s name and instead of flying for her life, the poor silly baggage walked straight into his lair. She might have gone free: there was no reason to arrest her.  Probably she imagined she might smooth things over by paying some routine bribe or calling on one of her noble patrons: she might make amends for her blunder about the fan.  It was all for the love of her Mario.  And Spoletta explained exactly how Scarpia made use of it.

‘That was why the Baron was a good man to work for,’ he said.  ‘He used his head. Having the woman there made it much easier.  All we had to do was set to work on her fine gentleman where she could hear us.  She wasn’t anywhere near as pig-headed.  A few good screams from him and she snapped like a string of beads, couldn’t spill fast enough.’  This was what I had abandoned Mario to: and Tosca.  And had I not known it from the first?  Everyone knew what went on behind barred doors in the palace, and everyone turned a blind eye, as long as the city was safe.  I read, sick and shaking, sitting in my fine lady’s veil and gloves, the hired ruffians staying respectfully clear of me, in the very room where it had happened … How could I bear to live with myself?  Yet I live on, regardless.  I am not as honourable as Tosca.

Could I blame her for betraying Mario and my brother?  Did she ask to be entangled in my schemes?  I would have done the same in her place, however much better I understood things.  But she was the one who was there, with Mario.  I will wager she screamed, cursed and fought.  She did not get as far as the door, only to turn back meekly because she was told to.  If she gave way, it was only because they were too many for her.

But that was not all.  When that part was over, when Scarpia had sent his hounds to find Cesare, and had Mario dragged away to wait for the hangman, his game with Tosca was just beginning.  It turned out that he had had his eyes on the Diva for a long time, and to see her spit hatred at him, in agony for her lover, had only whetted his appetite.  He offered to spare Mario’s life if she would give him her body.  I am not making this up: Spoletta was perfectly frank about it.  Women were one of the perquisites of his master’s job, and after all, who cares if an actress is raped?  Scarpia himself, I am sure, saw things on a higher plane.  It might be a new sensation even for him, to possess a woman who loathed him with every fibre of her being, while her very love for another would force her to comply with any demand he cared to make.  I believe that love was altogether an intense irritant to Scarpia.  He thought that if he flung enough filth at it he could assure himself that it did not exist: the finer and truer the love, the greater the urgency to do so.

And of course – again – Tosca at last agreed.  And again, what else could she do?  She gave in, in return for a promise that Mario would not be hanged, but would be ‘shot’, for appearance’s sake, in a sham execution, after which the two of them would be allowed to escape.  Evidently Scarpia was playing with her.  It defies belief that she trusted in such a fanciful lie, but it was his only offer.  After she left Scarpia she was allowed into the Castel Sant’Angelo, where they had taken Mario, to tell it to him, an hour before dawn.  I do not suppose he believed it for one moment, but perhaps he let her think he did.  I hope at least they were able to forget everything for an instant, for one last embrace.  The Jacobins’ bonfires were burning just below the castle walls; another few hours and the garrison would have lost its nerve, and no one would have been executed, and Mario would have been safe … As it was, they followed their orders: they put him against the wall.  Tosca saw that he had been shot, without any pretence.  She walked to the parapet – walked into air without flinching – fell straight to her death.  Scarpia had had his way in everything.

Except for the small detail that when she left him, he was dead.  If he hadn’t kept his side of the unequal bargain, neither had Tosca.  He had made the mistake of sending his men out of earshot, and the double one of leaving a sharp knife on his table.  And when he tried to collect his payment, she stabbed him to the heart. 

She and Mario were true to each other for a lifetime.  A short lifetime, but still.  They lived free and they died together, while I, Marchesa Attavanti, did as my husband commanded, stayed safe, and failed them. 

I shall never know what Mario thought or foreknew when he painted me as the Magdalene, or for whom he really meant the love with which he painted her face.  But I would kneel, and put on sackcloth, and tear my hair and stretch my arms out to heaven, just as she did, if I thought that, like her, by doing so I would be forgiven.

********

Hardly any of my acquaintance ever speak of Cesare or Mario in my hearing.  It would be ill-bred.  Never mind if your brother is hunted to his death, if your only true love is tortured and killed like vermin, such things are not mentioned in polite company, and as a great lady who is never seen without an elaborate coiffure, how could you possibly wish it otherwise?  I see murderous old generals, and courtiers who have long since forgotten what truth is, strut and preen at my soirées (oh yes, I soon began giving them again), decked in ribbons and medals, honoured by all.  While Cesare and Mario, who gave their lives for justice, have no monument, and are talked of in shamefaced whispers.  Cesare at least got a decent grave.  I have never been able to find out where Mario was buried. 

But he did leave me something, after all.  Not a work of beauty and skill like the Magdalene, wantonly destroyed: a grimy piece of cheap paper, crumpled, straightened out and twice folded over.  The Chief of Police handed it to me, furtively, saying that he got it from Spoletta.  It was a letter, addressed to Floria Tosca.  Someone must have taken a bribe to let Mario write it while he waited for his death, and as Tosca was dead too, that worm Spoletta had kept it.  When his new master started asking questions, I imagine he said with a leer: ‘Who’s paying?  The Attavanti woman?  Oh yes, she was his piece too, wasn’t she?  Perhaps she should see this …’

I unfolded the letter when I was alone, terrified of the bitterness of the moment when it was written, as if it might have poisoned the paper itself. 

Did I mention what beautiful hands Mario had?  I used to watch sidelong as he was drawing: they were so steady and sure, and I used to drive myself wild by imagining … well, never mind.  The letter, not counting the address, was only a few short lines.  All it said was:

Dearest Floria.  If only I knew this would find you alive and safe, I should be content.  I am afraid to think of what you may have suffered.  Please forgive me.  I had to help him but you should never have been hurt so.

I love you until I die. 

Floria

How shall I

I sobbed with the letter in my hand, in triumph and horror and rage.  Mario had written that: the Mario I loved seemed to live still, in those few words.  They had not destroyed him, not until they killed him.  But it was not for want of trying.  Scarpia’s artists had left their signature, in the very letters that trailed across the page, wavering and broken, as if his hand would barely grasp the pen, becoming almost impossible to read, finishing in a heavy ink stroke where he must have let it fall when he could not write any more.

I have wondered many times how he might have gone on with the letter, but as to why he broke off, I believe I know.  It was not simply that his hand gave out.  It was that he could think of nothing to say that would make amends to Tosca.  She would not be able to live without him.  Even in the joy of the moment when she came to him, they must both have known it. 

Mario had so much to live for, yet he threw it all into the balance, without a second thought, out of pity for a spent force, a broken man.  He kept faith and it cost him everything.  And what good did it do?  Why did he have to die comfortless, knowing that he had not saved his friend after all, and was leaving his love despairing? 

Did he think of me at all, during that night?  I have to hope that he did not, for how could he have forgiven me?

I did not kiss the letter, or any such foolishness.  I had no right: it was Tosca’s.  But I kept it, and sometimes when I have bad dreams or hopelessness comes over me I look at it and let myself feel again a fury that I mean to use one day.  Although, who am I to talk?  When Mario died, I was sound asleep.

For Tosca, it was different.  She was loved by the common people, and they will insist on honouring the unfortunate, even those who die in not altogether polite circumstances.  There were contributions to give her a fine tomb, and there are always flowers on it.  Bunches of white roses, scattering their petals, also appear, mysteriously, at the place below the castle walls where she ended her life.  Every so often I lay some there myself.  The most widely believed story is that she threw herself down to escape being ravished; that her lover stabbed Scarpia in revenge, and was killed in turn by the soldiers.  It is not bad, but the truth is better.

It cheers me to think of how she must have used all her strength to drive that knife into Scarpia’s heart.  I want to shout encouragement to her, to tell her that I am coming to help.  Between the two of us, we could have made an even better job of it.  We could have taken longer over killing him, made him pay a fairer price for all the harm he did.  I often think how many people had cause to hate Scarpia, and how we Voltaireans, the Jacobins, the republicans planned and plotted solemnly to free our city … and yet in the end the task that none of us could accomplish, not even the might of France, was carried out by one poor simple woman whom he had pushed too far.  The goat-girl, the brainless brunette, the coarse-bred actress who, unlike a lady, knew how to fight, how to strike home when the moment came…   but she had to do it alone, and then, alone again, when there was no hope left, she chose to die. 

It seems beyond absurdity that while she and Mario were alive, I detested her and she could not bear the sight of me.  How we were almost ready to kill each other for the sake of the man we both loved, whom we would have done anything to save – and ended by sealing his fate, between us.  What does it matter, now, that he loved her better than me – what did it ever matter?  What a wicked waste that I only feel friendship for her now that they are both dead.

Peace, Tosca.  Forgive me, wherever you are, and sleep well.

********

Explanatory note by Julia Angelotti, 18 January 1860

Having taken it upon myself to arrange and preserve what letters and papers I can find relating to the Italian side of my family, the Angelotti, I should include the memoir above, which I have translated from its original Italian, written by my great-aunt, the late Maria Francesca, Marchesa Attavanti, née Angelotti, probably soon after June 1800, when the events to which it refers took place.  But I hesitate, because of the highly intimate nature of her account.  I recommend whoever takes charge of this small archive in future to exercise discretion in allowing access to it.

My father’s family was divided by the troubles in Rome in the last years of the eighteenth century.  My grandfather Adriano Angelotti departed Italy at that time and set up in trade with moderate success in England.  The light in which his brother, Cesare, appears in this account helps to explain why he was seldom spoken of in my hearing.  Their sister, Maria Francesca, childless and for many years a widow, lived in the Attavanti palace in Rome, alone except for a few servants.  She visited us a handful of times, always reluctantly.  She did not herself encourage visits.  She was an austere personage in her later years: yet she and I were fond of each other.

The Marchesa placed this writing in my hands as a direct result of an occurrence during her last visit to England, in the summer of last year, 1859.  We took part in a tour of a country house whose owner I know slightly.   In his picture gallery, my attention was caught by a beautiful small painting of a pastoral dance.  I do not think I have ever seen a painting in which there was so infectious a sense of movement.  Our host explained that the picture was a Cavaradossi, one of very few known surviving works by a Franco-Italian painter of the late eighteenth century whose promising career was cut short by political violence.  (His account implied that such tragedies were, in a sense, a fitting and unavoidable part of an artistic life, and especially to be expected in such a volatile country as Italy.)  Aunt Francesca seemed deeply affected to hear the name of the artist.  She examined the picture with close interest and showed, beyond doubt, that she had been one of its models.  She was a great beauty in her youth, and, according to family legend, much courted.

That same evening, my aunt handed me a small silk-wrapped package containing this writing, asking me to keep it carefully, but not to read it until she had returned to Italy.  In explanation, she said:

‘I never told anyone.  There were always so many secrets.  But it is wrong to carry secrets to one’s grave.’  Then she spoke of her joy in finding that not all the artist’s work had perished, but rather bitterly of our host’s summing-up of his life.  ‘People talk as if the past had to be what it was,’ I remember her saying.  ‘As if one can only sigh, and accept it.  To those who were there, and wept and fought to change it, it was otherwise.  Remember, Giulia.  Although I hope that you will know happier times.  Nothing has to be.  It is so only because people decide.  And there are some decisions that, in this world, can never be forgiven.’

And then she said very quietly: ‘To speak like that of Mario, my Mario.  It makes me feel how long ago it all was … and yet still I sometimes wake in the night thinking that it is not too late, that somehow I can save him …’

After she was gone and I had read her account, I wrote briefly to my aunt to thank her: to let her know that I had understood, without going into details that could only give her pain.  I asked her whether she would like me to make enquiries about buying Mr Harries’ painting, for although he had said he would not sell it, he might change his mind in the light of what we knew.

However, I received a letter by return from a cousin of the Marchesa saying that she had died peacefully at her home, the day before my letter arrived.  There was no time for me to travel to attend her funeral, but I sent my condolences to her cousin, Umberto, and he was kind enough to invite me to meet him on my next visit to Italy.

We fell into reminiscences of Aunt Francesca, first guarded, then rather less so. I remarked that she seemed to blame herself for events in the past that she had been powerless to change.  He looked left and right, along the vine-grown terrace on which we were walking: in Italy one grew used to such circumspection.  Then he said:

‘And yet it is almost certain that few people have done more to change this country than the Marchesa, in the course of her life.’

I expressed surprise.  My ramrod-backed aunt, never seen without a black lace veil over her snowy white hair, looking as if she herself had not changed in a hundred years …

‘Yes,’ he insisted.  ‘No one knows: that is the measure of her success.  After she was widowed, she lived as a recluse, but she fostered every reform movement in Italy, she kept her hands on all the threads … Believe me, there was very little that was not discussed, behind the blind shutters of that old palazzo.  She helped the 1830 insurrections.  The revolutions of 1848 would never have broken out in so many of the states of Italy at once without her, although she was already an old woman.  And although they failed, the failure would have been bloodier still but for her.  She saved scores of lives.  She played a long game … and now, I believe, in another year or two Italy will be unified, and no longer a despotism, perhaps even the Republic she always dreamed of, although she did not live to see it.  The Marchesa did not waste her life.’

What would the Marchesa herself have thought of this judgement, I wonder? 

I do not know how much Umberto knew of that earlier episode in her life.  A feeling of tact forbade me to mention the details, and I certainly never asked whether he knew anything of that other, shorter document that she had kept, although it was not hers: the letter that Mario Cavaradossi had written to his beloved, the day they both died.  I imagine that it was too precious and painful to her to be shared even with me.  It seems most likely that she had it buried with her, without letting anyone know what it was.

So … what IS Bad Church Music?

I have been a member of the Facebook group ‘I’m Fed Up With Bad Church Music’ for a couple of years now, and it has provided food for thought in all kinds of ways.  Not least, in prompting one to ponder the question of what exactly makes church music good or bad?  A minority of group members believe that there is no objective answer, that such judgements are purely a matter of personal and cultural taste.  More of us have a gut feeling that we know the good from the bad, or at least the better from the less good, when we hear it.  When it comes to defining our criteria, though, there are many different attempts none of which seems quite to nail the problem.

Is bad church music ‘me’-centred, as opposed to good church music which is God-centred?  But are there not hymn-texts that centre on the singer with a humility and profundity that few would dare criticize, like ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’?  If it comes to that, are not a number of the Psalms highly, even distastefully ‘me-centred’? 

Is bad church music full of repetitions (“7/11 music”?)   But then has not repetition always been used in prayer as an aid to contemplation?  Are not psalm chants repetitive, and the Rosary, not to mention Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus?

Should we insist on a minimum of technical competence in the composition and performance of church music?  “Three-chord choruses” are a frequent bugbear, as are singers who wail out of tune, cantors who leave the congregation behind, etc. etc.  But then, does God not accept any offering that is made in good faith?  If people are genuinely trying their best, is not music that involves and includes the people as they are, a better option than good performance that reduces them to passivity?

Should sexuality be kept out of church music?  Well, I detest the aggressive, preening sexuality of rock music invading the church, but I have myself described the Agnus Dei from Byrd’s four-part Mass, approvingly, as ‘orgasmic’.  In a broader argument, should church music avoid theatricality, or avoid ‘stirring up’ human, physical passions, as opposed to calming and elevating the spirit?  But the line between liturgy and theatre has always been wafer-thin.  Good theatre is not just a matter of make-believe and histrionics, but reveals profound truths that everyday life can gloss over: so does liturgy.  And humans are body as well as spirit.  The whole point of having a sacramental Church is that it consecrates the physical world: we are not Manichees, believing in a simple dichotomy between corrupt matter and pure Spirit.  Any worship that leaves out the ‘physical passions’ will be leaving out half of humanity, and any such religion will be a cramped, etiolated thing.  Should we get out of the difficulty by simply leaving the choice of music to a properly constituted body with divine authority, as some Catholics in the group urge?  But that is just kicking the can down the road.  People have sung to God for much longer than the Magisterium has been in existence: the rules follow the music, not the music the rules.  And music can give intimations about the divine nature that words – including rules – can never encompass.

Indeed, music is such potent stuff that a proportion of Christians distrust it altogether.  For obvious reasons, we don’t see many contributors to this group wanting to ban all music, or restrict it to monotone chanting or even to singing alone.  But such Christians do exist.  They want a plain religion of words, deeds, and silence.  They are iconoclasts, who think that all art tends towards idolatry, a focus on the thing created rather than the Creator.  They are represented in the group by a tendency to think that ‘bad’ church music is, in fact, ‘good’ and vice versa: that simple, corny, clumsily performed ‘worship songs’ with guitar, and the like, are a sign that a congregation is keeping its mind on the essentials: welcoming all comers, concentrating on evangelism and good works.  Whereas the Anglican cathedral tradition of choral singing, for instance, has lost its way in ‘pride’ and ‘self-pleasing’.

Which is all very well.  But I believe that God is happy to see us playing, in the deepest sense, thinking, imagining and creating, as well as working, for His Kingdom.  Everyone hungers for beauty as well as for bread.  A church without art risks becoming dogmatic, narrow and self-righteous, without refreshment from the well-springs of imagination that go beyond words.  I believe, and wish, that far more people could become involved in singing and playing the finest church music than are at the moment.  The fact that choral singing has come to be seen as an ‘elite’ activity is just an aspect of the troubling disjuncture between artistic production and consumption, and between the ‘high’ and the ‘popular’ (or ‘commercial’) that has arisen in the past century in the Western world in general, not just the Christian part of it. There should no more uplifting metaphor for the Kingdom of Heaven than music with many interweaving voices and many instruments.  Many gifts, all different, all united in a greater whole.

No one cared more than Jesus about feeding the poor, but he approved of the woman at Simon’s banquet pouring her costly ointment over his feet, rather than selling it for charity. ‘She has done a beautiful thing for me.’  God is happy when we do beautiful things for him.    

So, having dismissed all kinds of ways of judging between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ church music, what do we have left?  How can we justify the way that some music makes us bristle up and feel ‘wrong’, while some is ‘right’?  One of my personal red lines is amplification.  I believe that amplified music in a church building (in the open air it is different) is utilizing a fake means of communication that, simply by being louder and making it easier to create an effect, tends to displace and diminish real physical communication between singers and hearers.  It is like over-seasoned food reducing our capacity to distinguish between subtle flavours.  I have a related aversion to ‘multi-media’ churches designed like cinemas or amphitheatres, as opposed to traditional churches that were designed to create the most favourable acoustics for ‘natural’ speaking, singing and listening.  But, who knows, I might one day attend a multi-media church that would change my mind.

The ‘real’ versus the ‘fake’ is a criterion I am still mulling over.  In the church music I like, I have a sense that the composer’s faith, their intelligence and their creativity have worked together to the utmost.  No punches have been pulled, nothing held back.  Whether a piece of music is simple or elaborate, or even if it falters technically, if it is the best the guy could do, I’ll accept it. 

And my objection to a lot of today’s ‘praise music’ is that I sense a faux-naif pose.  There is a difference between being part of a tradition and being impelled to do your personal best within that tradition, and churning out derivative stuff that is posing as ‘new’, just because you can sell it.  And there is a difference between having a simple faith, and posing as having a simple faith in an age when faith cannot be simple without lobotomizing itself.  There is a hypocrisy in adopting the technologies of a modern age, the marketing strategies, the microphones and loudspeakers, to promote a faith that wishes to ignore all the ideas, the better as well as the worse ones, of the modern world.

If one must go down the route of rejecting the modern world, I sense a greater honesty in the church music that tries to recreate the contemplative calm and/or simplicity of an earlier age more purely in its musical style as well as in its words, like that of John Tavener and the revival of Orthodox music, or like African church music or spirituals.  But I’ll take an honest agnostic’s music over a gung-ho evangelical’s any day: Herbert Howells rather than Stuart Townsend.  Anguished doubt, as long as it is wrestling with faith on the deepest level, is more conducive to true worship than is complacent, shallow celebration.

But even here, I’m inconsistent, because in practice I can actually put up with a certain amount of ‘fakery’ in church music.  For instance, I don’t mind John Rutter, or Taizé chants, although Taizé is formulaic, and Rutter quite calculating in the emotional effects he produces.  Really bad music closes minds, shuts off opportunities, creates a monoculture of the lowest common denominator.  Some not-very-good music actually acts as a place-holder and a stepping-stone towards the really good stuff, rather than initiating an irreversible decline away from it.  This is the mistake highly intelligent musicians can make about Rutter.  They claim he ‘debases’ taste, when in practice he acts as a recruiting sergeant for the masters.  Someone who is first captivated by Rutter will be ready to try Wesley or Purcell.  Anyone who likes Taizé may well be open to Gregorian chant. But I fear that anyone who really, really likes Marty Haugen is in danger of only, ever, being content with Marty Haugen, and indeed switching off from anything else before it begins, as ‘too hard’ or ‘too boring’.  Call the aspirational side of Rutter snobbery if you will.  I’ll accept being called a snob, or middle-class, or elitist, or anything else anyone cares to call me, if only I can have good music.

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And so … what is good music?  And so we come round to the beginning again …

A Puccini Polemic

Opera is often dismissed as a moribund art form.  The most recent frequently performed works were composed around the middle of the twentieth century, and audiences even for the established repertoire are in steady decline.   In 2015 the public perception of opera is far more restricted than it was two generations ago.  But insofar as people have heard of opera at all, they have heard of Puccini.  The heartstring-tugging, ‘the girl dies’ sentimentalism of La Bohème and Madama Butterfly, and the disaster-prone, corpse-strewn melodrama of Tosca: along with Carmen’s bullfighter, and some vague idea that Wagner was a Nazi who wrote portentous epics, this is roughly the opera-shaped shadow that remains in popular consciousness. 

How did it come to this?  In his time, Puccini was blamed for almost single-handedly bringing on the decline of great opera; now he is about all that is left of it.  In what follows I want to suggest that if ‘crowd-pleaser’ Puccini is still pleasing the crowds like no one else a hundred years later, it might be because he’s actually some good, and that the frenzied critical attacks on him in his time and since, rather than his operas, were symptoms of the problems in ‘Western’ culture that began about then and are still with us.  The groundwork of analysing Puccini’s critical reception has been done by Alexandra Wilson in her book The Puccini Problem (Cambridge, 2007).  A vigorous case for the ‘rehabilitation’ of Puccini has been made by William Berger in Puccini Without Excuses (New York, 2005).  Wilson’s book is specialized and Berger’s is essentially a popular guide, though with very perceptive critical sections.  I want to try to bridge the gap between the two, and add some context, and also some polemic, within a briefer compass.

Puccini worked at exactly the time that the Romantic era in the arts sputtered to a close (dated 1910 by Virginia Woolf!), to be replaced by Modernism.  His crime was essentially to continue to be a Romantic when the arbiters of taste were in the process of decreeing that something different was needed.  He was not a composer in the Verdi/Wagner league, but he was a good and effective one; and better composers than he, who worked in symphonic music rather than opera, are regarded as problematic and rejected by some high-and-dry critics for much the same reasons as he is: Mahler and Rachmaninov, for instance.  They, too, are accused of an over-ripe Romanticism that shades into sentimentalism and hysteria, but arguably all they did was to continue to insist on a lush style of beauty and frank emotionalism when taste demanded that beauty be pared down into austerity, or eliminated altogether, and emotion be understated.  They continued moving further in a direction from which dominant taste had veered away.  But why had taste changed direction like this?  Did it ‘have’ to?

WHO KILLED ROMANTICISM?

There is no agreed definition of Romanticism, the artistic style that flourished in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  One of its features, however, was the placing of a high value on naturalness, spontaneity and unbridled emotion in art, as a reaction to the ‘classicism’ – the control, symmetry and rationality – of the Enlightenment period.  And it in turn suffered its own reaction, but cultural historians argue about the reasons, and will continue to do so. 

Romanticism, especially in music, may simply have reached the end of its natural life span. ‘Every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation, and emotional charge until the evocative potential of the style is fully exploited.  Attention then turns to the style itself, at which point the style gives way to a new one.’ (Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 412)  ‘Highly wrought’ becomes ‘over-wrought’, and the wise artist will realise that the seam has been worked out and will strike out in a new direction. 

But the life cycle of Romanticism was also affected by socio-economic and political factors.  With increasing prosperity in the late nineteenth century, with mass production, wider education and higher disposable incomes allowing an ever greater proportion of the population access to art, all kinds of tensions arose.  During the climactic flowering of any artistic style, the barriers between the ‘elite’ and the ‘masses’ can temporarily be broken down.  Thus it was with the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe, the plays of Shakespeare, and, in Risorgimento Italy, the operas of Verdi, whose combination of powerful immediacy and technical subtlety made them appealing to rich and poor alike.  But almost at once, when the climax was passed, Romantic art was seen to be losing its spontaneity, its authenticity, and to be in danger of being ‘commodified’ for a mass audience.  There were anxieties that the ‘vulgar’ tastes of the ‘masses’ would corrupt art, or, conversely, that bad art would ‘manipulate’ the masses into stupor or fanaticism.  It was thought necessary to purify art, to purge it of anything that could have a ‘cheap’, automatic, unthinking appeal, to recover a fresh way of seeing the world by getting rid of unnecessary elaboration, sentiment and if necessary, the notion of beauty itself.  Thus Modernism was born. 

The directions taken by Modernism were heavily influenced by two theorists in particular, Marx and Freud – an unholy duo both apparently determined to cut Art down to size.  Romanticism had enthroned art, in place of religion, as the supreme repository of value for humanity, the means to apprehend what was true and important in life.  Marx and Freud between them tried their best to strip away these claims.  For Marxists, all that matters is economic justice, to be achieved through class struggle.  Power is what counts: there is no transcendent, disinterested art.  If art is not actively attacking a corrupt social order, it is implicated in supporting it.  Revolution in the arts was supposed to mirror and encourage revolution in society, to speak directly to the oppressed poor, bypassing the parasitic ‘bourgeoisie’, those self-satisfied consumers of commodified art, and to lead to the establishment of a socialist utopia.  Romanticism’s increasing association with nationalism, racial theory, and then fascism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, made it even more a natural target for Marxists.  For Freudians, meanwhile, art is prima facie nothing but wishful thinking, the attempt to compensate for the artist’s or society’s unhealed psychic wounds and neuroses, without addressing their roots.  In an ideal world, art would be unnecessary: ‘the perfectly adjusted organism is silent’.  Throughout the twentieth century, creators of literary fiction, poetry, music, visual art of all kinds, have laboured under this dual denial of the legitimacy of their work.  Art must criticize society, or art must clinically promote psychic ‘health’ and probe ‘sickness’; art must subordinate itself to these aims, or it has no right to exist. 

Populist historians like John Carey (The Intellectuals and the Masses) somewhat cynically see the whole Modernist tendency as an attempt by the intellectual elite to recover its privileged position – dependent on scarcity value – by making art more ‘difficult’, even while its stated aim was to abolish elites and empower the ‘masses’.  The failure of high modernist art to appeal to the ‘masses’ was noted, and as a response, in the 1960s and after, modernism gave way to ‘post-modernism’.  The very idea of absolute standards in art was abandoned: instead there was supposed to be an infinity of different perspectives, none leading to an objective ‘truth’ or ‘reality’. This apparently total relativism, however, coexists to this day with a residual Marxist belief in the value of overturning the established order.  Perspectives other than those of the ‘white European male’ and the political establishment are preferred.  Rather than trying to wean the masses off their dependence on mass-produced junk, post-modernists study and, to an extent, celebrate the junk – the more sensationalist, shallow and amoral the better – in the hope of so accentuating the ‘contradictions of capitalism’ as to accelerate its collapse.  So, since the 1960s, the attempt to educate the public in ‘good’ art has largely been given up, if not actively sabotaged, by the elites (educational establishment, broadcasters), with the dire consequences for audiences of classical music and opera that we are all familiar with.

In this context, we can understand why critics have been so set against Puccini ever since his time.  His career coincided with the exhaustion of the Romantic style.  Critics held him personally to blame for the decline, rather than commending him for doing what he could to find new possibilities within the style.  There followed the Modernist ascendancy, in which Puccini was judged and found wanting by Marxist/Freudian standards, as (a) bourgeois and (b) unhealthy.  Post-modernism to some extent rediscovered Puccini, but on its own terms: it approves of his perceived ‘decadence’ and trashiness, his supposed contribution to the rise of moral relativism and the decline of absolute standards in art.  I think this attitude is pernicious: with friends like these, Puccini hardly needs enemies. 

HISTORICISM AND HINDSIGHT?  DECADENCE OR ASPIRATION?

Puccini is characterised as a composer of ‘decadence’.  I shall get on to the idea that his actual music was ‘decadent’ in a minute.  But in the wider, social and political sense, we need to look at the notion that Europe in the 1890s was a ‘decadent’ place.  The idea was born at the time, and has been endorsed, with hindsight, by most people since.  The fact that Europe was unable to resolve its political tensions and that the cataclysms of two world wars, the Russian Revolution, and the Nazi and Fascist ascendancy were on the horizon, seems to confirm the idea all too emphatically.  Colonialism and trade wars set the European powers head to head; national unification in Germany and Italy, rather than being the hoped-for answer to their peoples’ problems, brought troubles of its own.  In the arts, as the noble struggles for freedom seemed to be over, Romanticism had nowhere left to go but to extremes – whether of aestheticism, nationalism, or ‘depravity’.  However, if we read the claims that were made at the time, it becomes clear that contemporary perceptions of ‘decadence’ were perhaps one part serious diagnosis to three parts moral panic – the panic that seems to overtake people when faced with comparative luxury, comfort, the removal of threats and the presence of confusing new opportunities.  And what led inevitably to war was the moral panic, rather than the ‘decadence’ itself.

Prophets of doom back to the Old Testament have seen excessive prosperity, and the conspicuous greed and inequity that go with it, as the inevitable precursor to plagues and cataclysms.  On this reading, Marx’s Kapital is perhaps the most intellectually respectable and influential ‘The End Is Nigh’ tract ever written.  With Marx as their starting point, intellectuals throughout the twentieth century were impelled to fit past and present events into a pattern which they expected to be completed in a certain way – by the collapse of industrial capitalism, and/or its transformation into the dictatorship of the proletariat, or perhaps a ‘planned’ Modernist world society guided by technocrats (H.G. Wells).  That the pattern was not, in fact, so completed within the expected time-frame, and that industrial (and post-industrial) capitalism has thus far picked itself up from its successive crises and staggered, or swaggered, on – this leaves the leftist intellectual establishment aggrieved, but still a long way away from changing its collective mind.  But one thing is clear: that the global bourgeoisie, that class that was just beginning to loom so large in late nineteenth-century Europe, has so far gone from strength to strength.  There may be clouds on its horizon, but so far, everyone wants to be part of it.  As a bourgeois composer writing for a bourgeois audience, perhaps Puccini should be characterised as being on the side of growth, rather than ‘decadence’.  The idea of ‘decadence’, indeed, is subjective.  What seems like ‘decadence’ from the point of view of an aristocracy, an institution, or an intellectual elite that is being elbowed aside, or seeing its standards diluted, may seem like something quite different to the upwardly mobile. 

Greater disposable incomes; more widespread literacy and education; improved public health; greater religious and sexual tolerance; more independence for women, and the beginnings of women’s suffrage; an increased audience for the arts, and the possibilities of expanding the range of cultural ‘products’ on offer, into the infinite middle ground between the ‘aristocratic’ and the ‘popular’ – all these changes provided opportunities for an artist like Puccini, and many of them, which even those on the Left regard as obvious improvements now, were precisely what pundits of the time decried as ‘decadence’.  If we note the extent to which Modernism had its roots in moral panic, we may be less inclined to dismiss artists whose work does not conform to the Modernists’ preconceived arc of historical development.

‘REALISM’ AND RETREAT?

It is an extraordinary experience, now, to read the earliest reviews of Puccini’s operas in the musical press of the time and consider what he was up against.  The critics who wrote those reviews had become habituated, not just to an endless flow of competent new opera, but to hearing a new masterpiece from Verdi or Wagner every few years.  The Ricordi publishing house, hoping Puccini would be their new money-spinner, marketed him as the ‘heir to Verdi’, and he paid the price: it’s as simple as that.  The critics seriously seemed to think that Italian opera could and should be maintained at the late-Verdi level indefinitely: especially as Italy had used Verdi as a mascot of unity, and thought it needed a new composer to continue to be its national mentor.  They compared Puccini to Verdi and found him wanting – an invidious comparison that persists to the present day.  I suppose it is not impossible that a genuine heir or heirs to Verdi might have emerged, composers who could discover new unexplored possibilities in the Italian High Romantic style, but it seems unlikely.  Readers in the early twenty-first century, who can only dream of a new opera on a Puccini level being composed anywhere in the world ever again, feel inclined to murmur ‘what did they want, jam on it?’   

Puccini, of course, was not interested (other than financially) in being ‘heir to Verdi’: his artistic aims were not totally, but largely, different.  He was the prime exponent of verismo, the furthest point reached in the nineteenth-century dismantling of the ‘frame’, the barrier of artifice between the opera and direct imitation of life.  Classical and early Romantic operas had told stories and expressed emotion in a stylized way through a succession of formal musical structures: recitatives, arias, ensembles and choruses.  The operas of Wagner abandoned the formal musical ‘numbers’ for a flexible through-composed style, but substituted their own ‘distancing’ effects: the extended timescale, in which the singers and the orchestra meditate on the action rather than responding directly and immediately to it and each other; and the mythological settings, which warn the audience not to expect literal reality or ‘normal’ behaviour.  Verdi, for his part, set stories that were more naturalistic, belonging to history and even (in La Traviata) to the contemporary middle-class world, but he usually depicted royalty or nobility in classically tragic situations, and he hung onto formal musical structures, although using them more and more flexibly.  By contrast, the verismo school of Italian opera at the end of the 19^th century strove to take naturalism further.  Action would unroll at a realistic speed, the singers would sing as far as possible in natural speech rhythms with only brief lyrical expansions, and the subjects would be drawn from contemporary reality and everyday life.  But, as William Berger points out, that cannot be all: if imitation of ordinary life was the whole point of verismo, no one would sing, for a start. He suggests ‘that at the core of verismo there is a search for the mythic in everyday life’ (Puccini Without Excuses, p. 292.)  The music is there to bestow significance, to lay bare the archetypal patterns into which ordinary human actions fall.  In fact, there is little that is ‘ordinary and everyday’ about the characters of the majority of verismo operas, compared to their middle-class audiences.  They are peasants clinging to primitive codes of honour, bohemians starving in garrets, historical characters caught up in violent events, or victims of culture-shock in exotic settings.  Emotional extremes were the meat and drink of opera as they always had been: it was the uninhibited immediacy of their presentation that was new – and the sense that not-especially-admirable characters with all-too-human frailties, rather than heroes and heroines of tragedy, might have their travails dignified in music.

Arguably, the greatest verismo operas were composed before the style was recognised as such: Verdi’s Traviata and Bizet’s Carmen.   Puccini, however, was the supreme exponent, the only verismo composer to produce more than a single work that survives in the core opera repertory.  Yet in spite of his unending search for ‘dramatic truth’, the criticism that dogs his operas more tellingly and persistently than any other is that they are ‘fake’: that their emotionalism has the feel of being artificially worked up and used to manipulate the audience into a response that has not been ‘fairly’ earned.  And a personal slur of dishonesty, evasiveness and sentimental self-indulgence sticks to the composer himself and to anyone who unreservedly likes his music.  But to what extent are the works of Puccini – and others – ‘refusing to look at the world squarely’, and to what extent are they simply refusing to look at the world in the way the prevailing high culture demands it be looked at – in a ‘hard-bitten’, ‘disillusioned’ and reductive way?  It is obvious that an attempt to discover the ‘mythical’ in people’s sordid little lives was not going to appeal to any Freudian or Marxist.  If you flattered people that way, how would they ever realise they needed their heads sorted out, or get angry enough to bring on the Revolution?

The uncertain success of verismo may, however, be partly the result of trying to remove veils or destroy frames that, in the end, have to remain in some shape or form.  Art is not life, people singing on stage is not ‘natural’, and there comes a point when to try to be as realistic as possible ends up calling attention to, rather than hiding, the inevitable artifice.  (Nothing falls as flat as realism that fails to be realistic, as the many references to Tosca in the book Great Operatic Disasters make all too clear.)  But someone had to try it.  Puccini was the fall guy.  After Puccini, a rattling noise could be heard all over Europe as operatic composers retreated pell-mell into new forms of stylisation, slamming the shutters as they went – the detached mythical game-playing of late Richard Strauss, the neo-classicism of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, the astringent dissonance of Berg, Schoenberg and (to some extent) Janacek, the formalism of Britten.  No one was ever again going to risk appearing on stage naked, only to have the critics claim they were wearing tasteless, diaphanous, rose-tinted veils.  

‘DECADENT’ MUSIC?

As Puccini refused to be either reactionary or revolutionary in the self-proclaimed ‘age of decadence’, it was inevitable that he would be accused of writing ‘decadent’ music, and now we must look at the various senses in which this label has been applied.  First of all, the basic sense that his music is technically shonky: ‘decadent’ in the sense of falling short of the high standards of workmanship achieved by his illustrious predecessors.  Puccini, the accusation goes, was a lazy bastard who was more interested in spending his royalties on sport, women and fast cars than on mastering symphonic technique.  True – and not true.  Puccini wasn’t Wagner, and he wasn’t Verdi.  But then, he wasn’t trying to be.  Wagner’s leitmotifs grow in and out of one another organically like the roots, trunks and branches of a primeval forest.  Verdi’s musical structures have the combined grace and weight of a palatial building.  But their grandeur can be daunting to the inexperienced listener.  Puccini’s are more like a prefabricated house with rearrangeable screens for walls.  Smaller-scale, more lightweight, and yet elegant, adaptable and functional, they draw you straight in.  Just right for the upwardly mobile middle class.  There is a deftness about the way he slots his motifs together that is miraculous in its own right.  It’s like watching a collage artist – Matisse, for instance – creating a balanced, suggestive whole from a few scraps of torn paper.  Why should this not be a legitimate proceeding in music?  Donald J. Grout (1947; Wilson p. 223) concluded that ‘Puccini’s music often sounds better than it is, due to the perfect adjustment of means to ends’.  Unfortunately I don’t think he meant to be funny.  How should music be judged otherwise than on how it sounds?  Does anyone ever say ‘Matisse’s pictures look better than they are’, because he didn’t use the technique of Rubens?

The more damning sense in which Puccini’s music is called ‘decadent’ is that it allegedly shares in the suffocating, dissolute atmosphere of the fin de siècle – an unhealthy interest in extremes and infirmities, a sensuous and sentimental gloating over frailty and suffering, rather than true sympathy.  His contemporaries, and the Modernists, considered he went too far in this direction; for the post-modernists, he didn’t go far enough.  But did he really go there at all?  It is essential to put such criticism in its context.  As Alexandra Wilson’s book shows, the earliest complaints of immorality and sensationalism in Puccini’s work came from conservatives who objected to the depiction of extra-marital sex and violence on stage as such; the accusations of ‘weakness’, ‘effeminacy’ and ‘sickly sensuality’ came from Nationalists who wished to promote a cult of ‘strength’, ‘virility’ and racial purity.  The complaints were taken up by Modernists with a preference for dispassionate dissection, and Freudians with their own narrow ideas of mental hygiene.  Although objecting to Puccini on almost opposite grounds, their objections can sound uncannily similar.  Their attitudes, unlike the nationalist ones, are still with us and have respectability, but it must be recognised that they are just as partial.

The Freudian reading of Puccini, in particular, deserves a more sustained critique than it has yet received.  The Freudian gospel so dominated the twentieth century that I imagine very few artists, and none of those who belonged to the intellectual ‘establishment’, were unaffected by anxiety as to how their work would be read in its light.  To be fair to Freud, he developed his ideas for therapeutic use: when applied to art criticism they are reductive a priori.  Rather than having a ‘gift’, the artist has, or is, a ‘problem’, and his work is not so much an achievement as a set of symptoms, merely presented in a more accessible and interesting way than those of an ordinary patient. While ages of faith might try to silence artists they disapprove of by calling them wicked infidels and condemning them to hellfire, Freudians do the job by impugning their mental health.  It may be doubted whether even threats of damnation can be as crushing to an artist as to be told that his work is a manifestation of his sickness, his deep and inescapable personal inadequacy: at least an infidel supposedly has the power to repent.  I suggest that the ascendancy of Freud had an incalculably paralysing effect on creativity throughout the twentieth century.  A respectable artist had two choices: either to bend over backwards to present him- or her-self as ‘healthy’, according to the highly restrictive template that Freudian theory allowed; or to avowedly ‘pathologise’ his or her peculiarities, pre-empting judgement by self-analysis, again according to the Freudian template. Spontaneity and the free emergence of what lay in the artist’s unconscious was interfered with, as therapeutic aims were twisted into very public value judgements.

Mosco Carner, in his 1958 biography of Puccini, reduced the artist’s creativity to a simple psycho-sexual ‘complex’ in the standard Freudian way.  Pointing out that the composer grew up fatherless with an energetic mother and several older sisters, Carner asserted that he never escaped his all-powerful Mother and was unable to mature as a man.  His unsuccessful marriage and frequent extra-marital affairs are explained in this light.  The step away from the Mother that full commitment to a sexual partner would have entailed was, supposedly, fraught with unbearable guilt for him, a guilt that he projected onto the heroines of his operas: this is why they are nearly always presented as in some sense ‘fallen women’, ‘punished’ for their devoted love by sickness, abandonment, suffering and death. And why the male characters in his operas tend to be cads and bounders, or at best romantic, impulsive types who are unable to follow through and achieve their own ends, not stalwart grown-up men with their feet on the ground.  In his repeated variations on these themes, Carner implies, Puccini was ‘pushing his own buttons’ obsessively, re-enacting a dilemma which it was not within his power to consciously diagnose, let alone solve.  His operas are a kind of self-soothing mechanism that can only appeal to those who are content with non-solutions: they do not helpfully illuminate the human condition.  Thus having, you might think, completely damned Puccini, his praise for his musical and theatrical skill seems faint indeed.

And the only thing we can be sure of in all this is that a man with an averagely messy love life wrote some arguably saccharine melodies for suffering sopranos.  It is surely time to turn things round and dissect the mental attitudes that led to this frantic medicalising and moralising.  We get a taste of them in Carner’s anxieties about the levels of ‘virility’ or ‘effeminacy’ in Puccini’s male characters, and in his telling confusion between ‘weakness’ and ‘gentleness’ (p. 261).  Puccini lived through the fin-de-siècle crisis of masculinity that saw many of his contemporaries reacting with misogyny and militarism.  His characters, lest we forget, belonged to a generation for which the whole of Europe seemed to find little use: the ‘doomed youth’ of the First World War.  The fact that his romantic young men cannot find their place in the world, and need to be saved (physically, not just spiritually) by strong women, is to a degree more honest and interesting than Carner’s criticism.  It is the latter that appears nervous and dated, redolent of a time when old-fashioned moral rigidity about sex and gender roles had collided with the new, high-fibre-and-three-times-a-week, Freudian censoriousness about ‘normality’ to create perhaps the worst of both worlds.  We are more relaxed and aware now.  And yet Carner’s judgements continue to be repeated as gospel, and embroidered, by modern writers on opera like David Kimbell (Italian Opera, Cambridge 1994) – though Berger takes a nicely irreverent attitude to them.

I should suggest that Puccini’s dilemma as an artist was not so much a product of his psycho-sexual peculiarities, as of his consciousness of standing at the end of the Romantic tradition during a crisis of belief in Art, in religion, in Enlightenment ideals and in the value of human life in general.  His response to the crisis, however, was more robust and less ‘decadent’ than has usually been thought.  Rather than scrambling into a sanitised, collective, materialist hope for humanity with the Modernists, he asserted a continued belief in the Romantic ideal despite every pressure to the contrary: this is why his work can appear so pessimistic, and yet contain a core of hope. 

The majority of Puccini’s operas, including his three most-performed works (La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly), take disillusion as their overt subject.  In all these three, the central characters begin with high hopes which are systematically thwarted and stripped away, a process that ends in every case with the heroine’s death.  Yet the disillusioning process is not a cynical one, and the heroines, far from being depicted as weak and inadequate, are strong despite their frailty, their perspective powerfully endorsed by the composer.  La Bohème is a special case, in that the central character, the consumptive Mimi, is to an extent ‘illusion-free’ from the beginning.  Mimi’s music is ‘fragile’, that of the Bohemian set she falls in with is boisterous; but the effect is ironic, considering that Mimi earns an honest living making the fripperies that society demands (silk flowers), while the Bohemians, less successful purveyors of more pretentious fripperies, inhabit a fantasy world.  Puccini’s achievement is to present their youthful illusion as the bubble it is, without puncturing its gorgeous rainbow surface.  He does not validate their belief that Art can transform the world, but he sympathises with it; and he does validate Mimi’s simple belief in love.  In his other two ‘Big Three’ operas, Puccini presents the Romantic predicament yet more starkly.  Tosca and Butterfly believe in love against all the odds, to the point where the only way for them to maintain their faith is through suicide.  The simple question that all Puccini’s operas ask is: was it – or is it – worth it?  Is there any ultimate value in life, love, beauty, all those things that humans have and then must lose?  On the face of it, most of his plots say ‘no’: but the music says ‘yes’.  The music accentuates the apparent vulnerability and helplessness of those who keep faith without compromise in the teeth of the evidence.  Yet it bestows value, and does what Romantic music does: insists, inarticulately, on transcendence.

Puccini’s operas are often criticized for having little character development, for never examining or challenging his characters’ supposed beliefs or ethical positions.  There is justice in this.  Verdi’s operas belong to the tradition of liberal humanism, and encourage us to ask questions, to take part in a dialectic. Why does Rigoletto have to pander to the Duke?  Why does Otello believe Iago?  Why doesn’t Violetta send Germont packing?  In Verdi’s universe, things can – indeed, urgently must – get better.  In Puccini’s, things, and people, are as they are. You are more likely to be left thinking simply (as in the blogger Opera Obsession’s Tosca experience) ‘My God my God my God’.  http://operaobsession.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/ecco-un-artista.html .

But to argue on this basis that Puccini has no moral seriousness and is just a sensationalist is very wide of the mark.  Puccini, at some level, knew that he was at the end of a line.  He felt that, rationally speaking, Romantics like himself were losing the argument in the hard-edged, clinical new world of the twentieth century.  But, like Galileo forced to recant, he went on muttering Eppur si muove – ‘and yet it does move’: ‘it’, in this case, being the human heart.  This is what continues to make Puccini’s operas so compelling.  It was not what intellectuals wanted to hear in the twentieth century.  As a Modernist, one was not supposed to place one’s hope in the power of Art to touch ordinary hearts.  One was supposed to hope in the Dialectic of History, or not at all.  If there is one good thing about post-modernism it is that at least other messages can be heard from time to time, over this shrill utilitarian ideology.

THE TOSCA QUESTION

Tosca tends to focus the attitudes of critics to Puccini.  It is the opera most often brought up as the lead exhibit when accusing him of Decadence, perversion and fakery: the one with torture, attempted rape, stabbing, suicide, and everybody dead at the end.  What do opinion-formers say of it?  A ‘guilty pleasure’, a ‘shabby little shocker’, a ‘coarse bodice-ripper’ from which even the opera critic of the Daily Telegraph feels he must take pains to disassociate himself: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/8645993/Tosca-Royal-Opera-HouseLa-Rondine-Opera-Holland-Park-review.html.   (‘I neither like nor admire Tosca’… I am sure we are all relieved, Rupert Christiansen!).  Even an admirer, Susan Vandiver Nicassio (Tosca’s Rome), thinks that its subject is ‘the illusory nature of human happiness’.  The best that she can say about it is that it provides an emotional catharsis of sorts as we watch the composer manipulate his unknowing, helpless puppet characters to their doom.  For the opera’s detractors, it’s even worse.  Tosca is an exercise in sado-masochism that hasn’t the courage of its convictions, but pretties the subject up.  The audience is in the moral position of passers-by rubber-necking at an automobile wreck on pretence of sympathy, or of kinky porn users who won’t admit to their habit.  If all this is true, I wondered for years, why do audiences leave performances of Tosca feeling not depressed and vaguely dirty, but exhilarated, as if they have witnessed a triumph as well as a disaster? 

I believe that the critics have it back to front.  The trouble is that Freudian attitudes to sexual politics, and pre-conceived ideas about ‘decadence’, have blinded them to what is actually going on in the opera.  Mosco Carner gives the consensus view when he cites the villain of the piece, Scarpia, as an example of the fin-de-siècle ‘discovery of … disease …, abnormality, as a fertile theme for artistic treatment … Tosca has in Scarpia an erotic sadist [with a] pathological trait’.  The truth is that Tosca is more old-fashioned and innocent, and at the same time more modern, than that.  It is not ‘about’ Scarpia as a psychological case (in the way that Salome is about Salome or Wozzeck is about Wozzeck).  It does not present him as sick or abnormal.  On the contrary, he functions successfully and is very pleased with himself.  He is bad, not mad.  While an artist like Puccini could depict a sexual predator like Scarpia operating with impunity from a position of public power, under layers of hypocrisy and denial, the world was busy pretending that this didn’t happen: that such a person was a rarity, if not a figment, to be sought out by the Decadent imagination.  In fact, he is a realistic portrait of a common type.  Only in the last few years (as I write in 2015), with taboos on speaking publicly about sexual abuse finally being lifted, are we waking up to the everyday reality of the Scarpias who have been operating, probably for centuries, in closed hierarchies – families, schools, churches, ethnic communities.  Freud played his part in the cover-up, preferring to treat women who came to him with stories of rape by relatives as delusional, and their complaints as ‘fantasy’ – evidence of what they secretly wanted.  His theories were a new way of doing what power systems have always tended to do: blaming the victim, creating a moral equivalence between the powerful and the powerless.  While those few sexual bullies who were unmasked were labelled interesting cases, excused by being pathologised, their victims were dismissed as having invited their maltreatment, as being ‘masochists’ on a level of perversion with the ‘sadists’.  The mischief this attitude has done is breathtakingly documented in Lundy Bancroft’s book Why Does He Do That?  You can see this whole mess of twentieth-century attitudes informing critical responses to Tosca: the notion that Scarpia is the most important or interesting character, or that Tosca is secretly attracted to him and really wants to be raped (in a Freudian twist of the self-serving libertine code that Scarpia himself propounds)!  Puccini is found wanting for not having been more truly Decadent and made all this explicit.  Because he wrote music that was exciting and accessible rather than disturbing and alienating, he and the audience are assumed to be sneakily ‘enjoying it the wrong way’, to be sadists, or worse, masochists themselves.

Puccini, actually, is entirely innocent of all this inverted morality.  His story is about resistance to tyranny, not sexual perversion.  Tosca successfully defends her integrity; Cavaradossi defends his friend, unsuccessfully but still admirably.  Their bad choices, manipulated by Scarpia, drive them apart, but their love brings them back together.  Puccini is sometimes accused of reifying or worshipping Sex as a ‘primal instinct’, in place of ‘higher’ religious or ethical ideals.  He does no such thing.  He presents a showdown between two kinds of sex so different as to be different things: sex as a tool and reward of power, and sex as part of a free, loving relationship.  It is love, not ‘sex’, that he presents as valuable, as conveying meaning in life despite the fact that it must inevitably end with death.  This might seem a message so obvious as to be anodyne, but it is worth emphasising, given that it seems to have been completely opaque to critics who bought into the strange sexual ideologies of the twentieth century.

A reassessment of Tosca by William Berger goes deeper, offering a mythical interpretation which gave me a Eureka moment.  Scarpia, the corrupt police chief, stands for the Apollonian principle, Tosca the opera singer for the Dionysian.  He, in other words, represents order, hierarchy, rationality, taken to the point of ossification; she, creative chaos, anarchy and instinct.  Tosca is a Maenad, who is led by a glass of wine to the knife with which she slays an ‘order’ that has become a life-denying tyranny.  Berger puts Tosca’s leap from the castle walls in the context of a number of self-actualizing, heroic ‘death leaps’ in Latin history and mythology.  On his reading it is no mere suicide but an act of faith – faith in the principle she represents getting an equal hearing ‘before God’.  And the orchestra’s final theme is an orgasm, a triumphant vindication of the value of life in the face of death.  The ‘vulgarity’ of Tosca is an essential part of the opera’s artistic effect.  It is the nature of the Dionysian to be vulgar, to fly in the face of canons of ‘good taste’. 

Berger’s analysis has much wider applicability.  What has the twentieth century in music been but one huge and destructive split between the Apollonian and Dionysian principles?  In one corner, cerebral, disinfected ‘high art’ music, too embarrassed to try to evoke any uninhibited emotional response; in the other, abandoned by the priesthood, ‘popular’ music that is emotionalism reduced to mindlessness, so impoverished in technique and ideas that it is barely even emotionally effective any more.  The same split between the precious ‘high’ and the shlocky ‘low’ has been writ large in all the arts.  No wonder that no one wanted to listen to Tosca’s message, once the arts were set on such a path.  And an artist who tried his best, but in vain, to keep the ‘high’ and the ‘popular’ from flying apart, and got thoroughly bashed for his pains, might well feel that he was in the position of Tosca’s Cavaradossi: a tortured prisoner of the self-righteous Apollonian, with his Dionysian Muse powerless to save him, although his last hope might be that she could save herself.  That audiences for a hundred years now have continued to respond so powerfully to Tosca, even without being able to say why, may suggest that it was not a vain hope. 

PUCCINI IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

When I suggested on an internet discussion group that Tosca should be seen as a humane drama, I received the following reply from the user ‘Fontinau’ that neatly encapsulates the received wisdom:

‘Puccini couldn’t be less humane if he tried … Tosca, and Puccini in general, have to be understood in the context of late 19^th, early 20^th century Decadent art.  He impels the audience to take sensual pleasure in weakness: Mimi’s physical frailty, Tosca feeling sorry for herself because God has neglected to reward her good behaviour, Cavaradossi crying because he doesn’t want to die, etc.  The problem is that Puccini couldn’t or wouldn’t go further.  In stylistic terms, music that rather interestingly hints at the possibilities of Decadence rather than great Decadent music.’

I hope I have said enough to show that this view is, at the very least, open to question.  I believe that it’s diametrically wrong.  The reason why Puccini doesn’t ‘go further’ into the possibilities of Decadence – in the sense of amorality, the rejection of values – is because, as an essentially humane composer, he was resisting it with all his might; and the frailty of his characters shows the difficulty of the task.  One interesting thing about this comment is that it reveals some of the geological layers of Puccini-detraction: a post-modernist readiness to celebrate transgressive ‘decadence’, wrapped around the rather nasty, essentially fascist, contempt for ‘weakness’ that earlier critics evinced.  

Among the many reasons why this viewpoint needs revising is that it should be clear, in the twenty-first century, that decadence is a slippery concept.  What is perceived as decadence can be a reshaping of morality, as much as a mere rejection of it. We, now, have far more of all the things that the fin-de-siècle considered decadent: irreligion, disrespect for authority, sexual permissiveness, divorce, comfort, short attention spans, ever-changing fashions, globalisation and ethnic mixing, as well as an entertainment diet that makes Puccini’s operas look strait-laced: there is more sex and violence in an average episode of TV drama any night of the week than there is in Tosca, making present-day opera critics’ complaints of its ‘sensationalism’ sound rather quaint.  And yet the sky has not fallen, the ‘race’ has not noticeably ‘degenerated’, public order broken down or morality vanished.  It is thanks to ‘decadence’ that our level of goodness to each other has improved in some ways: that our ethics are more modest, more grounded in human nature.  Unlike the early critics of Tosca, we don’t think it contemptible for a man who is going to be shot to spend his last moments thinking about the amazing sex he had with his girlfriend, rather than contemplating his political ideals or what a loss he is to Art (à la Nero).  Nor do we feel we have to explain it in terms of a pathological identification of Love and Death, à la Freud.  It just seems honest.  We don’t think that a woman who would stick a knife in her attacker rather than be raped must be un-womanly and semi-crazed; we don’t coyly excuse the man as a ‘seducer’, and we know better than to think that she must fancy him really.  By twenty-first century standards, Tosca is positively moral for precisely the reasons its critics a hundred years ago thought it was immoral.  People need to get with the programme.

However, the critics did their worst, and after Puccini, composers paid attention.  There was to be no more unguarded emotionalism.  And no more pandering to the bourgeoisie, nor yet to the masses.  Opera would become an ascetic, resolutely high-art form, and lose the popular audience as a result.  Apparently it was a price worth paying.  The gulf between high- and low-brow widened.  As almost the last man to try to bridge it, Puccini represents opera’s dying fall.  As part of his recent tentative rehabilitation, it has been pointed out that his style of composition – concise, free-form, following dramatic situations in ‘real time’, pushing emotional buttons and telegraphing thematic connections – found its future in film music, rather than concert music.  It’s amusing to think that if he had lived in America, and instead of staging his operas, had made them into pioneering films, he would probably be remembered as the rude but vigorous father of a great new art form – albeit a little condescendingly, as cinema was obviously art for the masses.  (It is, of course, no accident that Puccini’s most optimistic opera, the one that achieves the greatest integration between Romantic sensibility and modern technique, the one that his detractors don’t dare call ‘decadent’, but get round by dismissing it as ridiculous instead, is the one with an American and filmic setting: La Fanciulla del West.) But because he chose to present his theatrical work as opera, an art form that was doomed to decline through its very preciosity, he gets written off as decadent.  How fair is that? 

As an example of how opera retreated to the high ground after Puccini, we may consider the work of Benjamin Britten.  Britten excoriated the ‘cheapness and emptiness’ of Puccini’s melodies: he was probably issuing a warning to himself.  He was homosexual (homosexual acts were illegal in Britain for most of his lifetime), and harboured, much more obviously than Puccini, a preoccupation with the abuse of innocence. He could not afford to let himself be caught unawares, let his feelings ‘hang out’ uninhibitedly, grab his audience by the throat and demand sympathy.  Britten, unlike Puccini, was an intellectual, self-conscious, shape-shifting artist.  He had a Puccinian gift for melody, but he knew better than to let it define him, in a Modernist musical milieu in which melody meant sell-out, schmaltz.  He was dashed if he was going to be written off as an effeminate pervert, the corruptor of his nation’s manhood, as Puccini had been.  He would confine his aching sweetness within the safe inverted commas of children’s music and ‘church stuff’, and otherwise serve it up with a generous squirt of irony, of astringent formal and dissonant lemon juice.  He would treat himself, through his characters, as a ‘case’, in the approved Freudian manner, before anybody else did.  What Britten’s operas – and those of numerous other twentieth-century composers – might have been like without this determined self-censorship, we can only guess.

Britten’s operas did, however, attempt to integrate melody and accessible narrative and characterisation into the Modernist style, and they resist being classified in any narrow stylistic niche.  They belong to a time when ‘high art’ at least still believed in its mission to be universal. They may stand for the last bid of new opera to gain more than a tiny avant-garde audience in Britain.  Half a century later, the mountain range of the operatic repertoire has receded far enough into the past for the peaks and foothills to stand out in a ‘vertical’ perspective, all seeming equally far away in time.  This allows us to see Puccini’s operas as representing, not a ‘slide’ in a downward direction towards decadence, but an ‘approach’ to more demanding works.  It would seem absurd to suggest that listening to Puccini spoils an audience’s taste for ‘the finer things’, now that ‘opera’ is seen as monolithic, occupying an undifferentiated ‘high culture’ niche.  Its proselytizers recommend ‘first operas’ for people wanting to ‘get into it’, and what do they recommend?  Carmen, La Bohème, and Tosca.  You will hear abundant anecdotes of people starting with one of these and very quickly learning to enjoy Verdi, Wagner, Mozart and the other ‘high peaks’.  But the numbers are pitifully small; the critics’ consecration, or demonization, of opera as an elite art form, has been all too successful. The critics of c. 1900 who thought that art was in danger of being debased by popular taste, and who deliberately set out to ‘purify’ high art to avoid this happening, actually brought about the very thing they feared.  By denigrating the stepping stones, they created a near-unbridgeable gulf, ensuring that ‘the masses’ would be doomed to a diet of unrelieved pap.  (In practice, this gulf has been partially bridged by many works of musical theatre, especially the great Broadway musicals.  But it is noticeable how humbly these had to pitch themselves, introducing any tendencies towards emotional depth and ‘high art’ by stealth.  Overtly ambitious musicals, West Side Story for example, got quickly and ruthlessly slapped down by critics.)

At the time when opera stood at the inescapable fork in the road between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ art, Puccini went with popular.  History judged him wrong.  But we ought to regret what was lost thereby, and at the very least salute his operas as a gallant attempt to achieve the impossible.  Not to mention being wonderfully enjoyable in their own right.  And it may not be too extravagant to hope that with the advent of a new global audience for Western music, particularly in the Far East, an audience unburdened by twentieth-century Western cultural baggage, opera may find sufficient popularity to undergo a renaissance.