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Verismo's Dramatised Deviants: Lombroso's Criminal Anthropology in Tosca

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2022

Jane Sylvester Open the ORCID record for Jane Sylvester [Opens in a new window]
Jane Sylvester*
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University of Missouri-Kansas City, MO, USA
*
Email: jsylvester@umkc.edu
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Abstract

Following the premiere of Tosca in January 1900, Giacomo Puccini's progressive critics generally took issue with two main aspects of the opera: the first was the composer's supposedly unoriginal modes of expression, and the second was the work's scandalous plot. While many attributed the dark tone of Tosca to its French source, Sardou's melodrama La Tosca, I contend that there is an underlying context for both the dramatic and the musical unsavouriness of Puccini's verismo opera: the Italian fascination with criminology. Beginning in the 1870s after Italian unification, positivist criminologists, led by Cesare Lombroso, sought to locate the organic causes of criminality and believed that deviancy was objectively readable through the body. Lombroso further conceptualised the ‘born criminal’ as an exceptional individual that was predisposed to artistic expression. His theories, rooted in deeply troubling stereotypes and conventional wisdom, gained traction with a bourgeois public as well as with contemporary luminaries, including Giuseppe Giacosa, one of Puccini's librettists. Drawing on Lombroso's writings, letters and archived objects, I show how the criminologist's bourgeois version of perversity provides a valuable framework to evaluate the derivative modes of deviant expression present not only in Tosca, but within verismo opera at large.

Keywords

VerismoPucciniToscaCriminologyLombrosoLeitmotif
Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , November 2022 , pp. 269 - 292
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 See for instance Lombroso's introductory chapter on criminal tattoos in the first edition (1876) of Criminal Man [L'uomo delinquente], trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham, NC, 2006), 58–62. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg has also argued that Lombroso’s interests in tattoos, graffiti and handwriting were classificatory signs of deviancy and normalcy. See Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians (1860–1920) (Chicago, 2007), 254–61.

2 Jonathan Robert Hiller, ‘“Bodies that Tell”: Physiognomy, Race and Gender in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Literature and Opera’ (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2009), 218–311.

3 Jean-Christophe Coffin, ‘L'exploration du musicien italien à la fin du XIXe siècle: entre médicalisation et paradoxe’, Laboratoire italien 20 (November 2017). https://journals.openedition.org/laboratoireitalien/1632.

4 Pierangelo Gentile, ‘L'anomalia Verdi, ovvero la resa del professore: il pensiero di Cesare Lombroso sulla musica’, Laboratoire italien 20 (November 2017). https://journals.openedition.org/laboratoireitalien/1640.

5 Schwartz, Arman, Puccini's Soundscapes: Realism and Modernity in Italian Opera (Florence, 2016), 47–8Google Scholar. Alexander Rehding's recent study on Salome and contemporary discourses on degeneracy briefly discusses Lombroso's criminological contributions as part of a broader unpacking of the ‘diseased’ or ‘unhealthy’ qualities perceived in Strauss's opera during its early reception. See Rehding, ‘Unsound Seeds’, in Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, eds. David Trippett and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge, 2019), 303–34.

6 Letter IT SMAUT Lombroso 144.4. In this letter, social critic Max Nordau shared with Lombroso that Sardou referenced Lombroso's writings in his 1897 play Spiritisme.

7 Gibson and Rafter, ‘Introduction’, Criminal Man, 15.

8 Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 2; Wilson, Alexandra, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (Cambridge, 2007), 11–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hiller, ‘“Bodies that Tell”’, 18–30.

9 Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 2–15.

10 Gibson, Mary, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, CT, 2002), 19–33Google Scholar.

11 Horn, David, The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (New York, 2003), 33–4Google Scholar. Along with his three other colleagues, Paolo Mantegazza, Moritz Schiff and Arturo Zannetti, Lombroso distributed questionnaires with, as Horn describes, ‘matters as diverse as the pulse, diet, menstruation, and the prevalence of red hair’.

12 Horn, The Criminal Body, 34.

13 See Horn, The Criminal Body, 38–9, and for a full discussion 29–58. For a complementary discussion of Lombroso and the South, see Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 229–88. Concerning more general discourses on Italian attitudes towards the Mezzogiorno region in the decades following Italian unification, see Dickie, John, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

14 Horn, The Criminal Body, 34.

15 Horn, The Criminal Body, 35.

16 Hiller, ‘“Bodies that Tell”’, 18.

17 See Gibson and Rafter, ‘Introduction’, Criminal Man, 15; Horn, The Criminal Body, 34–5; and discussion in Stewart-Steinberg, ‘In a Dark Continent: Cesare Lombroso's Other Italy’, in Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 229–68.

18 Gibson, Born to Crime, 22.

19 Lombroso's colloquial writing style and its influence on the world of literature have been widely recognised amongst literary and cultural scholars. Annamaria Cavalli Pasini has argued that Lombroso and his colleagues strategically integrated popular opinion, cultural biases and stereotypes to create a style that was highly journalistic and often dramatic. See Cavalli Pasini, La scienza del romanzo: romanzo e cultura scientifica tra Otto e Novecento (Bologna, 1982), 59. Considering the mass appeal of Lombroso's work, Luigi Guarnieri has argued that he influenced many famed authors of the time including the scapigliati Praga, Tarchetti, Boito and De Amicis, as well as foreign writers such as Zola, Poe, Hugo and Doyle. See Guarnieri, L'atlante criminale: vita scriteriata di Cesare Lombroso (Milan, 2000), 117–18. Stewart-Steinberg provides a comprehensive summation of these views in The Pinocchio Effect, 233–4.

20 Hiller, ‘“Bodies that Tell”’, 51.

21 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 63. Emphasis mine.

22 Delia Frigessi, Cesare Lombroso (Turin, 2003), 330.

23 Coffin, ‘L'exploration du musicien italien à la fin du XIXe siècle’.

24 Coffin, ‘L'exploration du musicien italien à la fin du XIXe siècle’, para 4.

25 Coffin, ‘L'exploration du musicien italien à la fin du XIXe siècle’. See also Gentile, ‘L'anomalia Verdi, ovvero la resa del professore’.

26 Taken from the English translation of Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius (London, 1895), 22.

27 Lombroso, The Man of Genius, 9, 11, 62, 206.

28 Gentile, ‘L'anomalia Verdi, ovvero la resa del professore’.

29 Lombroso, Cesare, ‘Le più recenti inchieste scientifiche sui suoni e la musica’, Rivista musicale italiana 1 (1894), 117Google Scholar: ‘Anche la musica, quest'arte che pareva ispirata al sentimento, e alla più completa subiettività, è entrata in usa fase completamente scientifica.’ Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

30 Though Lombroso used the French term art brut (‘raw art’), curators of the Museum of Criminal Anthropology describe the collection as arte grezza, ‘rough’ or ‘crude’ art, based on Lombroso's original descriptions. Lombroso used this term during his lifetime, and while it shares similarities with Jean Dubuffet's conceptions of ‘art brut’ from the 1940s (namely the connections to art produced by mentally ill individuals), their conceptions of the term evolved separately. Marro continued to collect works by individuals in prison or living as long-term patients in an asylum during the first decades of the twentieth century. The artists whose works Marro collected are mostly housed in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (affiliated with the University of Turin).

31 According to sources associated with Valtre's case, she wrote in her notebooks until she was arrested, and the notebooks were used as evidence for her and her partner's trial. They were acquired by the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in December of 1913, less than a year after the trial.

32 N. Catalogo: 807.1, 18. Original text: ‘E se qualche nube si accumula sulla mia anima, e mi rende triste e pesante la vita, il ricordo di te la rompe, come fa il sole con i suoi raggi, attraverso le nuvole tempestose. Sei tu che illumini il mio cammino. Il sono certa che la navicella della mia vita sarà spesse volte battuta dalla burrasca … Ma non esser triste: sarò io sola che soffrirò. Tu sei bello e davanti a te si può aprire una via cosparsa di rose e di viole.’

33 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 79.

34 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 80.

35 Vito Moretti, ‘Il mondo animale nel Mastro-don Gesualdo’, in Animali e metafore zoomorfe in Verga, ed. Gianni Oliva (Rome, 1999), 176.

36 See Hiller, ‘“Bodies that Tell”’, 112.

37 See Letter 37 from Puccini to Ricordi in Letters of Giacomo Puccini, ed. Giuseppe Adami, trans. Ena Makin (London, 1931), 96–7. Also Mosco Carner, Puccini: A Critical Biography (New York, 1959), 71.

38 Renzo Villa, ‘Un album riservato’, in Locus Solus: Lombroso e la fotografia, eds. Silvana Turzio, Renzo Villa and Alessandra Violi (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), 40.

39 See Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 204.

40 Maria Truglio, Italian Children's Literature and National Identity: Childhood, Melancholy, Modernity (New York, 2017), 6.

41 For further discussion, see Jonathan R. Hiller, ‘Lombroso and the science of literature and opera’, in The Lombroso Handbook, eds. Paul Knepper and Per Jørgen Ystehede (New York, 2013), 235–6.

42 Amicis, Edmondo De, ‘La musica mendicante’, Musica nuova: Rivista artistica bimensile 2/5 (16 March 1904), 9Google Scholar: ‘Tutte le infermità, tutte le deformità, tutti gli aspetti della sventura e del dolore, è venuti d'ogni dove: … al ragazzo siciliano che risalì a piedi, cantando, tutta la penisola, e con le sue prime note mi fa alzare il capo come alla visione improvvisa d'un golfo azzurro coronato di selve d'aranci. E tutte le apparenze della povertà e della rovina, tutti i segni della travagliata vita randagia anche negli strumenti; tutte le voci dello sfinimento e dell'angoscia nei suoni di quei violini scordati, di quelle arpe scorticate, di quelle chitarre che stridono, di quelle fisarmoniche che sfiatano, di quelle trombe e di quei flauti che tossono e fischiano, di quei tamburelli dalla pelle affloscita e dalla voce sorda, con cui par che chiedano pietà alla mano stanca che li percuote.’

43 De Amicis, ‘La musica mendicante’, 9–10.

44 De Amicis, ‘La musica mendicante’, 9–10.

45 De Amicis, ‘La musica mendicante’, 10: ‘Mentre l’artista suona o canta, le serve battono i tappeti, il ciabattino martella le suola, il fabbro picchia sull’incudine, la gente affrettata sale e scende vociando per le scale; carri e carrette entrano ed escono; la voce del “virtuoso” è soverchiata dal grido del rivendugliolo ambulante di legumi o di scope; i versi della romanza che parla d’amore, di luna e di paradiso salgono nell’aria piena di vapori di bucato, e si mescolano nelle stanze aperte con l’acciottolio dei piatti … con tutte le miserie più prosaiche della fastidiosa vita quotidiana. Ahimè! Ahimè! Che duri contrasti e che amare derisioni!’

46 De Amicis, ‘La musica mendicante’, 10: ‘Eppure, quello che ci lasciano dentro tutte quelle voci ingrate e quegli strumenti di tortura auricolare non è sazietà o irritazione contro l’arte che oltraggiano; è un sentimento opposto, è una ammirazione pensierosa.’

47 La prensa, ‘I nostri operisti: Giacomo Puccini ritratto da Edmondo De Amicis’, undated. Reprinted in L'illustrazione popolare (May 1900). For discussion see Wilson, The Puccini Problem, 32–4.

48 Vito Fedeli, ‘Verismo?…’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano (March 1892), translated by Arman Schwartz in Giacomo Puccini and his World (Princeton, 2016), 263.

49 Luigi Torchi, ‘Tosca’, Rivista musicale italiana 7 (1900), 113–14.

50 See Schwartz, Arman, ‘Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered’, 19th-Century Music 31/3 (2008), 229–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 See Chapter 3 of Wilson, The Puccini Problem, 69–96.

52 For example, Alfredo Colombani, in the Corriere della sera claimed that ‘in Tosca everything is black, tragic, terrible’. Macchi, in Il mondo artistico, called Sardou's drama ‘one of the least agreeable, most violent and most artificial’ of works. Michele Virgilio was disgusted by the opera's ‘atmosphere tinged with blood that pervades and overwhelms everything’. See Michele Virgilio, Della decadenza dell'opera in Italia: (a proposito di Tosca) (Milan, 1900), 30; also Wilson's reading of these in The Puccini Problem, 74, also 69–96.

53 Letter IT SMAUT Lombroso 144.4.

54 The three extant letters in the archive are documented as IT SMAUT Carrara/CL. Giacosa, Giuseppe, 1–3.

55 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 284–5.

56 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 285.

57 Emanuele Senici, ‘Introduction’, Giacomo Puccini and his World, eds. Emanuele Senici and Arman Schwartz (Princeton, 2016), 13. Senici argues that Cavaradossi's aria takes on the sonnet form, observing the rhyme scheme of the two quatrains. While the inconsistent number of syllables in the lines of the aria means it does not qualify as a true sonnet, Senici's observation nevertheless points to this aria's deliberately formally poetic nature.

58 Original text: ‘Bigotto satiro che affina / colle devote pratiche la foia / libertina e strumento / al lascivo talento / fa il confessore e il boia!’

59 Sardou, Victorien, La Tosca (The Drama Behind the Opera), ed. and trans. Kleine-Ahlbrandt, W. Laird (Lewiston, NY, 1990), 39Google Scholar. For a reading of this scene, see Carner, Mosco, Giacomo Puccini: Tosca (Cambridge, 1985), 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Lombroso's fifth and final edition of L'uomo delinquente devotes a great deal of attention to brigandry. See Lombroso, Criminal Man, 313–56. For a reading of this, see Horn's chapter, ‘The Savage and the Modern’, The Criminal Body, 29–58.

61 Letter in Nardi, Piero, Vita e tempo di Giuseppe Giacosa (Milan, 1949), 767Google Scholar.

62 Torchi, ‘Tosca’, 86. Also found partially in translation in Wilson, The Puccini Problem, 77.

63 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 58.

64 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 49. Lombroso constructs a similar metaphor in Polemica in difesa della scuola criminale positiva (Bologna, 1886), 38.