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Published: Monday, 11 November 2024 at 12:34 PM
Turandot: a guide to Puccini’s bloodthirsty final opera, its famous ‘Nessun Dorma’ aria, and its best recordings
Who was Giacomo Puccini, Turandot‘s composer?
Puccini’s love of fast cars could easily have led to us marking the centenary of his death 21 years ago rather than this month – a spectacular crash in 1903 nearly ensured that the likes of Madam Butterfly (1904), La fanciulla del West (1910) and Il trittico (1918) never saw the light of day. The Lucca-born composer’s racy lifestyle was funded by the huge success of Manon Lescaut (1893), La bohème (1896) and Tosca (1900), a notable contrast to the preceding Edgar (1889), which had failed to capture the public imagination. His later years saw him enjoy international celebrity, though his roots remained firmly in Tuscany.
Turandot: Puccini’s final, unfinished, work
As we remember Puccini at the centenary of his death, it is worth giving particular thought to the opera with which he was preoccupied at the time. Turandot, in many respects the composer’s most ambitious and adventurous work, consumed his efforts for the final four years of his life and was proving most troublesome.
The 1910s had been a decade of experiment for Puccini, as he turned his back on the crowd-pleasing formula he had developed around the turn of the century in La bohème, Tosca and Madam Butterfly, and began to emulate his contemporaries north of the Alps. His works of this decade were the unusual American-themed, Debussy-inspired La fanciulla del West, the light, operetta-like La rondine and Il trittico, a trio of contrasting one-act operas. No two works from this period were the same and by 1920 Puccini had lost none of his appetite for innovation.
Turandot: a new and violent departure for Puccini
At the turn of the decade, Puccini was dithering between many potential operatic subjects, and gave an adaptation of Oliver Twist serious consideration before deciding what he really wanted to write was a fairy-tale opera. Talks with his two favoured librettists of the moment, Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, turned towards the 18th-century dramatist Carlo Gozzi and his play Turandotte. The librettists set about adapting an Italian translation of Schiller’s version of Gozzi’s play.
The subject matter – in short, a beautiful but implacable Chinese princess who puts to death any suitor who cannot answer the riddles she sets them – represented a brand new departure for Puccini, a man known for his prowess in operatic realism, and that came with risks. By the 1920s, commentators were starting to divide his oeuvre into two distinct stylistic ‘manners’. The sentimental Manon Lescaut and La bohème were ‘first manner’ and much loved. More violent ‘second-manner’ works such as Il tabarro were less popular with critics and often described as going against what many believed – hoped – to be the composer’s true nature. Even Tosca, way back in 1900, had raised eyebrows in this regard.
‘Brutal subject matter and a harmonically adventurous score’
Turandot was a quintessential ‘second-manner’ work, with its brutal subject matter and harmonically adventurous score. Throughout the opera’s genesis, Puccini expressed increasing doubts in his own abilities, fretting constantly about not being able to finish the work. The challenge he had set himself was, arguably, unachievable: at the end of the opera, he needed to humanise a bloodthirsty protagonist who was as far removed as was possible to imagine from his usual gentle heroines. This was a composer who was a master of character psychology, and he was unwilling to settle for a finale that did not convince. In the end, it would be someone else’s problem to solve.
Turandot: completing Puccini’s opera after his death
After Puccini’s death from a heart attack following experimental radium treatment for throat cancer, the task of completing the opera fell to Franco Alfano. His version, slightly cut down, would become the standard ending. However, at the opera’s premiere in 1926, Toscanini laid down his baton at the point where Puccini had stopped writing. The opera had, of course, been anticipated with intense expectation, and this gesture added to the pathos of the occasion, effectively turning the premiere into a sort of memorial service. Turandot was highly acclaimed, but you didn’t have to look too hard to detect a certain nervous undertone to the reviews.
Of course, Austro-German composers had been breaking the musical rules for decades, but Italian opera audiences were only accustomed to so much innovation. In Turandot, Puccini had gone even further than before in using modern musical techniques, writing passages of dissonance, even of atonality, and using driving ostinato rhythms that bear the influence of Stravinsky. There are also moments of lyricism, notably given to the slave girl Liù, together with Calaf’s showstopper ‘Nessun dorma’ (‘None shall sleep’), but Puccini withholds lyric melody for long periods of time, deploying it strategically to create deliberate contrast with the more angular music surrounding it.
Turandot: a forward-looking mindset
Many early-20th-century operas made reference to the old Italian theatrical genre of commedia dell’arte: think of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Pulcinella, or (later) Berg’s Lulu. Turandot is no exception: the ‘Masks’ Ping, Pang and Pong are reworkings of Truffaldino, Pantalone and Tartaglia, three disruptive old men who recurred as stock commedia characters. Turandot also bears the influence of contemporary Italian Modernist artworks in its strikingly mechanistic heroine, who seems to resemble the masked or robotic figures who populate the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico and the writings of the Futurists.
All of this showed a highly forward-looking mindset on Puccini’s part that makes us wonder what might have been on the cards had he lived. Turandot was not the opera many of his contemporaries expected from him, and even today a first-time listener would be in for a shock if they expected the whole opera to sound like ‘Nessun dorma’. With its many levels of sophistication and complexity, this work is, like its heroine, truly an enigma indeed.
Turandot: the best recordings
The best recording
Zubin Mehta (conductor)
Joan Sutherland (Turandot), Luciano Pavarotti (Calaf), Montserrat Caballé (Liù) et al; London Philharmonic Orchestra
Decca 478 7815
For the perfect Turandot, you would want a gorgeously lyrical Calaf, a delicate, heartrending Liù, a Turandot who can navigate the character’s psychological complexities, and a conductor capable of bringing out the subtleties of this most symphonic of opera scores. When the ideal interpreters are scattered across a number of recordings, compromise is inevitable.
Conductor Zubin Mehta’s long-revered interpretation from 1972 now faces fierce competition from the slick 2023 Pappano set (see right) but ultimately ticks more boxes in terms of overall satisfaction. Joan Sutherland is often remarked upon as being an odd choice for Turandot. However, she is surprisingly impressive: less strident than some interpreters but with no sacrifice of power, and immense warmth of tone in the passages where the character shows vulnerability. Perhaps behind the violent man-hater there is a scared young girl.
‘Voice gleaming, Pavarotti’s “Nessun dorma” really does feel like coming home’
A Turandot needs to be judged on more than just its eponymous character, not least because she makes her grand entrance so late. Although there are some formidable competitors, Montserrat Caballé is a thoughtful, round-toned Liù, her ‘Signore ascolta’ supported by a gorgeous pillow of shimmering strings. And then we have the unmistakeable Luciano Pavarotti, his voice gleaming out ever-radiantly. He has an unfair advantage, of course, but his ‘Nessun dorma’ really does feels like coming home, shifting in mood second-by-second from introspection to optimism, and opening up to the most expansive, golden bloom. Yes, he milks the role’s show-off passages to the max, but his interpretation is also detailed in its expressivity, exhibiting, for example, a delicious impatience in his first encounter with the ‘Masks’.
Mehta’s reading of the score, meanwhile, is confident and animated, with an easy give-and-take in tempos, blazing brass and dramatic sword-like swipes from the strings. He highlights interesting details, bringing a queasy languor to the soft, mystical choral passages and employing portamento judiciously in ‘Ho una casa nell’Honan’ to create a gauzy effect that casts Puccini as a Hollywood film composer well before such a thing even existed. The chorus is well-disciplined
and crisp; and Ping, Pang and Pong capture the ideal blend of grotesquerie, humour and vocal beguilement.
Three other great recordings
Antonio Pappano (conductor)
Warner Classics 5419740659
This revelatory 2023 interpretation combines high drama, intelligence and discipline, bringing out the smallest nuances and revelling in the contrasts between sensuality and brutality. Sondra Radvanovsky is imperious and psychologically insightful as Turandot, Ermonela Jaho heart-stoppingly vulnerable as Liù. Jonas Kaufmann’s baritonal Calaf sacrifices beauty for power, with some unevenness in tone when shifting between different dynamics and parts of the range. An odd glitch at the end of ‘Nessun dorma’ suggests a separate take spliced in, a lone imperfection in a recording of otherwise outstanding sound quality.
Herbert von Karajan (conductor)
Deutsche Grammophon 423 8552
Some have said Katia Ricciarelli doesn’t have the vocal capacity for the title role, but she brings considerable allure to her softer moments. And this 1981 recording is still worth hearing for Plácido Domingo’s uber-heroic Calaf and Barbara Hendricks’s sweet Liù. Karajan’s conducting seems ponderous at the outset, but as things progress, he brings an atmospheric sense of mystery and an almost Wagnerian expansive lyricism.
Erich Leinsdorf (conductor)
Alto ALC2021
Birgit Nilsson is formidable as Turandot, the voice steely, searing and authoritative, turning to opulence as she reveals her vulnerabilities. Renata Tebaldi is luxurious casting as Liù, gentle and honeyed but with tremendous control of vocal line – there is immense tenderness in her exchanges with Jussi Björling, ardently expressive as Calaf though sometimes outsung by Nilsson. Alas, his ‘Nessun dorma’ is bafflingly sluggish, in a 1960 recording where the conducting is precise and assured but reluctant to entirely let go.
And one to avoid…
Tullio Serafin (conductor)
Warner Classics 5419760483
This 1957 mono set does not offer the spaciousness or clarity of sound quality available elsewhere. That said, there is boundless dynamism and excitement in conductor Tullio Serafin’s interpretation, together with occasional scrappiness borne of impetuosity. As Liù, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sings as if in a dreamworld, though is hardly Italianate; Eugenio Fernandi’s Calaf is enthusiastic if slightly affected. And, as Turandot, there is something mesmerising about Maria Callas’s sheer abandon as she hurls herself at the high notes.