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📌 Main takeaway:
ANedri Zerban’s show, with dazzling designs by Sally Jacobs, debuted in 1984 and is the Royal Opera’s longest-running production. This is its 19th revival: the show on 18 December will be its 295th showing at Covent Garden. Turandot addresses grand emotions and even grander themes: love, fear, devotion, strength, loyalty, life, and death in a fictionalized version of imperial China. And of course, there is certainly the most famous moment in the opera, the wonderful aria Nessun Dorma.
“If the opera has depths, Zerban is content to ignore it, but for once it doesn’t seem to matter. The three-story Chinese pagoda set, an army of extras and a troupe of masked dancers make his colorful, cartoonish creation the closest thing the company has to a West End extravaganza,” wrote The Guardian’s Erica Gill in a review of the opera’s 2005 revival.
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Puccini’s text states that the emperor appears among “clouds of incense… among the clouds like a god.” In this production he actually appears as if from heaven, his magnificent throne slowly lowered to earth.
“Puccini wanted the opera to be lyrical, and he was skeptical of too much modernism, but he was also forward-looking – with many moments of dissonance and strange tonal effects,” says Oliver Merz, head of opera at the Royal Opera, who believes this epic production is the perfect introduction to the art form. “It is a colorful and sumptuous spectacle that has stood the test of time and four decades later, remains a magnificent showcase for great singers.”
In this current revival, the role of Turandot is shared between Anna Netrebko, Maeda Hundeling and Anna Peruzzi. Calaf, the Unknown Prince is sung by Yusuf Eyvazov, Arsene Sogomonyan and Roberto Alagna, with Leo Masaban sharing Secila Rangwancha and Juliana Grigoryan. Raul Jimenez is the Emperor.
Turandot was Puccini’s twelfth and final opera. “Its bones are larger than in any of his other works: the chorus plays a larger role, the orchestra is larger, and Puccini constantly strives for an epic quality. In most of his other operas, intimacy and small ensembles are most important. But here the set pieces with the chorus are the main feature and it is these that make this opera so popular – the sheer spectacle of so many people on stage,” Antonio Pappano wrote in a Guardian article published in 2023.
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Members of the Youth Opera Company, the Royal Opera’s in-house chorus of nine to 13-year-olds. YOC is a free initiative that gives children from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to perform in Royal Opera productions and offers training in performing arts, theater and music.
“Combining the spectacle and claustrophobia of a mythical Beijing where a constant stream of executions has reduced the population into a blood-crazed mob,” wrote George Hall, reviewing the 2009 revival. “Whether the result is a disturbing reconsideration of the battle of the sexes, or Puccini’s obsession with the fascism that was sweeping Italy while he composed the piece, his latest opera packs a punch.
This terrifying larger-than-life executioner sends into the next life those who fail to guess the three riddles that, if answered correctly, will win the hand of Princess Turandot.
Puccini died in 1924, leaving Turandot unfinished. He wrote much of Act III, up until Leo’s death, but there are only sketches of his ideas on how to finish the work. His student, Franco Alfano, wrote a sequel that gave the tale a quick and happy – if psychologically unconvincing – ending that reenacted the famous Nessun Dorma song. This is the ending (albeit an abbreviated version) that has been used in almost every production since the work’s premiere at La Scala, Milan, in 1926.
André Gerban’s presentation is less concerned with the complex psychology of the work – as some have noted, the heroine Calaf has a suicidal obsession with Turandot, while she is frigid, wary and violent – and more interested in spectacle.
What about Nessun Dorma itself? It is a very difficult tune with its high notes of As and Bs – right at the top of any tenor range. A 1972 recording of Luciano Pavarotti singing was chosen as the soundtrack for the 1990 World Cup hosted by Italy and became a popular culture hit of legendary proportions. Today, The Three Tenors remains the best-selling classical album of all time, with nearly 12 million copies sold.
The tune is sung by the unnamed prince (Clave), who wins the hand of an unwilling Turandot by solving three mysteries. But it poses a mystery of its own: if she can learn his name before dawn he will give up his life and thus free her from the hateful promise of marriage. The princess turns the city upside down and tortures those she thinks can tell her the prince’s name, but she fails. “No one sleeps”Neeson Dorma() Prince Calaf sings, “I Will Conquer” (Vincereò-Oh), and he does.
The late Sir Denis Foreman’s excellent ‘Good Opera Guide’ summarizes Puccini’s opera as ‘the opera in which the prince avoids beheading by winning a game of words, and no one sleeps’ and its setting as ‘Beijing, medieval China is also a fairyland’.
The fictionalized version of Beijing may be a fictional land, but that didn’t stop the People’s Republic of China from banning it until 1998 because it felt the opera portrayed China inappropriately.
Puccini never traveled to China (or Japan – where Madama Butterfly is set) but he fell under the Oriental spell that swept the West in the late 19th century, as Jonathan Burton points out in an article about the programme. “After the opening of the Far East to commercial, diplomatic and cultural contacts in the mid-nineteenth century, Europe and America became obsessed with everything that emanated from the ‘Mysterious East.’ Debussy and Ravel heard gamelan java at the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and incorporated the sounds into their music, Van Gogh and Degas discovered woodcuts by Hokusai and Hiroshige, and Gilbert and Sullivan wrote The Mikado to coincide with a Japanese exhibition in London in 1885, and in drawing rooms Decorated with Japanese prints, Chinese screens and bamboo wallpaper, Western hostesses in silk kimonos presided over jasmine tea and games of mahjong.
“Puccini’s unfinished opera is itself a mystery that resists deciphering,” says Jack Furness, who has directed the past four revivals of Zerban productions. “In this production…every musical gesture of the score is reflected on stage with overt theatricality, imagination and flair, inspired by a range of world theater traditions. In the latest revival, we have emphasized the deep connections of both the story and the production to Italian theatre. Commedia dell’arte. And Kate Flatt’s choreography, which ritualizes the drama and controls the flow of time, never fails to take the breath away.
Turandot is at the Royal Opera House until February 4.
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