Dramma lirico in 3 acts
Libretto by Giuseppe Adami & Renato Simoni after Carlo Gozzi
First performed April 25 1926, Teatro alla Scala, Milan
World premiere of Lucia Ronchetti's prologue: Io tacerò, commissioned by Oper Frankfurt
Sung in Italian with German & English surtitles
Introductory talks (in German) in the Holzfoyer 30 mins before curtain up, available on video here shortly after opening night and everywhere where podcasts are to be found.
Turandot Elza van den Heever / Olesya Golovneva
Calaf Alfred Kim
Liù Guanqun Yu
Ping Liviu Holender
Pang Magnus Dietrich
Pong Michael Porter
Timur Inho Jeong / Thomas Faulkner
Altoum Michael McCown
A Mandarin Erik van Heyningen
Princess Turandot’s beautiful but cruel, breaking with all conventions and providing her subjects with bloody spectacles.
Turandot refuses to marry by setting an impossible condition: Whoever wants her for his wife must solve three riddles. Anyone who can’t, is publicly executed. Prince Calaf, a refugee stranded in Peking, falls hopelessly under Turandot’s spell. The Princess is shaken to the core when he manages to answer all three. Turandot unleashes a clear struggle for power, which ultimately claims innocent victims.
The Persian myth about Turandot was a welcome vehicle for Puccini to start making his music more in keeping with modern day developments. His score captivates with lyric belcanto, the buffonesque, biting dissonances and floating sounds. The brutality of political mass movements, growing louder when the work was written in the 1920s, are mirrored in the chorus scenes. Puccini and his librettist took up the challenge to make Turandot’s transformation from a hating woman into a loving one plausible. A plan which the protagonist’s hardheartedness and Puccini’s unexpected death in 1924 put paid to: only a sketch remained of the final love duet between Turandot and Calaf, the opera incomplete. Lucia Ronchetti was commissioned to compose a new prologue for this new production, a premonition of a catastrophe, which starts its inevitable course in the opening bars of Puccini’s score.
