Background Notes
Sticking to his usual routine, Puccini began searching for potential operatic subjects immediately after the Italian premiere of Il trittico . It must have been a tiresome process when one considers the number of possibilities the composer pondered before making a commitment ? his relatively small oeuvre testifies to a lasting insecurity over getting just the right text. Unlike Verdi, Puccini was not a literary man and frequently relied on others for suggestions only to thanklessly discard them later on.
For this particular round he considered a dramatization of Oliver Twist (to be called Fanny ), an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (the libretto, Christopher Sly, was to become Sly, set by Wolf-Ferrari in 1927) and The Son-Daughter, another play by David Belasco (whose Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West the composer already had adapted).
Hoping to revive the successful team of Illica and Giacosa, Puccini engaged two librettists, Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni. They functioned in a similar manner as their predecessors ? Adami worked out the dialogue and drafted the scenario while Simoni put the text into verse. At first they proposed an original drama set in the suburbs of London during the 1830s, but Puccini wouldn't bite. Then Simoni, a Gozzi scholar and author of his own play, Carlo Gozzi, put forth the 18 th -century playwright's Turandot. Puccini was familiar with the recent Max Reinhardt production of Gozzi's play and had been impressed ? ?? above all accentuate the passion of Turandot, who has been buried for so long in the ashes of her deep pride.?
Gozzi's Turandot was cast as a lengthy five-act drama, which the librettists had to condense considerably. Though the creative team tousled over whether or not the opera would have two or three acts, they did agree on a concise dramatic flow that would take place in a narrow timeframe ? from moonrise to sunrise. Gozzi's passion for the Italian commedia dell'arte required four of the traditional masks (Pantalone, Tartaglia, Brighella, Truffaldino) to serve in the royal household. Puccini was weary of this antiquated theatrical cliché but reconsidered later in the process ? their inclusion, albeit redefined as the Chinese ministers Ping, Pang and Pong, would breathe a little Italian life into a fairy tale steeped in chinoiserie. He hoped they would add a little comic relief to the serious, sometimes barbaric plot.
The focus of the drama changed as well. For its day Gozzi's Turandot is a surprisingly feminist work: A person living in the shadow of power, tired of the subsidiary role women had to play in the culture of ancient China , is determined to control her own destiny and devises a system of riddles to promote her superiority over men. In the opera her motivation is mollified to avenging a ravaged ancestress, which thinly veils her own fears of sexual experience. The emperor very much regrets the pact he made with his daughter in good faith ? Gozzi's play indicates every beheading of a royal prince initiates another war.
The tightening of the play's denouement in the opera posed its own problems. Finding out Calaf's unknown name is key to both works, but Gozzi's plan proved to be too intricate and time-consuming, involving many characters. His Turandot discovers the name by way of her servant, who turns on Calaf when her own romantic advances are repelled. Turandot intends to set him free but is moved when Calaf attempts to kill himself if she will not submit (the sentence of his execution having been commuted much earlier in the play). Puccini invented the character of Liù in part to solve this problem, conflating three of Gozzi's handmaids into one and transferring Calaf's attempted suicide to Liù's fatal one. The design was intended to thaw Turandot's icy demeanor with Liù's self-sacrifice, but in the finished product, his efforts seemed to have backfired ? the quick transition to Calaf's kiss and the ensuing love duet makes both characters appear quite callous in light of Liù's recent demise.
Many have tried to draw the psychology out of this scene ? Puccini's neurotic tendency to provide a death scene and the need to mark Turandot's transformation from monster to woman not by compassion for Liù but with a sexual symbol ? a kiss. It's hard to ignore a parallel to the real-life tragedy of Doria Manfredi, the young maid who was driven to suicide after the composer's jealous wife suspected her of having an affair with Puccini and did her very best to slander the girl's good name. Whatever the comparison to Turandot and Liù may be, the composer's victimized servant girl joins a long line of ill-fated Puccini heroines.
By March 1924 the composer had completed orchestration of the opera up to the chords following Liù's funeral cortege. What remained was the final duet and conclusion. Puccini was anxious to obtain the final lines from his librettists, who were somewhat dilatory in their work as they pursued other projects. In October, Puccini finally had received the ending of the opera, but by that time he was involved in a fight for his life. A persistent pain in his throat had been diagnosed as cancer, and after seeing several doctors Puccini agreed to see a specialist in Brussels . There several radioactive needles were inserted into his throat in an operation that required the composer to be conscious for fear of the strain on his heart. At first the prognosis was good, but four days later he unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died.
Arturo Toscanini, slated to conduct the premiere, made it his mission to see the opera completed. Puccini had left behind a number of sketches for the final bars of music and had played some of the excerpts for Toscanini the month before his death. Franco Alfano was engaged to bring these ideas to fruition. Alfano was a composer of some merit but was chosen chiefly because it was believed he would not imprint too much of his style upon Puccini's own. What may have appeared to be a great honor became a painful task. Upon hearing the completed ending, Toscanini discovered that Alfano had not used all of the fragments and felt there was too much of the younger composer's original music. He was forced to revise his ending, shortening it by about 100 bars and incorporating more of Puccini's ideas. It is this version that is generally performed, but at the belated premiere on April 25, 1926, Toscanini refused to conduct the new ending (in part out of respect for the dead composer but also with a certain animosity toward Alfano), resting his baton after Liù's death and stating to the audience, ?At this point the Maestro died.?
Turandot occupies a unique point in the history of opera. It takes an about-face from the realism of Italian verismo style popular at the turn of the century (marked by the works of Leoncavallo, Mascagni and Giordano but moribund by 1924), moving toward the vogue for fantasy-fable themes of the early 20 th century (evidenced by Stravinsky's Le Rossignol, Busoni's Turandot, Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten and Prokofiev's L'amour des trois oranges, among others). Though arguably seconded by Strauss's Arabella, Britten's Peter Grimes or Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Turandot remains the most frequently performed opera of those written to date and marks the end of an era ? the great tradition of Italian 19 th -century opera.
Courtesy of Minnesota Opera
