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To Die for Love
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11423 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1994 |
2,484 Words |
| Author
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Lynne Lawner
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VISSI D'AMORE
(I lived for love)
Paola Capriolo
Milan: Bompiani, 1993
118 pp.
Puccini's popular opera Tosca would lend itself perfectly to feminist revision. All the sensationalist elements are there: repression, torture, rape, murder, suicide. In addition, the tale of Scarpia's oppression and, finally, annihilation of the singer Floria Tosca and her lover, the painter Mario Cavaradossi, constitutes one of the most spectacular examples of sexual harassment in all literature and drama.
Nevertheless, when Italian writer Paola Capriolo decided to expand the opera, turning it into a novel, her interest was directed less to Tosca, the radiant victim, than to the oppressor, Baron Scarpia, Rome's chief of police under the Bourbon occupation during the Napoleonic wars.
Throughout history, villains have often been allowed to speak for themselves. Milton's Satan is an outstanding example. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor subtly probes the human heart. Their voices are quite different from those of the hardened criminals, serial killers, and tyrants we have lately made into heroes, or at least into well-paid authors whose memoirs we peruse with lurid curiosity.
In Capriolo's short novel Vissi d'amore, the title of which derives from a famous aria in Act II sung by Tosca ("I lived for love", villainous Scarpia is given the opportunity to reveal the secrets of his inner life. These include the lies he tells himself regarding the doctrinal justification of his professional duties and his many-layered lust for Tosca.
Conceived in the familiar form of a lost diary, in this case discovered by Scarpia's successor, the novel is entirely Scarpia's. Having been transformed from the ingenuous young woman of Sardou's 1887 play, on which the libretto was based, into the resourceful, passionate lover and ferocious avenger of Puccini's opera, Tosca is now rendered somewhat powerless and enigmatic. Capriolo's spare version prefers to throw the spotlight on Scarpia and the forms and evolution of his desire.
In the opera the action unrolls quickly, as Scarpia, sending his bloodhounds after the escaped revolutionary Angelotti, baits Tosca, fanning her jealousy in relation to Cavaradossi, who
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