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Published: Monday, 11 November 2024 at 12:34 PM


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.