Puccini: Turandot (Metropolitan Opera "Live" in HD, aired May 7, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday my husband Charles and I went to a Metropolitan Opera “Live in HD” screening of a May 7, 2022 performance of Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, a bloodthirsty fable set in ancient China and dealing with the Princess Turandot, daughter of Emperor Altoum, who somehow has managed to get her father to agree that anyone who wants to marry her must not only be of royal blood, but consent to a contest in which she will ask them three riddles. If he gets all three right, she will marry him; but if he misses just one, she will have him beheaded and his head mounted on a spike in the courtyard of the palace at Peking (now called “Beijing”). When the opera starts we see the Prince of Persia, latest loser in Turandot’s grisly contest, about to be executed while the crowd alternates between fleeting compassion and fiendish glee. It’s occurred to me that Puccini was writing this opera while Benito Mussolini staged his March on Rome and took over all Italy as fascist dictator – he even coined the term “fascism” from the ancient Roman fasces, a bundle of twigs with axes in it to symbolize power – and though Puccini, unlike Beethoven, Wagner or Verdi, was not especially political, it’s hard not to read the crowd scenes in Turandot and associate them with the mass rallies Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin did to mobilize their populations to pursue their bloodthirsty goals.

Puccini died in 1924, two years after Mussolini’s takeover, with Turandot still unfinished – he was waiting for his librettists, Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, to finish the text for the final duet in which Turandot is supposed to end her resistance and yield to the man who finally won her contest, the Tatar Prince Calaf. He was also dying of throat cancer and ie didn’t last long enough to do more than write out a few sketches for the ending, so Puccini’s publisher, Ricordi, assigned another composer, Franco Alfano, to finish it. Alfano was chosen because he’d just had a hit with an opera called The Legend of Sakuntalà, set in ancient India, and Tito Ricordi, who had inherited the publishing company on the death of his father Giulio, thought that would qualify him to complete an opera scout ancient China. The world premiere of Turandot took place at La Scala in Milan in 1926, two years after Puccini’s death, and the conductor, Arturo Toscanini, stopped the performance at the part where Puccini had left off, saying, “This is where the Master laid down his pen, for this is where the Master died.”

In later performances he used the Alfano ending but made significant cuts in it, and the cut version became the standard text. Later I got to hear Turandot with three different endings courtesy of an online opera list – the traditional version with Toscanini’s cuts, the full-length completion Alfano wrote, and a later finish by Italian-American composer Luciano Berio – and came to the conclusion that Alfano’s full text was by far the best and should be used in subsequent productions. Alas, for this go-round the Met stuck to the standard cut version. They also staged Turandot in an elaborate production by the late Franco Zeffirelli for the new Met at Lincoln Center in 1987. 32 years before his death at age 96 in Rome. This incredibly elaborate production was designed to make full use of the enormously expanded scenic machinery of the new Met (for which Zeffirelli had been the first director; he had staged Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra for the new house’s opening in 1966 and the revolving turntable got stuck during rehearsals and trapped Leontyne Price, cast as Cleopatra, for two hours inside a papier-maché replica of a pyramid), and according to the current scenic director of the Met, who was interviewed during one of the intermissions, the sets are so extensive it required 25 freight containers to store them. (The Met keeps all its active productions in the sorts of containers used to ship goods on ships.)

Like the last film we watched of Turandot – a 1969 telecast from Turin, featuring the great Birgit Nilsson as Turandot, in a production by Margherita Wallmann that, like this one, was very ornate and featured lots of extras in traditional Chinese costumes (or at least what the director and designer thought looked like traditional Chinese costumes). The effect was stunning but also a bit wearying – at times the sheer splendor and opulence of the piece took away from the stark drama of the story and the character arcs of the principals. At least the Met threw a great cast at it: the Turandot was Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, whom I’ve seen on Met telecasts before and who has the sort of body a lot of people who don’t like opera ridicule. She doesn’t really look like the sort of women men would literally risk their lives for, but Monastyrska’s voice more than makes up for her typical opera-singer looks. (To this day a lot of people believe Maria Callas cut her career short by dieting so she would look more credible as her characters.) In her big aria, “In questa reggia,” in which Turandot explains that the reason she’s taking her grisly revenge against the male sex in general was that several generations before her ancestor,Princess Lo-U-Ling, was captured by a Tatar prince and subjected to torture (she doesn’t, at least in the Met’s rather decorous English subtitles, come right out and say Lo-U-Ling was raped, but it’s hard to read Turandot’s story any other way), I’d have liked to hear jost a bit more terror in Monastyrska’s voice, but other than that she’s fine.

So is her Calaf, South Korean tenor Yonghoon Lee, who turned out to have a big, strong, old-fashioned Italian tenor voice. Ironically, the one real-life Asian in the cast was playing one of the two non-Asian principals, but I liked Lee’s voice – he reminded me of the good qualities of Marto Del Monaco, a leading Calaf in the 1950’s, but without the overwrought obnoxiousness that made Del Monaco just about my all-time least favorite opera singer. Lee was able to sing the big show-stopping aria in act three, “Nessun dorma” (in the plot Calaf has challenged Turandot after he’s solved her three riddles to guess his name before sunrise; if she does so he’s willing to be executed, so Turandot decrees that no one in Beijing will be allowed to sleep because she wants them all to work on discovering Calaf’s name), without turning it into a flashy display piece the way Lciano Pavarotti did. (I watched Turandot live in San Francisco with my mither and my brother in 1977, with Montserrat Caballé as Turandot, Pavarotti as Calaf and the Black singer Leona Mitchell as the slave girl Liù – more on her later – and it was a stunning performance that was released on a set of bootleg LP’s on the Historical Recording Enterprises label. “Nessun dorma” became one of Pavarotti’s greatest hits, both in context and on its own, and it was probably Pavarotti’s performances that moved Turandot up in popularity so much that it joined Puccini’s “Big Three” – La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly – to form a “Big Four.”)

In the pivotal role of Liù, the slave girl who formed an unrequited attachment to Calaf because “one day, in the palace, you smiled at me,” and became a caregiver to Calaf’s blind father Timur until he and Calaf reunited in Beijing, the Met cast Armenian soprano Ermonela Jaho, who was quite good even though she and Monastyrska had all too similar vocal timbres. Zeffirelli’s costume designer did her no favors by dressing her in a papoose-like garment and matching headband that made her look more Native American than ancient Chinese, but Jaho has a haunting voice with something of Callas in the veiled midrange. She’s also sung the lead role of Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, and I’d like to hear that sometime – just as I’d like to hear Yonghoon Lee sing Wagner: he doesn’t have the voice for Siegmund, Siegfried or Tristan but I think he’d do quite well in the earlier Wagner operas like Tannhäuser or Lohengrin. The part of Timur, Calaf’s father, was taken by veteran bass Ferruccio Furlanetto, who made his Met debut in 1980 and is still going strong. In an intermission interview he attributed his vocal longevity to singing Mozart – and lamented that since Mozart’s roles for bass are all in their 30’s he’s regrettably aged out of them. At the end of the opera,

in her final curtain call, Monastyrska came out wearing a cloak of the Ukrainian flag, blue and yellow, and earlier in her intermission interview she’d expressed relief that her daughter had escaped the Russian attack by fleeing to Romania but her son and several other family members are still in Ukraine and not surprisingly she’s fearful for them. Also not surprisingly, the Met as an institution has taken a strongly pro-Ukrainian stance in the current war with Russia, including sponsoring a March 14 benefit concert featuring the Ukrainian national anthem, a new piece called “Prayer for Ukraine” by Valentin Silvestrov (which sounded a lot like John Lennon’s song “Imagine” to me), Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strongs (written in 1938 on the eve of World War II and first conducted by anti-fascist refugee Arturo Toscanini), the patriotic chorus “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s Nabucco, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs (composed between 1947 and 1949 in the aftermath of World War II) and the “Ode to Joy” finale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I gave more information on the background of Turandot when I watched and posted about the 1969 Turin telecast, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/11/puccini-turandot-rai-torino-february-25.html, and won’t repeat it here; suffice it to say that this production of Turandot was stunning and, among other things, helped me hear the remarkable palette of tone colors Puccini used and the sheer beauty, as well as the lavish colors, of his score.