Puccini: Turandot (RAI Torino, February 25, 1969)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago my husband Charles and I watched an interesting bootleg video of Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, made in 1969 by the Italian state network RAI in Turin, with Georges Pretre conducting and a first-rate cast: Birgit Nilsson in the title role, Gabriella Tucci as Liu, Gianfranco Cecchele as Calaf and Boris Carmeli as his father Timur. The production was staged by Margherita Wallmann, and given the current trend towards austere opera productions it was an odd throwback to see this one, which cluttered the stage with chinoiserie bric-a-brac and clad the performers (even the ones in minor roles) in ultra-elaborate costumes that made one wish the video had been in color instead of black-and-white. (Then again, Wallmann’s designs might have been so colorful they would have clashed internally and perhaps this production comes off better in the cool austerity of black-and-white.) By chance I’d just read an American Record Guide review of a new video of Turandot staged by director Robert Wilson for the Teatro Real in Madrid, which quoted the theatre’s artistic director, Joan Matabosch (that’s a guy, by the way), as writing in the DVD booklet that Wilson based his production on the argument that “Puccini reinvented himself with Turandot, and that standard realistic productions, with ‘gaudy and ostentatious cardboard cut-outs, betray a gross lack of sensitivity to the work’s aesthetic.’ Indeed,” continues ARG reviewer Allan Altman, “this 2018 performance cuts to the core of what distinguishes this work from the rest of Puccini’s oeuvre. The quasi-oratorio style is as right for this work as it would be wrong for La Fanciulla del West.”

It’s interesting to consider the possibility that Puccini was evolving a radical change in his style in the early 1920’s and only his death in 1924 (with Turandot unfinished and no other works in that style even begun) that he didn’t live long enough to reach, just as I’ve long suspected that John Coltrane was evolving a new style in his last year and a half (between the break-up of the “Great Quartet” with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones at the end of 1965 and his last known recording in May 1967, two months before his death), but even without its stylistic oddities Turandot is something of a problem child among Puccini’s work, not only because he didn’t live long enough to finish it but because the musical language is far more advanced than that of his “Big Three” (La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly). Actually none of the operas Puccini wrote between Butterfly and Turandot -- La Fanciulla del West (which I consider a masterpiece, easily at the level of the “Big Three,” the first Puccini work that showed the influence of Debussy and other “modernist” composers and a work that has the huge advantage over Turandot that Puccini did live to finish it), La Rondine and the three one-acters he premiered at the Met in 1918 as Il Trittico ("The Triptych") -- have made it to more of a toehold in the standard repertory because he was striking out in new artistic directions.

In Turandot Puccini was clearly “pushing the envelope” not only musically but dramatically, using a fairy-tale plot (by Carlo Gozzi, the Italian writer whose works also supplied the bases for Wagner’s first opera, Die Feen -- “The Fairies” -- and Prokofieff’s The Love for Three Oranges) with highly stylized characters instead of the relatively realistic stories he’d set before; having the chorus participate in the action as a protagonist (influenced by Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, which had been a success in Russia in 1874 but was virtually unknown elsewhere until Sergei Diaghilev produced Rimsky-Korsakov’s revision in 1896 and took it on tour around the world); using three subsidiary characters -- Ping, Pang and Pong -- along the lines of the “Masks” from the traditional Italian commedia dell’arte; and taking on the challenge of a highly bloodthirsty plot (Charles and I were watching this the night after we’d screened the last two episodes of Game of Thrones and it seemed all of a piece with that show’s aesthetic). Princess Turandot is the daughter of Emperor Altoum of China (usually presented as a wizened old man who seems more like her grandfather than her father) and has remained unmarried because she’s announced that she’ll only accept a suitor of royal blood -- and anyone who marries her first has to be put to a test. She will ask him three riddles, and if he gets them all right he can marry her; but if he gets one wrong, she’ll have him executed.

We don’t actually hear Turandot sing until midway through Act II, when in her big aria “In questa reggia” she explains that her ancestor Princess Lou-Ling was raped by an invading Tatar king and left to die, and this has given her a hatred of all men which she expresses by setting up this preposterous test and killing the men who fail it. (At least one other major repertory opera, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, is also motivated by a sex crime committed against the female protagonist’s ancestor generations earlier in the backstory,) The libretto specifies that she has her victims’ heads mounted on pikes and put on display -- though even highly elaborate productions like this one usually bypass the grisly scene, despite the instruction that at one point in act one the severed heads are supposed to sing a chorus representing the ghosts of the victims trying to persuade the hero not to accept Turandot’s challenge. The hero is Prince Calaf, son of the Tatar king Timur, who’s wandering through China with his dad and their servant Liu, who’s basically Timur’s caregiver (he’s blind and needs her to lead him around) and is identified through most of the opera simply as “The Unknown Prince.” Liu has a crush on Calaf because one day back home in the Tatar palace he saw her and smiled. But Calaf glimpses Turandot briefly as she condemns the Prince of Persia, the latest loser in her battle of the sexes, and he’s instantly smitten. He goes through the challenge, and of course he gets all the answers right and so Turandot is supposed to marry him -- only she pleads with her dad to let her renege on the deal, saying she doesn’t want to be taken like a common slave. Calaf offers her his own deal -- if she can discover his name before dawn, she can kill him instead of having to marry him.

Accordingly Turandot orders the entire population of Beijing to stay awake all night and do whatever they can to find out the name of the “Unknown Prince,” and this leads to the most famous aria in the piece, Calaf’s “Nessun dorma” (“None shall sleep”), in which he predicts that someday he will conquer Turandot and win her love. Then it finally occurs to someone that the way to find out who the Unknown Prince really is would be to capture the two people he came to town with --- the only ones in the dramatis personae who actually know him -- and they capture and torture Liu (in Wallmann’s production the torture device is something that looks like a giant archery bow which they tie to her back), who insists she will not reveal the name. Turandot asks Liu why she won’t, and she says, “Princess, it is love!” “Love?,” Turandot replies with a bemused awe, as if she’s never even heard of the concept before, and Liu sings a final aria, “To ne di gel di cinta,” in which she predicts Turandot will someday know love and her icy heart will melt. She ends the aria by taking a dagger from one of the guards and killing herself, presumably taking the secret of Calaf’s identity with her (though there’s a major plot hole here in that there’s still one living character, Timur, who knows Calaf’s name). Liu’s body is borne off and the chorus expresses shock and horror at this nice young girl having been driven to suicide -- and at that point the part of the opera Puccini had finished ends.

In the final scene, composed by Franco Alfano after Puccini’s death (though decades later another composer, Luciano Berio, also had a hand at it) because Alfano had just had a success with the opera The Legend of Sakuntala and Ricordi, who published both composers, figured a man who’d just written a hit opera about ancient India would be the right man to finish an opera about ancient China, Turandot finally breaks down under Calaf’s hectoring, he tells her his name, and she announces to all and sundry, “I have learned the stranger’s name -- his name is Love!” This is supposed to be a happy ending despite all the blood on Turandot’s hands up to this point, and I’m not sure Puccini could have set this scene and made it work if he’d lived. In fact, I’m not sure anyone could have -- not even the three composers who are commonly thought of as the greatest opera writers of all time, Mozart, Verdi and Wagner. Certainly Alfano couldn’t -- though his work is hampered by the cuts Arturo Toscanini made in it before the premiere at La Scala in 1926. (By chance I once heard three versions of Turandot in succession with three different endings: the cut Alfano version that has become standard, the full Alfano version and the Berio version -- and I came to the conclusion that the full Alfano version was the best and the one that should be used in the opera’s performance.) Indeed, for a long time Liu the slave girl was considered the opera’s real heroine, not only because like so many of Puccini’s previous heroines she was an innocent young girl who suffered because she loved not wisely but too well, but because of an incident in Puccini’s own life that bizarrely anticipated this part of the plot of Turandot. In 1908 a servant girl named Doria who worked at the Puccini household killed herself after a confrontation with Puccini’s wife Elvira, who accused Puccini of either seducing or raping her. (Puccini was a notorious “ladies’ man” who, like Bill Clinton, had a good deal of trouble keeping his dick in his pants.) Doria’s father threatened to prosecute both Puccinis, he for raping his daughter and she for driving her to suicide, but the Italian courts dropped the case after an autopsy revealed that Doria had died a virgin.

This Turandot was well staged (even if things got a bit cluttered at times and the huge gong Calaf hits to announce to Turandot that he’s accepted her challenge looked to both Charles and I like the one that announced J. Arthur Rank’s films), well conducted (by Georges Pretre, a French conductpr whose last name means "priest") and well sung. Birgit Nilsson’s voice and face both projected steely implacability in the lead; Gabriella Tucci sang movingly but was perhaps a bit too close to Nilsson’s timbre (the best Liu’s, Renata Tebaldi and Mirella Freni, had lighter voices than their Turandots and so it was easy to tell them apart). Gianfranco Cecchele (the last name would be pronounced “check Kelly” in Italian,which for some reason includes the letter “h” to take away the “h” sound) was a strongly voiced and butch Calaf; he didn’t have the kind of overwhelming vocal charisma of Luciano Pavarotti (who first assumed the role in 1971, two years after this Turin film, and turned “Nessun dorma” into a classical standard with innumerable performances both in context and as a separate item). But Cecchele was a good deal more convincing visually than Pavarotti in the part of a butch hero. The print we were watching was obviously a crude dubbing from a VHS tape, with occasional picture and sound glitches that afflicted that format notoriously -- and it came with a date stamp on the opening screen indicating that someone had dubbed this from a VHS copy in 2002. The picture was no great shakes (it looked like a kinescope from the 1950’s instead of a professionally filmed and released production from 1969), and it was crude black-and-white in the old 4:3 aspect ratio, but it was still well performed and Nilsson’s rendition of the title role remains virtually unsurpassable. It did not have English subtitles, which meant that through much of the opera I had to play “Turandot whisperer” to Charles to explain to him what was going on, but we were still able to enjoy it.