Turandot

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Image courtesy of Liceu

Despite the cruelty of its plot, Turandot has earned a preeminent place in the canon of the universal repertoire and also in the hearts of audiences around the world. With a brilliant and unprecedented score, Puccini portrays the soulless, cold and implacable princess pitted against the man determined to win her at all costs.  

The Liceu revives the production that re-opened the theater after the catastrophic fire of 1994. Created by Núria Espert, the opera is set in the imperial city of Beijing, where Princess Turandot protects her virginity under an oath: she can only marry the man of royal blood who solves three riddles that she herself will dictate. Whoever fails will die. The rules and tyranny of a woman who is incapable of love, who refuses to become human, instead preferring to be an institution and who imposes a surveillance state in which men are sacrificed.

A monumental, evocative and orientalist scenography with an extremely harsh and oppressive setting, full of beauty and formal balance, heighten the epic poetry of the story. 

Puccini was unable to finish the third act of the score. He died in 1924 in Brussels before he could finish the final duet and it was his assistant, Franco Alfano, who completed the score. The first performance of the piece at Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1926 was a kind of requiem for Puccini. Arturo Toscanini conducted the work until the last notes Puccini wrote and then lowered the baton saying: “This is the end of the master’s work. After that, he died.”  

Alfano’s ending has become the norm in opera houses all over the world, but it is precisely in this dramaturgical vagueness where Espert puts his seal: an unraveling based on the sublimity and rituals of the Chinese court where Turandot, after recognizing that love dominates and weakens her, prefers to kill herself rather than flee abroad. Too many irreparable cracks inside her heart next to a prince with a hero’s thirst who dreams exclaiming “Vincerò” (I will be victorious).

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