Turandot, the end of opera?

It was April 25, 1926, when Puccini’s unfinished opera Turandot reached the height of its inevitable pathos at its first performance. Toscanini conducted the opera right up to where Puccini had surrendered to death. He was faithful to the maestro’s last notes, unable to set to music the metamorphosis of the ice princess to a woman in love: “Here ends the performance because at this point the Maestro is dead.”

Toscanini’s blatant gesture at the premiere, however, did not resolve the question of a convincing ending to give the opera. After the finale composed by Alfano, as recently as 2001, Luciano Berio proposed a new solution, again based on the Maestro’s notes.

Toscanini’s lapidary words, however, seem to contain a deeper and more sinister reference.

With the death of Liù, a slave in love with Calaf, a typical Puccinian heroine, the opera does not move forward. It seems to come to a halt, unable to find a just solution to the deep and intimate need for metamorphosis, demanded by the very nature of things.

How can we not see in the death of the sweet and courageous Liù, the inevitable metaphor for the epilogue of opera and Italian melodrama?

These are the years of the rise of cinema, and opera is on its way to becoming an art for a few connoisseurs no longer a vital art form aimed at an audience, even a popular one, who identify with it.

Powerful and mysterious, Turandot’s incipit announces the drama. The opera throws the viewer into “fairy tale time” in an alternation of choral excitement and funeral march-like sadness. The appearance of the cruel princess bent on revenge begins the duel between the two granite personalities. Calaf and Turandot approach each other in a dance of love and death that with the end of the opera ends with the princess’s gesture of silent acceptance of love.
Turandot surrenders to Love!

And so sweet Liù, with her sacrificial death, seems to pass the baton to Turandot’s modern and complex femininity. She who thaws her way to self-consciousness and her love, in a psychoanalytic process and poetic shift that only the ante-time death of the author prematurely exhausted.

Turandot contains a new openness on Puccini’s part to the continental avant-garde capable of renewing Italian melodrama.

The subject of Turonadot originates from a Persian fairy tale taken up by Carlo Gozzi in his Fiabe Teatrali. These are the fantastic and polemical response to the Reform of the theater that was being carried out in those same years by Carlo Goldoni, who intended to bring real life in all its aspects to the stage.

As early as 1804 Schiller reevaluated the fairy-tale orientalism and artifices of the Commedia dell’Arte in a romantic key by making an adaptation of it performed in Weimar, when the theater was directed by Goethe, with music by Karl Maria von Weber.

The anti-bourgeois revival of theatrical fairy tales would later be taken up by the historical avant-gardes of the early decades of the 20th century such as Prokov’ev, Brecht and Yevgenij Vachgantov, and as early as 1917 Ferruccio Busoni wrote his Turandot.

Puccini’s unfinished opera allowed Zeffirelli to create majestic and opulent stagings that would indulge his vivid imagination.

He will tackle the difficult opera in his mature years. After 1983 at La Scala followed three more stagings at the MET, the Arena di Verona, and finally in 2011 at the Royal Opera House in Muscat.

The source of his inspiration? An 18th-century crystal centerpiece in the Oriental style-not exactly a chinoiserie, but a turcheria.