In the second act of Puccini’s Tosca, after stabbing Scarpia with a knife taken from his supper table, Tosca places candles beside his body and a crucifix upon his chest before leaving the room (a ritual prescribed in the stage directions and accompanied by a slow, thirty-bar orchestral postlude to accompany these gestures). It is one of the most familiar pieces of stage ritual in the operatic repertory, yet it did not originate with Puccini. Thirteen years before the opera received its premiere in Rome in 1900, Georges Clairin recorded Sarah Bernhardt rehearsing the same action for Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca, the five-act drama from which Puccini’s librettists would later construct the opera. As Tosca enters the Glyndebourne repertory for the first time this summer, Clairin’s drawing returns attention to the opera’s theatrical origins.
Georges Clairin (Paris 1843–1919 Clohars-Carnoët), Sarah Bernhardt as Tosca, pencil on paper, dedicated and signed lower left ‘à mon ami Dussart / G. Clairin’ and inscribed ‘croquis fait pendant une des répétitions / de la Tosca’, 33.5 × 19 cm (13¼ × 7½ in.).
Clairin’s inscription, croquis fait pendant une des répétitions de la Tosca, establishes the drawing as a record of the play in rehearsal rather than a later reconstruction of Bernhardt’s performance. It captures a moment in the history of Tosca before Sardou’s work had been displaced by the opera it inspired, when Floria Tosca belonged, above all, to Bernhardt and the role was understood through her voice.
Sardou’s La Tosca opened at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on 24 November 1887, with Bernhardt in the title role, Camille Dumény as Mario Cavaradossi and Pierre Berton as Baron Scarpia. The production ran for 129 consecutive performances, and although its mixture of political history, sexual violence and melodrama provoked hostility from some critics, its theatrical effectiveness was never seriously in doubt. Sardou had become the most accomplished exponent of the pièce bien faite, or well-made play, in which information is carefully withheld, reversals are precisely timed and apparently incidental details return with decisive consequences. In La Tosca, this mechanism was applied to a recent and still politically charged historical setting, namely Rome in June 1800, during the brief restoration of papal authority and the confusion surrounding Napoleon’s victory at Marengo.
The play’s political structure was considerably more elaborate than that of the later opera. Cavaradossi’s support for the Roman Republic and Scarpia’s service to the restored Bourbon and papal order place their conflict within the violent reversals that followed the French invasion of Italy, while the premature report of Napoleon’s defeat at Marengo, followed by news of his victory, determines the fate of the principal characters. When Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica adapted the play for Puccini, much of this historical material was removed, compressing Sardou’s five acts into three and concentrating attention upon the triangle between Tosca, Cavaradossi and Scarpia. Puccini had sought the rights as early as 1889, but it was only after seeing Bernhardt perform the play in 1895 that the project acquired new urgency.
The role had been conceived for an actress whose fame already extended far beyond the Parisian stage. By 1887 Bernhardt had left the Comédie-Française, established her own touring company and developed an international public that followed her performances across Europe and the Americas. Her celebrity depended upon theatre, but it was sustained by an unprecedented circulation of images. Nadar photographed her in her principal roles; painters including Clairin and Louise Abbéma represented her both on stage and in private life; later, Alphonse Mucha’s posters would turn her elongated figure into one of the defining images of the fin de siècle.
Clairin occupied a privileged position within this carefully constructed visual world. He and Bernhardt met in 1874, when she was already emerging as one of the leading actresses of her generation and he was an established Salon painter; an early romantic relationship developed into a friendship that lasted until Clairin’s death in 1919. His monumental portrait of her, exhibited at the Salon of 1876 and now in the Petit Palais, established much of the imagery through which she would be understood: the slender figure, the exotic interior and the movement between indolence and self-display. Bernhardt kept the painting throughout her life, while Clairin continued to represent her over the following decades in portraits, allegories and theatrical roles.
The present drawing belongs to a more private category of image. Rather than translating Bernhardt’s celebrity into the more formal language of Salon portraiture, it records Clairin’s access to the rehearsal room where theatrical gesture was tested before being presented to the public. The action occurs at the climax of Sardou’s fourth act, after Tosca has killed Scarpia when he attempts to claim her as the price of Cavaradossi’s release. She finds two candles and places them beside the body converting the site of violence into an improvised funerary tableau before taking the safe-conduct from Scarpia’s hand. A photograph produced by the Nadar studio in 1887 records the same arrangement.
The drawing also belongs to the history of Bernhardt and Clairin’s friendship. In the same year that La Tosca opened, Bernhardt established her retreat on Belle-Île-en-Mer, where Clairin became a regular guest and maintained his own workspace, and their relationship moved continually between theatre, artistic practice and domestic life. Bernhardt was herself a sculptor and painter who exhibited at the Salon, while Clairin served as both portraitist and instructor (the conventional distinction between artist and model consequently describes their collaboration only imperfectly). His images contributed to her public identity, but they were also made within a friendship in which drawing was a shared practice.
Bernhardt continued to tour La Tosca long after its Paris premiere, carrying Sardou’s play through Europe and the Americas even after Puccini’s opera had begun its own international career. During a performance in Rio de Janeiro in 1906, she injured her right leg while making Tosca’s final leap from the parapet of the Castel Sant’Angelo, an injury that contributed to the eventual amputation of the leg in 1915. She nevertheless returned to the stage, adapting roles to be performed seated and continuing to tour during the First World War. Few parts were more closely identified with her or demonstrate more clearly the degree to which her theatrical authority depended upon the physical extremity of performance.
Clairin dedicated the sheet à mon ami Dussart, possibly the painter Léon Dussart, a former student of Paul Delaroche, and it may have passed directly from the rehearsal room into the possession of a fellow artist. The drawing preserves a performance that can otherwise be recovered only indirectly, while documenting the collaboration through which Bernhardt transformed Sardou’s heroine into one of the defining theatrical figures of the late nineteenth century.
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