The première of Turandot, at La Scala on 25 April 1926, was an event of great national significance. Puccini had died unexpectedly seventeen months earlier and the occasion was an opportunity not only to mourn him but to mark what many realised would be the end of an entire tradition. A younger composer, Franco Alfano, had used Puccini’s sketches to complete the final act, but the first-night audience did not get to hear his ending. The conductor Arturo Toscanini (who had picked fault with Alfano’s completion, and forced him to make cuts) made the spine-tingling gesture of laying down his baton at the precise moment in the score where Puccini had set down his pen. Cries of ‘Viva Puccini!’ rang throughout the theatre.
Turandot saw Puccini returning for a second time to an East Asian theme (following Madama Butterfly, which had been famously booed at La Scala in 1904) but was a first foray into operatic fantasy. The work was set in a mystical ancient fairy-tale world and yet at the same time was profoundly modern. In characterising his bloodthirsty, inscrutable anti-heroine – determined to exterminate every suitor who seeks her hand – Puccini took inspiration from the masked or robot-like female protagonists of contemporary modernist plays and paintings, who symbolised the decline of the human in the machine age. Of course, this ultimately presented him with a conundrum: the challenge of how to negotiate Turandot’s ‘transformation through love’ convincingly at the opera’s end gave him a severe case of writer’s block.
Musically too, Turandot was a progressive work, building on the experimental style Puccini had begun to develop during the 1910s in works such as La fanciulla del West and Il tabarro. Of course, he was not tempted to abandon writing arias that could be detached and performed separately in concerts or recordings, and this opera features what is quite possibly the most famous and popular of them all. But the listener who comes to Turandot expecting the entire opera to sound like ‘Nessun dorma’ will be surprised, for Puccini’s score often teeters towards bitonality, if not dissonance, as he depicts the barbaric society over which Turandot’s father, the Emperor Altoum, presides. Puccini also makes particularly striking use of the chorus, who disconcert us by flicking at the turn of a switch between music that is languorous and seductive and passages that are harsh, strident and malevolent.
We are a long way here from the realism of such works as La bohème or Madama Butterfly, and Turandot revels unashamedly in the sort of sadism that Puccini had first explored in Tosca. It proved all rather disconcerting for the first-night critics, who seem to have expected Puccini to have left a ‘swansong’ that would recall his earlier, more sentimental works. (There was no real logic to their thinking: Puccini died unexpectedly of a heart attack following experimental treatment for cancer, and was not aware that he was writing his final work.) But even if Turandot is an opera that sometimes discomforts, seeming as it does to pre-empt the violence, authoritarianism and suppression of dissent that would characterise Italian Fascism over the next two decades, there is also a great deal to admire in its score.
The composer mixes a conventional Italian style of operatic writing with excerpts of authentic Chinese folk music he had heard on a music box, and his mastery of orchestration is astonishing, using an expanded percussion section, and an array of unusual instruments to create colouristic effects. Driving ostinato rhythms, no doubt learnt from Stravinsky, create an effect of dynamism that is quite thrilling. And lyricism, which Puccini withholds for long stretches, is all the more glorious when it is finally let loose. Particularly gorgeous are the two arias given to the young servant girl Liù: ‘Signore ascolta’ (Act 1), in which she tries to persuade her master Calaf not to attempt Turandot’s devilish riddles, and ‘Tu che di gel sei cinta’ (Act 3), sung just before Liù’s suicide, one of the last passages before Puccini stopped writing. If the critics were ambivalent about the character of Turandot, their response to the self-sacrificing Liù was ecstatic. Puccini would be associated with gentle, sympathetic heroines to the end.