Program booklet »Turandot«

GIACOMO PUCCINI

TURANDOT

CONTENTS

P.

4

SYNOPSIS P.

6

A PARABLE OF LOVE DIRECTOR CLAUS GUTH IN AN INTERVIEW WITH KONRAD KUHN P.

12

TURANDOT – RIDDLES AND TRANSFORMATIONS VERA KING P.

18

BEFORE THE LAW FRANZ KAFKA

P.

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A TURANDOT IN THE MODERN SPIRIT RICHARD ERKENS P.

30

STRUGGLE FOR CREDIBILITY KONRAD KUHN P.

38

THE ENIGMAS OF MUSICAL EXOTICISM IN TURANDOT W. ANTHONY SHEPPARD P.

44

IMPRINT

GIACOMO PUCCINI

TURANDOT DRAMMA LIRICO in three acts

and five scenes Text by GIUSEPPE ADAMI

& RENATO SIMONI

ORCHESTRA

3 flutes (3rd also piccolo) 2 oboes / cor anglais, 2 clarinets bass clarinet / 2 bassoons contrabassoon / 4 horns / 3 trumpets 3 trombones / bass trombone / timpani percussion (bass drum, snare drum, triangle, cymbals, tam-tam, Chinese gong, glockenspiel, xylophone, bass xylophone, tubular bells) celesta / 2 harps / organ / strings STAGE ORCHESTRA 2 alto saxophones / 6 trumpets 3 trombones / cimbasso percussion (2 wooden drums, tam-tam)

AUTOGRAPH Archivio Storico Ricordi, Milan FIRST PERFORMANCE 25 APRIL 1926 Teatro alla Scala, Milan (unfinished version) PREMIÈRE IN VIENNA 14 OCTOBER 1926 Vienna State Opera DURATION

2 H 45 MIN

INCL. 1 INTERMISSION

TURANDOT

SYNOPSIS ACT 1 The mandarin proclaims the law: Princess Turandot will be the bride of the prince who can solve the three riddles she poses him. If he fails, he will be executed. The Prince of Persia has just made the attempt and failed. The mob calls for the execu­ tioner. In this situation Calaf finds his father Timur, the de­ throned King of the Tartars, whom he believed to be dead. He was brought to safety by the slave girl Liù after his overthrow, who has been caring for him since. When Calaf asks her why she made this sacrifice, Liù explains that Calaf had smiled at her once in the palace. The Prince of Persia is led to his execution.

At the sight of him, the previously bloodthirsty mob pleads for mercy for him. Calaf joins in the call. But when he sees Turandot, he falls in love with her that instant and now wants to challenge her riddles. The ministers Ping, Pang and Pong try to dissuade him from this. Liù and Timur beg him to reconsider, but Calaf has decided he will accept the challenge.

ACT 2 Ping, Pang and Pong talk about the many princes who have died in the attempt to win Turandot, and dream of their own private happiness. The test begins. Altoum, emperor of China and Turandot’s father, is tired of the slaughter. He calls on Calaf to give up and go his way. Calaf insists on the test. The mandarin proclaims the law again. Turandot explains the origin of the law. Many thousands of years ago, her ancestor Lo-u-Ling had been seized by a man, raped and killed. Now, she is taking her revenge on the princes who dare ask for her hand. No one will possess her. Calaf calls for her to pose the riddles. To Turandot’s horror, he finds the right answer three times. The princess begs her father not to give her to the strange prince, but he refuses, pointing out that he has taken a holy oath. When Turandot asks if Calaf will make her his wife by force, he rejects this, saying that he wants her love. He offers an escape. If she can discover his name before dawn, he will submit to his fate.

4

Previous pages: JONAS KAUFMANN as CALAF ASMIK GRIGORIAN

as TURANDOT DANCE ENSEMBLE

SYNOPSIS

ACT 3 The entire city is trying desperately to discover Calaf’s name.

Turandot has threatened executions if they fail. Ping, Pang and Pong try to bribe Calaf, then they appeal to his sympathy, but all in vain. When the mob is ready for violence, henchmen bring in Timur and Liù. Calaf immediately denies any link, but the ministers realise that the two know Calaf and can give his name.

Turandot tries everything to get Timur to speak. To protect him, Liù declares that she alone knows the prince’s name, but she refuses even under the threat of torture to give it up. When Turandot asks what the root of her strength is, she an­swers it is love. She predicts that Turandot will also come to love, and then takes her own life. In the general emotion, Calaf and Turandot are left alone. She still refuses to submit to Calaf. The kiss he steals from her changes the situation. She weeps her first tears, and admits that she has feared him but also loved him.

He should be satisfied with this and walk away with his secret.

He puts his life in her hands by voluntarily surrendering his name, Calaf, son of Timur. In the following decisive ceremony, Turandot announces to the emperor, her father, that the name of the stranger is “love”.

5

DIRECTOR CLAUS GUTH IN AN INTERVIEW WITH KONRAD KUHN

A PARABLE OF LOVE kk

In the libretto of the opera Turandot it says: “The action takes place in fairy tale time.”

What does this mean to you? cg An imaginary time. For me, the term “parable” is more accurate than “fairy tale”. If you try to stage the work with pure realism, you quickly end up in a blind alley. Turandot is different from – for example – La bohème in being a parable remote from verismo.

Essentially, it’s about how a young man – who we know nothing about, except that he’s a fugitive – stumbles into a world whose laws he only gradually comes to understand. Like in a bad dream. He’s been lured by the mythical tale about the female ruler of an empire. She seems to have come from a legend. Nobody has seen her from close up, all his predecessors were beheaded because they couldn’t solve the riddles.

Turandot is initially a fantasy image for the Unknown Prince, as he’s called in the score, a fiction he’s obsessed with. He first learns the system from its most brutal and grotesque side. Then there’s the complication of his own past, the prince unexpectedly finds his father (Timur) and a woman who loves him, but who he doesn’t know at all. And all this is very compressed,

like a brief résumé of the human condition. kk The location is shown as “Peking” ... but I think that at the latest since the performance at the “original setting”, the Forbidden City, it’s clear that you won’t get very far if you take this literally. cg I think that’s actually a major misunderstanding. For generations, set designers have worked from the most diverse illustrations of this place.

But I’m not concerned with that at all.

Puccini needed a trigger to compose, and he was very skilful in always finding a trigger for himself. I believe he was only interested in China to the extent that he could draw on certain harmonic features and motifs which people associate with China, a compositional access which creates a certain foreign sense primarily through its exoticism. And this is where it becomes interesting for me. Because this helps distance the work and focus our attention on what it’s actually about – less about the grandeur of the sets and costumes, more about the primeval ways that humans organized for living together, and their roots. kk When I think about the opera, it seems to me that it’s telling

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A PA R A BLE OF LOV E

three different stories, first there’s Calaf, then Turandot, who doesn’t even appear until Act 2, and finally a story of how the crowd can be manipulated.

Which of these three interests you? cg I want to tell Calaf’s story in Act 1 as he falls into the clutches of the system. How does he experience the system? In Act 2 I’m telling about Turandot’s experience. In other words, a change of perspective. She talks about what happened to her ancestor “many thousands of years ago”. But it’s very clear to me that this has to be about a personal experience, abuse by an outsider. I think the question who did it is of secondary importance. The decisive thing is that we’re looking at a damaged, injured person. I’d like to show the violence of Turandot’s effort to protect herself from becoming a victim again. This lands her in the role of the perpetrator. Once you’ve seen into her, you understand in retrospect the system which Calaf encounters in the first act. The central concept for me is “fear”. Personal fear transfers to society and shapes the system. Fear of being hurt, being weak. Act 3 is about how Turandot and Calaf come together as a couple – a genuine love story between two modern people which I take very seriously. Before they can be together, they need first to be clear with themselves. Here, they can help each other. Particularly today, where many people flit from one relationship to the next, there is frequently bad experience, results from the past, which can’t be simply blown off. This love story is frequently underexplored in performances of the opera. People always take Liù as the embodiment of

true love, while the title figure is presented as a cold woman who undergoes a transformation at the end which is difficult to understand. I would like to show Liù more as performing a function, her actions are a concept which evokes changes in Calaf and Turandot.

I see her more as a construct, despite the moving music Puccini wrote for her. kk If you want to show the love story between Calaf and Turandot, then you can’t finish with Liù’s death and the subsequent music of mourning, as is occasionally done in stagings, following the world première where Arturo Toscanini laid down his baton at this point.

How do you deal with the problem that Puccini himself never finished the composition? cg I must admit that I don’t find that so much of a problem. Franco Alfano, in his original version, known as “Alfano 1”, did that very well. He followed Puccini’s idea and composed a very organic ending. The euphoria at the end tells me that it’s possible to change into another person. This courage to yield to great emotions fascinates me. This is where the story reverts to myth. I find the pomp of the finale interesting in these terms, because it creates a paradox, the couple have just found each other, and they’re immediately torn into the public sphere, functional roles. kk Act 1 works with hard cuts and abrupt changes in the mood of the mob, almost like film dramaturgy. In contrast, Act 2 focuses on an ongoing situation, the riddles. Act 3 again has a very episodic structure until the story ends in the duet of the two protagonists. How can you respond

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A PA R A BLE OF LOV E

to this diversity in terms of the set?? cg We decided to put the chorus in front of the space for the action, as it were, so that the dynamic of its interventions is very strongly evident acoustically. At the same time, we put the emphasis on the two main characters. The story easily gets lost in the wimmel picture that the dramaturgy of Act 1 can evoke. This is why the chorus has a very strong presence here with us, but doesn’t share the stage with the protagonists. We work with a public area, a sort of atrium. You see the door that strongly attracts the prince, but he isn’t allowed in yet. In Act 2, we’re in Turandot’s most intimate space of, her bedroom, on the other side of the door, where her trauma originated. Here, the chorus is acoustically present, but not visually apparent. This makes it an echo of the actions of the main characters. When Calaf solves the three riddles, this leads to a power vacuum.

And this is what we see in Act 3: where is the state heading? As often happens, violence in the lack of orientation is directed inwards. The result is chaos.

An over-rigid state has flipped into total disorder. There has been a shift in the tectonics of the space. The coordinates have slipped. The settings can no longer be separated. The atrium and the bedroom have become merged, the place where the chorus was located in the first act has suddenly become an intimate area. The breakdown is the only way for something new to emerge, which is completed in the love duet. kk You talked about the door where Calaf requests admission. There is a concrete inspiration for this element of the set which has to do with Vienna. What’s this about?

cg Years ago, I visited the Sigmund Freud Museum on Berggasse, which is located in the former home. I was only moderately impressed by it. But when I wanted to go back, I suddenly found myself standing before the closed front door, which was protected by heavy locks and bars inside. The man who had worked so intensively to research our primal fears must have felt a positively paranoid need for security. The anti-Semitism of the times certainly gave him good reason for this. Perhaps Freud had a justified fear that society can flip. kk There are three characters in the opera which come from the commedia dell’arte – Ping, Pang and Pong. They’re taken from Carlo Gozzi’s original, but Puccini reshaped them. In their scenes, “exotic” elements are most apparent. At the beginning of Act 2 they come closest to us. How do you handle this trio, which brings in a comical element? cg It’s very well constructed by Puccini. In our interpretation we see them initially as a sort of senior official in an ant-like system. They take their duty almost too seriously and are completely caught up in it. They slip into comedy through their fussy obsession with minor details. At the start of Act 2 we see them in private together. This is a glimpse behind the scenes – of the system as well as the three characters. We see how much they suffer from the role they have to play. They express trivial, very human desires, and this makes them real. As if they’re taking off masks. These highly artificial beings are suddenly understandable as private individuals. But then they’re recalled to their duty. In the further course

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A PA R A BLE OF LOV E

of Act 2 and in Act 3 we see them in different terms, after we’ve seen how hateful the system is to them. Even if they don’t let this show, we are aware of this as onlookers. This is a sort of digression, a very personal, moving little story. The automatic operation of the system means that they can’t escape from it. kk They’re part of a bureaucracy which despises people. You could associate that with the time the opera was created in, characterized by the rise of Fascism in Europe. How do you relate to that? cg I see this bureaucracy more from the perspective of a Jacques Tati, or in the context of the writings of Franz Kafka. When bureaucratic procedures are highly ritualized, the horror their effects should evoke is no longer felt.

The inhumanity lies in the perfection of the system. Only one thing matters – does something fit the pattern or not? This shuts down empathy. In Kafka the powerlessness of the individual is very clearly described as they collide with a machinery they cannot understand. That’s another meaning of the oversized door in our set. kk There are declared Puccini haters who criticize his music as sentimental. How would you respond to such judgements? cg In my socialization as a man of the theatre I was often confronted

with this kind of attitude. But when I’d worked on several of Puccini’s operas myself, it became clear to me what an incredible instinct for the theatre he has. He puts the things he’s presenting precisely in focus. I don’t find the emotions false. If they seem to be, that’s because of how it’s done. Conceptually, Puccini is very truthful and intensely aware of the effects. That’s why we go to opera. We’re dealing with great emotions, and you can’t take a half-hearted approach. As a director you have a responsibility to capture the genuine side of it, and that’s only possible with great artists as performers. You can’t work with clichés, just repeating empty gestures. Perhaps you need to get some distance first so that you can put the focus on the story arc again. I sometimes think it’s positively tragic that there’s virtually no music I honour more than Puccini’s, but hardly any performance in the theatre I loathe more than a dishonest interpretation of his works – starting with the fake clichés of the artist in La bohème, which have been repeated for decades and still are, to the ways of presenting Madama Butterfly which we inevitably have serious problems with today. People don’t do Puccini any favours if they take his locations for his pieces too literally – the world has changed, but not the human needs and desires that he finds expression for.

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Next pages: ASMIK GRIGORIAN

as TURANDOT JONAS KAUFMANN as CALAF DANCE ENSEMBLE

VERA KING

TURANDOT – RIDDLES AND TRANS-­ FORMATIONS “ T HREE ARE THE RIDDLES, ONE IS DEATH! …

NO, NO! THREE ARE THE RIDDLES, ONE IS LIFE!” TIMELESS TRAUMA AND NEGATION Before Turandot appears singing her own words, some time has already passed in the opera. We first learn about her through the others, about the statutes of the riddle test and the suitors who die for her. She then appears silently, “as if it were a vision.”

Her beautiful face alone sets Calaf irrevocably aflame, while she, as a mercilessly cold ruler, delivers the death sentence with a single gesture.

In the second act, we finally hear her first words in an aria in which she describes a sort of primal scene of female suffering as the justification for her actions: terrible things had happened to her great, valiant ancestor, Princess Lo-u-ling – brutal violence, kidnapping and rape. “In this cas­ tle, many thousands of years ago, there once rang out a desperate cry. The cry reached me through long lines of an­ cestors and sought refuge in my soul.”

Turandot is constantly preoccupied with the cry that fills her soul, timeless

and unchanging, which she wants to understand as a mission for revenge and which at the same time marks her identity. An identity of negation, annihilation and isolation: I am the avenger who destroys all who seek to approach; I am the one that no one will touch. “No, no one shall have me! …

No one shall ever possess me!” Only this radical negation applies. Apparently, nothing else defines her. She refers to a terrible event that occurred many thousands of years ago and which seems all the more like a phantasm, a scene projected back into the distant past from her own life history, expressing and at the same time concealing a devouring presence of horror. Her own motherless story remains a blank space which is concealed with great effort.

If we listen to Turandot‘s story as one marked by her own unspeakably traumatic experience, the ritual enactment serves as a stronghold against the abysmal fear that torments her, a fear for which she has no name. A “nameless fear” as the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion would say. The execution

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TURANDOT – RIDDLES AND TRANSFORMATIONS

of all those princes who come “in long caravans from all corners of the globe” repeated over and over again through action or fantasy is then a re-enactment of an externalised experience of extermination. The violent traumatic experience that has befallen her is now being enacted on others, on all those who cannot answer the riddle and free her from her inertia. So far there is no hope in her inner life. In her bloodless emotional paralysis, there is seemingly no injury and certainly no passion – Princess Turandot remains unrecognised. No one can contrive to resolve her inner anonymity and her inner non-being, her non-becoming.

In a psychological state in which inner emptiness and silent abandonment prevail, there seems to be no other person who is able to absorb, identify and transform these feelings.

ETERNAL REVENGE AS THE ELIXIR OF LIFE Psychologically, the story can be understood as a kind of chosen trauma.

Conflict researcher Vamik Volkan describes “chosen traumas” as those narratives, myths and legends that are, for example, triggered by threatening or painful crises, that stand for a past event in which ancestors were unjustly victimised. It is a psychological process that is sometimes collectively significant and often fulfills several functions: distress is experienced as the repetition of a humiliation suffered long ago. At the same time, the image of the ancestors who were unfairly victimised is also portrayed as the eternal cause and legitimisation of current behavior. The traumatic imagery serves as an injunction to be vigilant,

even to seek revenge and retribution, and to restore the honor of those who were once violated. Last but not least, it is a source of collective or individual identity, even if that identity stands on shaky foundations.

Collective traumas often serve as cultural myths in this way. But individually, such victim legends can also function as placeholders for mentally overwhelming or traumatic life events – for example psychological or sexual abuse, unbearable emotional deprivation, violence and rape – in order to register and at the same time distance them.

The suggestion is that for Turandot too, the story of her ancestor dating back many thousands of years functions as an identity marker: “I am the one who can avenge and restore injured pride.” At the same time, it illustrates her incessant fear: “This could happen or could have happened to me too.” It strengthens her protective defenses and is intended to justify her cruelty: “Because it happened, everything is permitted, even the destruction of those who come too close to me”: „In you, I avenge that purity, that cry, that death!“ Through constant repetitions with the same outcome, the temporal continuity of the life story is dissolved in her inner experience and thus her own vitality is frozen.

COMPULSIVE REPETITION AND THE EMPTY TRIUMPH OF GRANDIOSITY In such mental inertia, the inner void and the existential fears of losing control can be compulsively overwritten with arousal, with sadistic or masochistic actions – with repeated patterns in which a traumatic perpetrator-­

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VERA KING

victim relationship is re-enacted. The victim can become the perpetrator and thus keep the feeling of her own suffering at bay. What is intolerable is passed on to others. Closeness, which is perceived as dangerous, is always prevented through destructive actions. Turandot’s own, possibly budding feelings of attraction – such as those hinted at in the opera when she warns the unknown prince of the life-threatening riddle – are warded off by repulsion.

All development seems to be blocked by compulsive repetition, the rehearsal of suffering and torment, of revenge and triumph, always realised through the same patterns. Retribution is intended to make us forget losses and create a barrier against the danger of confronting one‘s own pain and the pain of others.

Polarisations of omnipotence and powerlessness, exaltation and devaluation dominate this cosmos. Helplessness is counteracted by a phantasm of grandiose, rigid rule in which only one person – Turandot – has power over the life and death of all those who try to enter into a relationship with her.

The frequently contradictory emotional fluctuations of the crowd, in which raw emotions and desires come and go in an unprocessed way, act as a powerful echo – and as a heightened projection. The masses and the “court” appear almost like media that intensify the all-pervasive agitation. They loudly and drastically replicate seemingly automatic submission and brutality, intensified by bizarre humor and irony.

Shame is hidden by contempt for others, fear of humiliation is avoided by asserting superiority. Glances, gestures and words serve not to communicate, but to condemn. In this way,

the Other is eliminated and with it the possibility of an encounter that the victims of trauma can be subliminally convinced that they do not deserve.

Connection in the deeper sense of the word is unthinkable.

TRANSFORMATION IN CONFLICT The opera proceeds from compulsive repetition to a struggle for change. At the outset, we have the eternal re-enactment and externalization of Turandot’s traumatic inner world, exemplified by the constant executions that the ministers bewail and that prevent everyone and everything from living.

At the end, a name is bestowed on the idea of “love” as an explicit reference to a feeling that can now be designated as such. This struggle takes the form of a contest between two individuals and brings about initial disruptions of the established patterns – the unknown prince solves the riddles! But it also engenders new forms of resistance. Is there no way of doing away with this newcomer, no way of expelling what is new and unknown from the accustomed course of events?

At all events, unconditional love coming from outside is not enough.

Calaf‘s first encounter with Turandot, with her transcendent beauty and icy cruelty, creates in him an all-consuming urge to be the first and the only one to solve the riddle, to “gloriously prevail”. This desire, however, is still thoroughly narcissistic and exalts the victor. It is an idealisation in which his own irresistible desires are condensed (the “face” of Turandot that he sees, is warned to be an “illusion”). Is this perhaps also about the rebellion against

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TURANDOT – RIDDLES AND TRANSFORMATIONS

his father – more than that, about restoring the power lost by the father? Be that as it may, in order to win, he must also understand. It transpires that in order to win love, it is necessary to relinquish victory, a core insight around which everything revolves.

One could say that the development takes place in several stages of change, a violent conflict that ultimately paves the way for encounter and contact.

First, Calaf’s ability to solve the riddle is an expression of identification, of closeness and empathy. The prince divines Turandot’s covert desires and grasps her ambivalence: hope and the constant fear of disappointment, blood as a sign of injury, of injured femininity, but also as an image of passion and desire, and finally Turandot herself with her conflict between total withdrawal into her own self and the hope for release from her inertia. The prince doesn‘t simply guess the right words or win because he’s so smart. He solves the riddles by empathizing with her and using his own feelings as a guide.

In doing so, he offers the riddle-maker Turandot an interpretation of herself, of her own existential riddle: in his interpretation and solution of the riddles she can recognise herself for the first time. Recognition by the Other makes her see herself as in a mirror.

But this is just another step on a longer path on which Calaf also reluctantly realises that winning is not the point at issue. Calaf also changes. He doesn’t want to take Turandot by force, he wants to win her love. The nameless victor must turn into someone who risks exposure, who reveals himself, who has a name. He changes the power struggle by not immediately insisting on what he is entitled to after solv-

ing the riddles. The “stranger” fulfills the princess’s desire to maintain control, initially reducing her fear, but still with the assurance of ultimate triumph.

It is only in the face of Liù’s loving sacrifice and the authenticity of a devotion that resonates with such intensity that the atmosphere begins to change. New, profound guilt asserts itself, but also, for the first time, a sensible capacity for guilt. Even the cruel masses and the officials who have so far unhesitatingly connived with the vindictiveness of the powers that be can no longer avoid feeling for the tormented woman. As Ping says under the spell of Liù’s selfsacrifice: “Today, for the first time, death doesn’t elicit a mocking laugh from me!”

Sadistic pleasure gives way to heart-wrenching remorse. Grief, guilt and shame are signs of an initial turn towards a reality that holds out the possibility of de-idealization. Anxious and sorrowful, the princess, who until then had imagined herself to be divine and incorporeal, can permit a kiss that enables her to feel her sensuality and touches her in an unknown way. For the first time, the prince completely forgoes victory in order to reach Turandot’s heart and voluntarily reveals the riddle of his name.

At the end, we see the emergence of an ability to give one’s own feelings and the feelings of others a new-sounding name that has been avoided for so long – “its name is...Love!” At least this possibility now seems more likely than before, a development also indicated by the way Alfano emulates Puccini in giving subtle musical expression to things that are hinted at, hoped for, and yet unexpected.

The opera develops from a dark world of destruction permeated by fear, total

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TURANDOT – RIDDLES AND TRANSFORMATIONS

self-reference and hatred, in which there can be no love at all, to an initial reflection of oneself in the Other – an Other who understands Turandot and recognises her in the riddle – and from there to a first inkling of the possibility of love, which, in the words of Sigmund Freud, is not merely a “narcissistic choice of object” but a love for the Other as Other, a love that brings with it a new receptiveness for the unknown.

THE GREATEST RIDDLE Turandot only appears when her picture has been fully painted for us and the unknown prince has been smitten.

One could say that until then she had only been brought to life in repetitive circles – only for a short time, until another suitor failed and was sent to his death. She was still “not a human be­ ing,” as she says, not because she was a goddess, a “daughter of heaven,” but because she avoided becoming an individual subject through her psychological escape into a system of rejection and ritual destruction. In this sense, the opera is about a process of humanization – about being born as a human being. Until then, Turandot remains a mystery to herself. Self-idealization and a coercive system of violent control have served to conceal her nameless fear. Self-deception can only be overcome by looking squarely into the mirror held up by the Other.

But Calaf, whose desires are at the heart of the plot in the first act, is not simply a heroic savior. He too undergoes a transformation: from someone who wants something for himself, at any price to someone who understands, yet also gives something of himself. For Calaf too, Liù’s unconditional love for

the Other is a turning point. Through Liù, both Turandot and Calaf experience realise their guilt. In this respect, Liù not only represents love as a kind of devotion that can place the Other above oneself, it also stirs within the Other the capacity for compassion, guilt, and mourning.

At the outset, both are, as it were, armed to the teeth, Turandot with her eternal vengeance and murderous rejection, Calaf with the unconditional nature of his love for something he does not yet know. “One loves to love and therefore loves a person one can love,” says Niklas Luhmann. “Doesn’t ‘love at first sight’ imply that you were already in love before the first sight?”

Although, as Freud puts it, the “finding of an object... is in fact a refinding”, i.e. is based on early-life experiences of affection, it requires – over and above the severe traumas that may be involved – the by no means self-evident and invariably fragile ability to experience a person as an Other, to transcend the mere reflection of oneself in the Other.

As Calaf and Turandot explore together the possibility of perceiving the Other, and thus themselves, by giving something of themselves, they increasingly allow themselves to be affected and to “reach out to their soul” without feeling threatened by destruction. The “enigmatic character of art” emphasised by Theodor W. Adorno diversifies itself here in the central topos of the riddle.

It demands a solution, promises salvation, yet at the same time continuously initiates new quests: “Even if the work of art is the greatest riddle,” as Joseph Beuys said, the answer at the end of this story is the same as the answer to the three-part riddle of the Sphinx: “the human being.”

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JONAS KAUFMANN as CALAF ASMIK GRIGORIAN as TURANDOT

FRANZ KAFKA

BEFORE THE LAW Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am power­ful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.”

The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gate­keeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interro­gates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let

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B E F OR E T H E L AW

Next pages: KRISTINA MKHITARYAN

as LIÙ DAN PAUL DUMITRESCU

as TIMUR JONAS KAUFMANN

as CALAF DANCE ENSEMBLE MARTIN HÄSSLER as PING NORBERT ERNST as PANG HIROSHI AMAKO as PONG

him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper.

The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes child­ish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognises now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.

19

RICHARD ERKENS

A TURANDOT IN THE MODERN SPIRIT PUCCINI’S PRINCESS: NORMAL, HUMAN A train trip to Rome at the start of March 1920 was the setting for the launch of Puccini’s last opera. The 62-year-old composer was travelling through the socially and economically devastated post-war Italy to the revival of Il trittico at the Teatro Costanzi.

Shortly before, long-time friend and dramatist Renato Simoni had urged Puccini to consider the Turandot story

by Carlo Gozzi. At the Milan railway station, he gave Puccini a copy of the highly acclaimed Schiller version, back translated into Italian. Puccini started to read it, with growing interest.

A few days later, he wrote from Rome that the subject should not be lightly dismissed, and that he felt Gozzi’s Turandot was one of his “most normal and human” fairy-tale dramas.

The play had the potential to become “a Turandot in the modern spirit”. This was both a commission and an ambition.

Puccini’s attraction to the anti-realistic fiaba teatrale (fairy-tale drama) of Gozzi, a Venetian dramatist and opponent of Goldoni and the realist movement, was not as contrary to the spirit of the times as it might seem. Premièred in 1762, the fairy-tale piece with its conser­vative flavour was intended to

counter the triumphs of the comedy of character with its subliminal criticism of society and the aristocracy. Actually, Puccini was not interested in such outdated material, which would only be encountered in literary circles. His notoriously laborious search for suit­ able stories was entirely focused on stories or plays with a proven effec­ tive­ness and familiar to contemporary urban audiences. However, this was very much the case for Turandot, at the latest since Max Reinhardt’s production of the new translation by Karl Gustav Vollmöller at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in October 1911.

The fairy tale of the princess with her rampart of riddles, ruthlessly sending one suitor for her hand after another to the headsman, was a major success in the run-up to the First World War. Arriving in Rome, Puccini fell into conversation with “a foreign lady” about the Reinhardt production.

He was particularly interested in the original staging – by contrast, there is no mention of the Turandot Suite by Ferruccio Busoni as incidental music in his correspondence with the Turan­ dot would-be librettists. His remote diagnosis was that the Reinhardt production showed Turandot as a vulnerable little girl, surrounded by statuesque giants. And this was exactly what his

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A TURANDOT IN THE MODERN SPIRIT

“modern” Turandot was not going to be.

The creative spark started to glimmer.

THE LEGEND OF TURANDOT Is it surprising that Puccini became fascinated by a fantastic, exotic fairy tale, after composing Madama Butter­ fly, La fanciulla del West and Il tabarro?

At first glance, certainly. Because their dramatic power grew from the de­tailed depiction of social milieux which were the background for the clash of emotions. It is true that Puccini started his opera career in 1884 with a romantic legend. Le Villi is an adapta­ tion of a Nordic ghost story, remark­ ably also involving deadly revenge against a (faithless) male world. But his subsequent works are committed to a realistic aesthetic, regardless of the historical and geographical setting of his characters.

And they are all driven by human passions, hopes and desires. They do not feature the laws of an empire with deadly consequences. There was accordingly little fairy tale magic in Puccini’s work to date, apart from his art of capturing dramatic atmospheres, painting moods in music. The letter to his librettists shows that he was less enthralled by the marvellous and legendary aspect of the Gozzi fairy tale than the normal and human aspect. This can only have meant the evolution of the initially fear-stricken, injurious and vulnera­ble Turandot to sharing love with a partner.

This view of the original is no longer surprising if we remember that the word “Mär” (Legend) derives from Mede­ vial German, and means simply an account of some­ thing, an objec­tive event or subjective

experience, which seemed worthy of report. As an oral or literary genre, fairy tales have their own rules, related to dreams, as depth-psychological research reveals. The core is experience of conflict in human deve­ lopment, conflicts with parents or in maturing towards the erotic, loving partnership of a couple. Turandot is about this, and Puccini recognised this true aspect of the fairy tale: Turandot is normal, human, and to this extent eternally “modern”.

The story is about a high ranking, unmarried woman, who establishes fatal obstacles against a relationship.

Her fear of human closeness, of male intimacy makes her a source of collective fear. We do not know which mil­ lennium in human history this fairytale core dates back to. The springs of the past run deep here. We can reconstruct its transmission from the Middle Ages. The written version of the Turandot story begins with the Haft Paikar (Seven Portraits) of the Persian poet Nezämi from 1198/99.

The oriental dervish Mokles (Mukhlis) continued the tale in the 17th century, and added names, so that the young daughter from Turkestan (“Turan” – “Dokht”) became a Chinese princess. As part of the Thousand and One Days collection, this “Persian chinoiserie” finally reached Europe, was translated by François Pétis de la Croix, and was included in the 1710s in the “Contes persane” collection Les milles et un jours.

In the intellectual atmosphere of Venice, a trading centre traditionally allied with oriental and Asian civilisation, the exotic princess finally be­came associated with the stylised Italian improvised comedy in Gozzi’s fiaba

23

RICHARD ERKENS

teatrale version. This was the spiritual cradle of Puccini’s “modern” Turandot.

The staging of the “tragicomic fairy tale” which Friedrich Schiller wrote after Gozzi for the Weimar Court Theatre did not play any significant role. But this was what helped popularise the fairy tale in the 19th century.

POPULAR STORY, UNPOPULAR DUET As a fairy-tale character, Turandot was an essential figure in decades of popular reading after the political and social upheavals of the Napoleonic Era. People hungered for romantic and intellectual subjects, the literary fairy tale flourished. However, although the story was popular, its transfer to music was problematic. There were an incredible number of attempts to bring Calaf’s riddle duel with Turandot to the opera stage, but they had little traction and remained one-off events. It was primarily musical directors such as Franz Danzi in Karlsruhe in 1816 or Carl Gottlieb Reissiger in Dresden in 1835 who adopted Turan­ dot as tragicomic music theatre for their stages. Schiller’s adaptation was cut to two acts. Calaf’s infatuation and the follow­ing riddle scene as the finale of Act 1 was followed by Turandot’s efforts to solve Calaf’s riddle with the intrigue with Adelma in the second part.

The Vienna adaptation by the prominent Lieder composer Johann Hoven (alias Johann Vesque von Püttlingen) who produced his Turandot, Prinzessin von Schiras (Turandot, Princess of Shiraz – returning her to her Persian origins) in 1838 at the K&K Hoftheater at the Kärntnertor. Hoven did not compose any great solo for her,

she struggles even less, nor does she struggle for the female gender “insulted” by the “proud” male gender – as in Schiller. She fights simply for her personal freedom, which even a princess is entitled to.

Puccini will hardly have been fami­ liar with all these German language settings – there were others, besides the incidental music for dramatic theatre versions. This was probably not the case, however, with the Azione fantas­ tica Turanda, which had a rather unsuccessful world première at Milan’s La Scala in 1867. The composer was Antonio Bazzini, an interna­ tionally renowned violinist, who taught at the Milan Conservatory from 1873 as professor of composition, and had many illustrious students, including the 22-year-old Puccini from 1880. The professor’s only opera would certainly have been discussed in the course, and the young Puccini may even have studied the score.

There are two links at the dramatic level between Turanda and Puccini’s Turandot, as the relevant study by Kii-Ming Lo shows. The exiled Prince Calaf no longer falls immediately in love (like Tamino) with an image of the princess (who is Persian again here), but falls for her in public once he sees her. She arouses his desire with the dazzling aura of her power and her deadly remoteness and inaccessibility. However, the final solution – giving his name as a sign of reciprocal love – comes in an intimate conversation between the two. The couple has come together in a normal, human way – the political dimension is ignored. Puccini may have remembered this.

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A TURANDOT IN THE MODERN SPIRIT

“CHINESE PRINCESS (OR PERSIAN, WHO KNOWS)” Busoni, who became interested in the Turandot story from 1904, highlighted the problem of the setting in a letter to his mother: “Who knows where the princess reigned?” The question was significant for determining what exotic music should be used as a setting for a Turandot. Busoni wanted to avoid at all cost a “conventional theatrical exoticism”, as he called it.

When he expanded his Turandot Suite, which was less incidental music than “autonomous music to Gozzi’s drama” to a two-act opera, his anti-realistic approach dominated: it was impor­tant to emphasise the artificiality of the original commedia dellʼarte play and opera in general.

He conducted the world première of the piece in 1917 at the Zurich Opera House. The music was intended to help illustrate the marvellous fairy-­tale world, the ironic story. The audience was supposed to experience opera intellectually, but not be caught up emotionally at all. As a result, his “Chinese fable” (the final setting after all) contains many oriental motifs, Indian and Turkish as well as Chinese. And in Turandot’s bower, the chorus sings wordlessly to the melody of the Irish folk tune Greensleeves. Musical local colour to mix and match. This makes Busoni’s Turandot an expression of a modern aesthetic. This was the first Turandot opera in its own right, abstract fairy-tale theatre in a parody of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Like Puccini, Busoni changed the literary basis away from Schiller to Gozzi. One result is the three masques which Busoni added. As commedia

dell’arte figures, the chief eunuch Truffaldino and the ministers Pantalone and Tartaglia act independently, particularly in the intrigues the Act 2 in an effort to solve Calaf’s riddle. Busoni’s Calaf, infatuated with the image, sets out to revenge the previously beheaded “wretched prince” of Samarkand.

However, the riddles to be solved go against the violence and tension of the extreme situation – it is, after all, a question of life or death. The answers are reason, custom and art. The intellectual discourse also tames the existential struggle for human closeness. What Busoni avoided for reasons of operatic aesthetics, Puccini successfully aimed at.

HOPE – BLOOD – TURANDOT In contrast to characters such as Carmen or Salome, Turandot failed as both opera subject and decadent femme fatale figure of the long 19th century.

For the Puccini adaptation this created freedom, a triumph over the “world of yesterday”, as Stefan Zweig put it.

Together with Giuseppe Adami, the librettist for Rondine and Il tabarro, Simoni revised the original in a complex process shaken by crises. Puccini stuck with his way of working, in which music and text were created inter­dependently, and sometimes the composition was ahead of the libretto.

The dramaturgic macrostructure, the three acts with the riddle scene as the Act 2 finale, was not agreed on until the start of 1922. The ensemble with the three strokes on the gong was modified retroactively, together with the minister trio as the start of Act 2.

A remaining problem was that the title

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A TURANDOT IN THE MODERN SPIRIT

character, apart from a mute initial appearance, did not participate in the action until well into the work. The “psychological deficit” of the characters, as Dieter Schickling described it, was a severe burden, particularly for the final duet, which remained a fragment. However, it provided a viable way to remove the stereotypical fairytale and puppet theatre characteristics from the figures so that they could take on emotional life. We owe it to Puccini’s masterly melodic and tonal dramaturgy that emotional veracity appears within only a few bars, whether in the reunion of Calaf and Timur or (particularly) the slave girl, Liù.

She is a total recreation of the Adelma character. The rival intriguer became the silent, self-sacrificing lover. All this emotionality is reflected in the an­ swers that Calaf proposes with heroic bravery, deciphering the language that Turandotʼs riddles speak: hope, blood, Turandot. The difference from Busoni is striking.

The response by Puccini with Turan­ dot to the sensitivities of a Europe marked by the consequences of war is a synthesis of all the elements that went into his thoughts and feelings about the aesthetics of opera. Exoticism blends with the fairy-tale, comical, grotesque and heroic elements.

Whatever tinte Puccini uses, the emphasis is always on the authentic expression of human feeling, whether love, hate, hope or suffering.

This final magical fusion in his oeuvre has a new dimension which testifies

to his modernity, his unfailing sense of contemporary themes. However inti­ mate the language of her emotional transformation, the story of the coldhearted princess is given a terrifying monumentality. Turandot’s compulsive cruelty which has the people, along with the imperial priesthood and bureaucracy in a vice-like grip, unmistakeably reflects the carnage of the First World War. Submissiveness and fickleness of a captive population create a collective background of fear which covers every­ thing right at the start of the piece – in submission to the fatal law, the rousing chorus accompanying the grindstone with its shower of sparks, the hallucinatory hysteria at the moon’s rising, and the call for the executioner Pu-Tin-Pao and his assistants.

Even at Liù’s death, the last bars of instrumentation by Puccini, this collective paralysis is apparent in the plea that the spirit of the dead woman should not take revenge on the living.

By refusing to downplay the social dimension of the Turandot story and projecting it like no one before on a monumental scale, Puccini satisfied his ambition to create a work in the “modern spirit”. The story of the fairy tales and Puccini’s great choral opera Turandot both reassure us that hope remains despite the collective trauma from war and individual injuries.

Both rely on the possibility of a love growing from an encounter free of fear between two people. The answer to Calaf’s riddle accordingly has two parts, Calaf – love.

26

ASMIK GRIGORIAN

as TURANDOT SUPERNUMERARY of the VIENNA STATE OPERA

KONRAD KUHN

STRUGGLE FOR CREDIBILITY ALFANO’S COMPLETION OF PUCCINI’S TURANDOT “And Turandot? I am deeply pained that I have not completed this opera.”

Giacomo Puccini wrote this on 3 November 1924 to his friend, the musicologist Riccardo Schnabl. Three weeks later, on 29 November, Puccini died in Brussels from the consequences of his cancer. Puccini’s inability to complete his last opera in person has led to repeated speculation among Puccini researchers. In his influential biography of Puccini (1958) Mosco Carner suggested for example that after growing up from the age of five without a father, Puccini had a mother complex which made him unable to set to music the success of Calaf and Turandot in finding each other.

So why would Puccini have wanted to tackle the Turandot story at all?

For him, it was clear from the start that the title figure would not die this time, that the opera would culminate in a final duet between the two leading characters and would have to have a happy ending, however difficult it was to reach this. Nothing changed in this, despite all the setbacks during the process of creation, lasting more than four Previous pages:

ASMIK GRIGORIAN as TURANDOT DANCE ENSEMBLE

years and leading to no fewer than five different versions of the libretto.

Richard Erkens wrote: “The struggle for dramatic credibility that certainly posed a particular and even unique dramaturgic challenge in the case of Turandot’s transformation, captured in the libretto in the symbolic opposition of the coldness of death (morte– gelo) and heat of love (amore–fuoco) was part of Puccini’s fundamental understanding of his work as a musical dramatist. It is unacceptable to deny him this creative ability, at this point above all.” The fact that Puccini was unable to complete Turandot himself is due simply and solely to his death. Not least, this is shown by the fact that he took 23 pages of sketches to the clinic in Brussels where he hoped to be cured by the new radium therapy, so that he could continue working on the end of the opera in his sickbed.

These 23 pages, some written on both sides – making a total of 36 pages in all – together with a libretto with notes by Puccini and musical bullet points were the basis for completing the opera.

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STRUGGLE FOR CREDIBILITY

After Pietro Mascagni who was the first to be asked by the Ricordi publishing house had declined to take over the delicate task, Puccini’s fellow composer Franco Alfano was commissioned.

He seemed predestined by his opera La leggenda di Sakùntala about an Indian story, which had its world première in Bologna in 1921, to immerse himself in the “exotic” subject, and his own tonal language was not too far from Puccini’s, stylistically speaking.

Naturally, the world première originally planned for April 1925 was no longer possible after Puccini’s death.

The contract with Alfano was only concluded on 25 August of that year, and the posthumous world première finally took place a year later at Milan’s La Scala on 25 April 1926.

That evening, Arturo Toscanini put down his baton after the funeral march accompanying the removal of Liù’s body from the stage, with the words: “Qui finisce l’opera perché a questo punto il Maestro è morto.” (This is where the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died.) The second performance was then conducted by Ettore Panizza instead of Toscanini.

However, this was not the version of the finale that Alfano had originally submitted, but in a highly condensed version which is the one the opera is mostly shown in, unless the conductor and production team can go with Toscanini and end the opera with Liù’s death, which is also regularly done.

How did these significant cuts in the first version come about? This is where the relationship between Puccini and Toscanini – not always smooth – comes into play. Toscanini had conducted La bohème in 1896 with great success, making him an ideal inter-

preter of his works for Puccini. The two men were friends, although problems developed between them in 1918. The first occasion was Toscanini’s refusal to conduct the world première of Il trit­ tico, a work whose form and approach he decisively rejected. There was a reconciliation on 7 September 1924.

Toscanini was again planned to conduct the world première of Turan­ dot, and Puccini played him the entire opera at the piano, freely improvising a possible version of the finale. Toscanini responded enthusiastically to the piece, except for the ending, which he was not entirely convinced by.

This meeting allowed Toscanini to claim later that he had a relatively exAct 1dea how Puccini intended to end the opera, in contrast to Alfano, who had only the pages of sketches left behind to work from. In addition, Alfano had only photographs of these, supplemented by Guido Zuccoli, the established author of the piano scores of Puccini’s operas, who was familiar with Puccini’s manuscript, often difficult to read.

At least it seemed relatively clear from the libretto how Puccini had imagined the end of his opera. After a long struggle, during which Puccini had repeatedly bombarded his two librettists Renato Simoni and Giuseppe Adami with alternating violent accusations and detailed wishes, a version of the libretto was available at the start of October 1924 which the composer evaluated as follows in a letter to Adami. “It’s really beautiful, and completes and justifies the duet.”

However, apart from the opening exchange between Calaf and Turandot, the sketches showed only fragmentarily how Puccini intended to turn the li-

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KONRAD KUHN

bretto into a musically coherent form.

The turning point in the scene was the kiss. Puccini had already joked about the final duet in 1920, “A big scene about love with a modern kiss, everyone with a tongue down their throat.”

Alfano had nevertheless recognized that Calaf’s impetuous assault, as an attempt to break through the armour of the “ice princess”, would have to involve a violent reaction at first.

In his original version, the kiss is given an extended orchestration.

The instrumental climax is followed in the music by a violent reaction by Turandot (marked “di nuovo presto”), which only then leads to a ritardando and subsequently a lentissimo part.

The stage directions at this point say, “Turandot can no longer resist the assault, she has no voice left, no strength, no will.” In the resulting silence Alfano writes a pianissimo tritone at several points for the woodwinds, as a sign of what the kiss has done to her. As if paralysed – a new stage direction says, “pleading, almost like a child, murmuring” – Turandot says, “What’s happening to me?

What’s happening to me? I’m shivering … Lost … Let me go! No!” Comparing the second version imposed by Toscanini with Alfano’s original version up to this point, there are the following major differences, besides a more conflicted opening phrase in an intense dialogue. The kiss in the later version is significantly shorter instrumentally, directly followed by a general pause. This in turn is followed by a single “What’s happening to me?” and “Lost” before Calaf joins in with restrained rejoicing (here still premature) in the face of the emerging dawn, “O my morning flower.”

This can be read as if showing that the – enforced – kiss has virtually magically “healed” the severely traumatized woman of her notorious defensive attitude towards all men. Today, we can only shake our head over this. Much more plausible is Alfano’s musically fully developed arc of Turandot’s inner state, after experiencing a fresh traumatization and again reacting forcefully against the intrusive male. Marked with the stage directions “agitated, shaken” she sings a sort of second aria which Alfano clearly conceived as a parallel to her aria on her entrance “In questa reggia” (In this palace) – “Del primo pianto” (From the first tears).

Literally in tears, she admits that the strange prince filled her with fear from the start because of his decisiveness, but at the same fascinated her.

The second version leaves significantly less time for this “aria”.

Even more decisive is another cut which Toscanini dictated. After Calaf has voluntarily given his name, Turandot breaks out with, “I can decide your fate … I hold your life in my hand … You gave it to me … It belongs to me! Me! More than my throne … more than my own life …” The stage direction is again very clear: “As if her proud, haughty soul is rearing up again …” This feeling of triumph, the certainty of having won again and being able to decide for herself finally gives Turandot the courage to reject her fears and announce the name of the Unknown Prince to her father and the people, as if rebaptizing him: “Amor!” (Love) For the scene change to this concluding answer to the riddle Calaf had set for her, Alfano composed a new women’s chorus, to be sung backstage, similar to the offstage chorus that ac-

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STRUGGLE FOR CREDIBILITY

companied Calaf’s initial outbreak of joy. This is in great style, harmonically.

If you like, at this point you can find not only parallels with the Impressionists Debussy and Ravel, who Puccini also admired, but even echoes of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies. Toscanini also cut this last stage in Turandot’s transformation (you might almost say “transfiguration”), arguing that this is not Puccini but Alfano.

To which you can only say, naturally it isn’t pure Puccini! Conversely, Puccini always followed with great interest what his contemporaries were producing and allowed himself to be influenced by them. “I must hear good performances and new music, of all kinds.” Puccini wrote this in a letter of 4 August 1920 to his former lover and subsequent long-standing confidante Sybil Seligman. Besides Debussy and Ravel, he had been impressed many years before by Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-bleue and Béla Bartók’s Blue­ beard’s Castle. His encounter with Stravinsky also left traces on Turandot.

Puccini’s famous visit to a performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire on 1 April 1924 in Florence led to a meeting between the two composers marked by mutual respect. Toscanini’s objections lose their force in this context.

The influence Wagner had on Puccini is certainly complex. He had seen Parsifal in Bayreuth, and the formal structure of Turandot’s Act 3 with the change of scene at the end may have been modelled on Parsifal’s Act 3. It is natural to conclude that Puccini must also have thought of the duet between the two leading characters in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde when writing the final duet between Turandot and Calaf. There is the puzzling note in the

sketches “E poi Tristano” (And then Tristan).

Does this mean that Puccini wanted to use the famous Tristan chord, which he quotes secretly at other points? Or does this comment refer to the rapture of the famous lovers, who we know are united in a desire for death and who are only united in death at the end?

Alfano’s thoroughly personal completion of Turandot is certainly not Tristan-like. However, late Romantic and Impressionistic influences are definitely audible and lend particular appeal to his original version. Perhaps it was this that disturbed Toscanini.

The version that we know today as “Alfano 2”, and which has been played around the world from the second performance, is a whole 109 bars shorter.

Taking into account the fact that new transitional bars were inserted at several points, the cuts are even more extensive.

The original version, generally referred to as “Alfano 1” has a total length of 377 bars, so that the cut is well over one quarter. Alfano’s objection to these cuts was brusquely rejected by Casa Ricordi.

While Alfano delivered the required changes, he completed the orchestration of his original version.

This made it possible for it to be played in 1982, first in a concert performance at London’s Barbican Centre, and a little later as a staged production at New York’s City Opera. Since then, “Alfano 1” has been repeatedly used as the basis for new productions, as it is now for the new production by Claus Guth.

Returning to the prominent Puccini researcher Richard Erkens, he believes that the “necessary decisions” taken by Alfano on the basis of the

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STRUGGLE FOR CREDIBILITY

sketches were “dramaturgically stringent”, but that “this is only apparent in his original version, as this offers the psychological ‘full version’, as it were, of Turandot’s overcoming her trauma, which together with the ‘second aria’ ‘Del primo pianto’ incorporates the thoroughly ambivalent behaviour with the recovery and reinforcement of her ruling personality after Calaf’s naming.”

Since 2002 there has been a third version of the finale, created by the Italian composer Luciano Berio on the basis of Puccini’s sketches, where he included his own – and much more advanced – musical language. You can interpret his version, which sounds as if it absolutely implodes at the end, as a commentary on the fact that Puccini was unable to complete the opera himself. This deliberate anticlimax at the end is a clever move to make this attitude clear. It does not match Puccini’s intentions, however, as he clearly planned to return triumphantly at the end to the motif of the opera’s “biggest hit” – Calaf’s aria “Nessun dorma”, from Act 3.

However, Alfano’s original version has the lovers’ interjections against the chorus rejoicing with Calaf’s motif.

Toscanini eliminated these as well. In the “Alfano 1” version the chorus’s last word is “love”. By contrast, the opera in the “Alfano 2” version ends with the word “fame”. Perhaps this also shows how the focus had shifted in what was regarded for decades as canonic. We can credit Toscanini with recognizing that the coming together of the two main characters was not a completely successful end to the story in musical terms, and accordingly cutting it so brutally in order to get to the closing rejoicing as quickly as possible – although Toscanini never conducted the “Alfano 2” ending personally.

In any case the original version offers a more logical possibility for taking the utterly utopian commitment to love seriously – as a force which is able to overcome (at least for the moment) even the deep-rooted fears of Turandot, damaged to her core – and ending the opera with this.

34

Next pages: JONAS KAUFMANN

as CALAF ASMIK GRIGORIAN

as TURANDOT KRISTINA MKHITARYAN

as LIÙ

GIACOMO PUCCINI TO RENATO SIMONI, MARCH 18, 1920

A TURANDOT FROM A MODERN SPIRIT – YOURS, ADAMIʼS, AND MINE

W. A N T HON Y S H E P PA R D

THE ENIGMAS OF MUSICAL EXOTICISM IN TURANDOT AN EXOTIC SETTING Throughout his career, Puccini was very interested in the visual aspects of opera, and claimed to visualise the settings of his libretti as he composed.

He offered detailed suggestions to producers and even provided some sketches and selected designers.

Creat­ing a sense of place was clearly important to him, and he eagerly stretched his musical language to accomplish this in his scores.

Puccini attempted to create each opera’s setting through music, often based on some musical research, whether for the creation of exotic Japan or the Paris of the 1830s. For example, in preparation for composing the early morning scene at the Castel Sant’Angelo in Tosca, Puccini traveled to Rome to hear the dawn bells from that location himself.

Turandot, however, is an opera set in an entirely imaginary fairytale location that Puccini could never visit – ”Peking in Legendary Times.”

Nevertheless, some directors have attempted to stage “exotic realism”

in their productions. For example, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1987 production at New York’s Metropolitan Opera is famously extravagant in its exotic de­ tails. Productions of Turandot by the celebrated Chinese film director Zhang Yimou aimed even more explicitly at “exotic authenticity.” In 1997, the conductor Zubin Mehta invited Zhang to stage Turandot for a production in Florence. Mehta explained his choice of Zhang as follows: “I want somebody who knows his country so that we could finally do an authentic production ... authentic means made and conceived by Chinese and I think the end product was that.” This comment should give us pause: Why would a modern Chinese film director necessarily create a more “authentic” version of an operatic story set in “legendary times”, based on an eighteenth-century Italian commedia dell’arte fantasy play by Carlo Gozzi, which in turn was based on a Persian fable? Following Zhang’s success in Florence, he even restaged Turandot in the Forbidden City in Beijing (“on the original site”) in an attempt to realise the dream of bringing exotic

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THE ENIGMAS OF MUSICAL EXOTICISM IN TURANDOT

authenticity to Puccini. The current Vienna State Opera production di­rec­ ted by Claus Guth avoids these traps of “exotic authenticity.”

EXOTIC MUSICAL SOURCES Puccini pursued his own version of exotic authenticity as he set out to compose the music for his final opera.

Of course, he already had experience in this vein, using Japanese and Chinese tunes in Madama Butterfly and adapting his style to signal the wild American frontier in The Girl of the Golden West. For Turandot, Puccini attempted to compose music that would support the exotic setting and story, which is both unbearably cruel/ grotesque and impossibly enticing/ beautiful. First, the score exhibits an advanced harmonic style and some experimental orchestration. To match the barbaric sight of severed heads at the opera’s opening, and to signal Turandot’s cruelty and exotic threat, Puccini employed a dissonant bitonal chord in an aggressive and blunt rhythm that is commonly referred to as the “execution motive.” This cluster of pitches is the result of playing a d minor triad and a C# major triad simultaneously.

Just as he had attempted to incor­ porate aspects of East Asian music in Madama Butterfly – primarily in the form of borrowed tunes, staccato articulation, and pentatonicism – Pu­cci­­ni sought out sources of Chinese musical influence for Turandot. For his Chinese fable, Puccini turned to printed transcriptions of folk tunes and composed other pentatonic tunes himself. In addition, the composer

famously encountered a music box that played several Chinese melodies.

In August 1920, as Puccini was working on Turandot, a newspaper reporter leaked the news that Puccini had consulted a “Chinese” music box at the Bagni di Lucca home of one Baron Edoardo Fassini-Camossi and that the composer planned to use these Chinese melodies in his new opera. This music box was actually made in Switzerland and featured melodies that had been transcribed in China by a Swiss musi­ cian and member of the famous Bovet watchmaking family in order to mar­ ket these musical instruments to the Chinese in the late nineteenth cen­ tury. Baron Fassini was a veteran of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion and of a mission through China to Siberia at the end of World War I. Fassini most likely acquired his music box or boxes at the “loot auctions” sponsored by the foreign legations in Peking following the suppression of the Boxers.

All three of the Chinese melodies from this source appear in their initial or fullest versions in Turandot in the same key as on the music box. The most famous Chinese song, commonly referred to as “Mo Li Hua” (“Jasmine Flower”), signals the seductive and glorious aspects of the fairy-tale Chi­ nese princess. “Loc Tee Kun Tzin” (“The Sound of Gold Coins Striking the Floor”) was used as the Emperor’s theme in Turandot. This theme appears in a solemn setting in Act 2, scene 2 after the Emperor agrees to allow Calaf to attempt the riddles and it appears again triumphantly to conclude Act 2.

Finally, a third Chinese melody from the music box serves for the entrance of the comic Chinese ministers, Ping, Pang, and Pong.

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W. A N T HON Y S H E P PA R D

A motive from “Loc Tee Kun Tzin” had already appeared as what I have termed the “Patrimony theme” in Madama Butterfly, a theme heard with references to Butterfly’s father and his suicide at the request of the Japanese emperor. The appearance of this motif in both operas in association with exotic fathers further connects these Orientalist works. In fact, the opening measures of Turandot seem to pick up exactly where the final measures of Madama Butterfly left off. In 2012, I discovered that Puccini had also encountered another Swissmade music box featuring Chinese melodies some two decades earlier as he composed Madama Butterfly.

Two of those Chinese tunes served as Butterfly’s two main themes.

This discovery revealed connections between Madama Butterfly and Turandot.

Of course, all of the melodies on these two music boxes had already been filtered through European notation in transcriptions, and so Puccini’s use of music boxes as a source of influence was not really different from his use of notated tunes from printed collections.

By first transcribing the tunes in Western notation, and then through the very act of pinning them onto comb cylinders, the Swiss stripped away from these Chinese melodies many of the musical features that mark them as stylistically Chinese. Rather than speaking of the presence of “Japanese” or “Chinese” music in Madama Butter­ fly or Turandot we might better say that certain passages in these works are based on approximations of the pitch and rhythm in exotic melodies.

Similarly, the use of staccato string gestures generally toward the sound

quality of certain East Asian plucked string instruments.

EXOTIC WOMEN Exotic representation in opera goes back at least to the comic Turkishstyle operas of the late eighteenth century, such as Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, and it flourished in the nineteenth century, particularly in France and in French-influenced works such as: Carmen, Lakme, Samson and Delilah, and Aida. In studying such operas, we note not only the attempts by composers, librettists, choreographers, and stage designers to create exotic “local color,” but also just how often the exotic woman is the central focus. In Orientalist operas, exotic women appear in two varieties: the unbelievably innocent and selfsacrificing Lakmes and Butterflys, or the impossibly cruel or dangerous Delilah and Carmens. In Puccini’s final opera we encounter one of each type: Turandot attempts to retain her independence as a castrating femme fatale and Liù appears as the utterly devoted and sacrificial exotic flower girl. In striking contrast to Turandot’s introductory bicentric “execution motif” and brassy representation, Liù’s music is angelic, quiet with warm woodwinds, and frequently highlighted by a heavenly harp.

Actually, Turandot, through Liù’s example, comes to embody both stereotypes herself, for at the very last moment she is transformed as she succumbs to Calaf’s declarations of love. We realise that throughout the opera this transformation has been foretold, for Turandot is consistently

40

THE ENIGMAS OF MUSICAL EXOTICISM IN TURANDOT

associated with both the beautiful Chinese folk song “Mo Li Hua” and the chopping execution motif. “Mo Li Hua” is first heard just prior to Turan­ dot’s entrance in a very special exotic orchestration: with offstage humming chorus and saxophones and sung by a boys’ choir. Other characters tend to sing to part of the “Mo Li Hua“ tune when addressing the Princess directly. “Mo Li Hua” is transformed into a regal pronouncement for brass, and any doubt about this melody’s association with Turandot is cleared up as the chorus sings “Principessa” at her first appearance.

In Act 2, scene 2 (The Trial of the Three Enigmas) we hear both the execution motif and “Mo Li Hua” right before Turandot enters. She finally sings, after nearly fifty-five minutes into the opera. She explains that she has been possessed by the spirit of an ancestress, Lo-u-Ling, who had been abducted and raped by a foreign enemy. It is this horrible memory that inspired her three-riddle contest that continues to lead men to the scaffold. This reference to a wronged female ancestress does not appear in the opera’s literary sources where Turandot is motivated instead by a fierce desire to preserve her independence and by her hatred of men who she views as intellectually inferior.

Indulging in some interpretative fantasy, we might well ask whether Turandot in 1924 has the 1904 Madama Butterfly in mind when she justifies her ruthless riddles and decapitations of would-be suitors by telling of a long-lost tragic female relative who had been ruined by a foreign male. In Turandot the foreign male finally proves his devotion and we get the happy ending long deferred in Madama Butterfly.

As we listen to Puccini’s musical exo­ ticism throughout the opera, we should note that the “unknown Prince” Calaf, our hero from Tartary, does not sound very exotic in his music. In fact, his music remains mostly within the Puccinian norm. We, and Puccini’s ori­ ginal audiences, are thereby en­ couraged to identify with him. Calaf’s music sounds a good deal like that of several other romantic tenor roles in Puccini’s operas. The most memorable aria in the opera, “Nessun dorma,” offers a perfect example of Puccini’s technique for poignant Romantic melody. He prepares us for the big melody and climax by starting with shorter note values, gradually moving up in register, composing melodic upward leaps that follow rests, and then pushing the vocalist to the higher register with longer note values and a good deal of rhythmic flexibility for the climax. Puccini even tends to compose a rest to leave space for our applause.

Thus, particularly with the music for Calaf, Puccini remained a Romantic opera composer at heart in the end.

A MODERNIST FUTURE? Given that Puccini died before com­ pleting this opera, we cannot help but wonder what his future operas might have sounded like. Turandot poses a final stylistic enigma for us to consider–to what extent is this score from the 1920s a work of musical modernism? Did it offer a model for merging Italian Romantic opera with pan-European Modernist styles? Or, do the modernist stylistic features and allusions to specific contemporary avant garde works in the opera primar­­ily

41

W. A N T HON Y S H E P PA R D

serve the purposes of exotic rep­ resentation specific to this plot and setting? In short, was European musical modernism exotic itself from the perspectives of both Puccini and his intended audience?

To my ear it seems as though this Romantic Italian composer deliberately displayed his knowledge of and interest in a variety of modernist styles throughout Act 1 of Turandot.

The dissonance and ugly brash and brassy music might remind us of the presence of bitonality and specific moments in Strauss’s Salome (1905) – another opera with an exotic femme fatale princess associated with the moon. The aggressive, layered rhythms and ostinati heard during the blood thirsty chorus resemble Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (1913). I hear echoes of the French Impressionists Ravel and Debussy, but then I also hear a distinct echo of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1918) as Turandot’s ladies call for nocturnal quiet. In addition, multiple commentators have noted a

resemblance between the music of the Ghosts of the Beheaded Suitors and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) as well as Puccini’s use of Sprechstimme at several moments in Turandot.

At the premiere in 1926, the performance ended with Liù’s cortege for which Puccini composed music that strongly resembles Stravinsky’s “Spring Rounds” from Le sacre du printemps. This moment is nearly a direct quotation of Stravinsky’s score.

On stage, everyone leaves to bury the dead Liù. This is the point where Puccini died leaving only sketches.

Thus, some of the last music he ever composed was in imitation of Stravinsky. Given that Liù is a sacri­ ficial victim, perhaps this musical allusion to Le sacre seemed particularly apt to Puccini. However, we will never know whether allusions to Stravinsky’s music and modernist styles served, like the borrowed Chinese melodies, as primarily a form of exotic repre­ sentation or as a sign of Puccini’s late bid for a modernist status.

42

JONAS KAUFMANN as CALAF DAN PAUL DUMITRESCU as TIMUR KRISTINA MKHITARYA as LIÙ

ASMIK GRIGORIAN as TURANDOT

IMPRINT GIACOMO PUCCINI

TURANDOT SEASON 2023/24 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 7 DEZEMBER 2023 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editors KONRAD KUHN, SERGIO MORABITO, NIKOLAUS STENITZER Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER All performance fotos by MONIKA RITTERSHAUS Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT REFERENCES All texts were original contributions to the programme of the Vienna State Opera, except Franz Kafka: Before the law, translated to English by Ian Johnston. IMAGE REFERENCE Cover: Peter Mayr.

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS Andrew Smith, except Vera Kuhn: Turandot - Riddles and Transformations, translated by Konrad Kuhn, and W. Anthony Shepard: The Enigmas of Musical Exotism in Turandot, original English contribution.

Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.

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