Puccini’s Turandot

at Michigan Opera Theatre

By Patricia Lawlis

Giacomo Puccini, as a 19^th century Italian composer, was born into a world ripe for musical transition.  While the music of most Western countries continued to evolve by developing a strong tradition of symphonic music and by embracing the quartet, the operatic style of Italian music began to stagnate.[i]  This climate, as well as Puccini’s musical training in Milan, which was a center of new ideas in political and social life, is perhaps partly responsible for the changes in musical form that can be found in Puccini’s mature operas, as well as in his last opera, Turandot.

The operas that fall into the category of Puccini’s mature operas are the works that follow Manon Lescaut and La Boheme.  Fedele D’Amico, an Italian musicologist, defines the mature Puccini opera in terms of a work that embodies a specific Puccinian spirit, or “the spirit that makes his [Puccini’s] theater an authentic voice of the new society, so different from the Verdian voice.”[ii]  An example of a specific trait that marks the mature Puccini opera is the lack of morality found in the majority of his later characters.  In contrast to the operas of Puccini’s contemporaries, most notably of the time, Giuseppe Verdi, where characters tend to follow a set moral code, even if such a code is skewed towards a darker intent, Puccini’s characters, especially his female characters, act without any clear sense of morality.[iii]

Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, however, is a work that builds on the musical transformation of the mature operas and becomes a new style where “post-Verdian Italian operatic music, veristic and romantic, meets, and momentarily merges with, the surge of influences from northern and eastern Europe.”[iv]  Whereas the mature operas were notable for their lack of morality, in Turandot, Puccini sought to find a new extreme by writing an opera that would encompass both serious drama and comedy.

Turandot was an ideal piece for this musical experiment because of the source, a play written by eighteenth century Venetian, Gozzi, in 1762.[v]  Gozzi’s play is an adaptation of an ancient fairy tale in which a cruel eastern princess, Turandot, stipulates that her hand (and the throne of China), will only go to the man that can answer three riddles.  After the death of several suitors, the riddles are eventually answered by Calaf, the son of an exiled King, who wins Turandot’s hand, and later her love.[vi]  Gozzi’s writing style combines the serious drama that revolves around Turandot and her slain suitors, with comic aspects found from the many minor characters who mock the fallen men and the situation.  When Puccini saw Gozzi’s play in the summer is 1920, he was already known for writing one-act works focusing on either the serious/mystic or the comic, but the combination of the two sides of drama in the play inspired Puccini to attempt to combine the aspects into his own operatic rendition of Turandot.[vii]

In collaboration with librettists Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, Puccini began work on Turandot, determined that the finished opera would be not only his most important work, but an opera of “legendary stature and philosophic implication.”[viii]  This desire was perhaps one of the contributing aspects that would make this final opera so difficult to compose, and ultimately result in an unfinished work.  Puccini’s need to make everything perfect drove him to take a more active role in the writing of the libretto than he had in any of his previous works, and as librettist Adami began to become famous in his own right, and had less and less time to devote to Turandot, Puccini took over the work with constant rewrites and personal dictation.[ix]  Louis Biancolli suggests that if Puccini has simply chosen to write the libretto himself, it would have simplified the process as his level of involvement only served to add another writer to the already complicated process.[x]

Perhaps the aspect that caused the greatest amount of difficulty was, very simply, the act of blending the comic and the serious in a new operatic form.  Throughout the composition process, Puccini attempted to “preserve something of the spirit of the old play and at the same time… attempting to add to it the softness and mysticism which he needed for his music.”[xi]  Ultimately, Puccini died in November, 1924 with the final duet for the opera still unfinished.  It fell to Franco Alfano to complete the work using Puccini’s sketches, but Alfano knew that he would not be able to capture Puccini’s desire that the final duet be, “a great duet… [in which] two almost superhuman beings descend through love to the level of mankind, and this love must at the end take possession of the whole stage in a great orchestral peroration.”[xii]  Overall, Puccini’s struggles with this work, his efforts to blend serious drama and comedy, were not to be realized with a final, ultimate love duet.  While the work is recognized as one of his masterpieces and an exhibit of Puccini’s ability to incorporate new and unique ideas into his music, without his ability to bring his vision of the final duet to life, the work remains an unfinished piece.

After being completed by Alfano, the opera was first performed at La Scala on April 25^th, 1926.[xiii]  Michigan Opera Theatre will perform the opera this May, from the 10^th through the 18^th, under the direction of Garnett Bruce and with conductor Valerio Galli.  Ticket and other information can be found at www.michiganopera.org

Bibliography

Biancolli, Louis, ed..  The Opera Reader: A Complete Guide to the Best Loves Operas.

New York: Grosser & Dunlap, 1953.

Earl of Harewood, The.  Kobbe’s Complete Opera Book.

London: William Clowes and Sons Ltd., 1963.

Puccini, Simonetta and William Weaver, eds..  The Puccini Companion.

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994.