LONDON.- Long before Giacomo Puccini transformed Tosca into one of opera’s most enduring dramas, Sarah Bernhardt was already electrifying audiences as the jealous singer who kills the corrupt Baron Scarpia and ultimately leaps to her death from the Castel Sant’Angelo.
A remarkable drawing by French artist Georges Clairin offers a rare glimpse of that earlier Tosca. Made during rehearsals for Victorien Sardou’s play in 1887, the sheet captures Bernhardt at the moment when her character, having stabbed Scarpia, turns the scene of violence into an improvised funeral ritual.
It is a gesture familiar to generations of opera lovers. In Puccini’s second act, Tosca places candles beside Scarpia’s body and lays a crucifix on his chest before quietly leaving the room. The sequence has become one of the opera’s most memorable theatrical images. Yet Clairin’s drawing shows that the ritual was already part of Bernhardt’s interpretation of the character 13 years before Puccini’s opera premiered in Rome in 1900.
The work, titled Sarah Bernhardt as Tosca, is executed in pencil on paper and measures 33.5 by 19 centimeters. Clairin inscribed the sheet as a sketch made during one of the rehearsals of La Tosca, making it not simply an image inspired by the production but a direct record of the play being prepared for the stage.
That distinction gives the drawing unusual historical importance. It captures Tosca before Puccini’s music came to dominate the story and before the title role became inseparable from the great opera singers of the 20th century. In 1887, Tosca belonged first and foremost to Bernhardt.
Sardou’s five-act drama opened at Paris’s Thtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on November 24, 1887, with Bernhardt in the title role, Camille Dumny as Mario Cavaradossi and Pierre Berton as Baron Scarpia. The production ran for 129 consecutive performances.
The play combined romance, political intrigue, violence and melodrama against the turbulent backdrop of Rome in June 1800. Its characters are caught between competing political forces following the collapse of the Roman Republic and the restoration of papal authority, while reports from the Battle of Marengo dramatically alter the balance of power.
Sardou was already celebrated as a master of the tightly constructed “well-made play,” in which revelations, reversals and seemingly minor details are carefully arranged for maximum dramatic effect. In La Tosca, he applied that theatrical machinery to recent European history, creating a drama in which private desire and political violence constantly collide.
When Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica later reshaped Sardou’s drama for Puccini, they drastically streamlined it. Five acts became three, much of the detailed historical background disappeared, and the emotional triangle between Tosca, Cavaradossi and Scarpia moved decisively to the foreground.
Puccini had been interested in adapting the work since the late 1880s, but Bernhardt appears to have played a crucial role in intensifying that interest. After seeing her perform La Tosca in 1895, the composer renewed his determination to bring the story to the operatic stage.
By then Bernhardt was one of the most famous performers in the world.
Her celebrity extended far beyond the theater. She toured internationally, formed her own company and cultivated a public image that circulated through photography, painting, prints and, later, posters. Nadar photographed her in many of her celebrated roles, while artists including Clairin and Louise Abbma portrayed her both as an actress and as a private individual. Alphonse Mucha’s celebrated posters would eventually turn Bernhardt’s distinctive silhouette into an emblem of fin-de-sicle Paris.
Clairin was particularly close to her.
The two met in 1874 and developed a friendship that lasted until the artist’s death in 1919. Clairin’s large portrait of Bernhardt, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1876 and now in the Petit Palais, helped establish the visual vocabulary surrounding her public persona: the elongated figure, sumptuous surroundings and carefully staged combination of theatricality and intimacy.
Bernhardt kept that portrait for the rest of her life.
The Tosca drawing is something quite different. Instead of presenting Bernhardt as a finished icon, it shows her at work.
Clairin had access to the rehearsal room, where gesture, movement and dramatic timing were still being tested. In the scene he recorded, Tosca has just killed Scarpia after he attempts to force himself upon her in exchange for Cavaradossi’s freedom. She places candles near the body, creating a solemn tableau before retrieving the document that she believes will allow her and Cavaradossi to escape.
A photograph produced by the Nadar studio in 1887 documents a closely related arrangement, suggesting how carefully Bernhardt and Sardou constructed the visual impact of the scene.
Clairin’s sketch therefore sits at an unusual intersection of art history and theatrical history. It is both an artist’s drawing and a document of a performance in formation.
Its intimacy also reflects the unusually close creative relationship between Clairin and Bernhardt. She was not simply his model. Bernhardt herself painted and sculpted and exhibited her work at the Salon, making their relationship more collaborative than the conventional artist-and-sitter formula suggests.
Their lives became even more closely connected in 1887, the same year La Tosca premiered, when Bernhardt established a retreat on Belle-le-en-Mer off the coast of Brittany. Clairin became a frequent visitor and maintained a workspace there. Their friendship moved easily between private life, theater and artistic production.
Bernhardt continued performing La Tosca internationally long after Puccini’s operatic version had begun conquering the world.
The role demanded extraordinary physical commitment. During a performance in Rio de Janeiro in 1906, Bernhardt injured her right leg while making Tosca’s final leap from the ramparts of the Castel Sant’Angelo. The injury contributed to chronic health problems that eventually resulted in the amputation of the leg in 1915.
Even that did not end her career. Bernhardt continued appearing on stage, modifying roles when necessary and performing during World War I.
Few characters were as closely associated with her as Tosca.
Today Puccini’s opera has almost completely eclipsed Sardou’s original drama, but Clairin’s drawing restores an important missing chapter in the story. It reminds viewers that many of the gestures, images and dramatic effects now considered quintessentially operatic were born in the theater—and, in this case, shaped by one of the most influential actresses of the 19th century.
As Tosca enters the Glyndebourne repertory for the first time, Clairin’s modest rehearsal sketch offers a particularly evocative connection to the work’s origins. Before Puccini’s orchestra accompanied Tosca’s candles and crucifix, Sarah Bernhardt had already made the gesture unforgettable.
