One last word on Turandot

When Giacomo Puccini died in 1924 more than a year before the premiere of his unfinished work, Turandot (commented on here) it marked the end of an extraordinary burst of creativity in Italian opera that began with Rossini more than a century before, and included all of the great composers of Italian opera, culminating in the unique genius of Verdi and finding its final flowering in Puccini’s works. Puccini had worked on the great work that was to be his last for more than three years before he died—a greater period, on average than elapsed between his other works and six years after his immediately previous opera, Il Tritico (actually three one-act operas). Why?

That he was simply played out is not a credible explanation: Turandot is a work of extraordinary creativity and originality, a remarkable departure in many ways from his prior work. It may be that the throat cancer that eventually claimed him was already sapping his strength and initiative. But I think he was simply stuck.

Turandot is often characterized as a fairy tale but that’s not accurate. There’s no hint of supernatural or preternatural involvement in the story as there is in a real fairy tale. Turandot is best thought of as a fable placed in a mythological Chinese setting. I believe it’s actually a psychological fable, the characters portraying various sorts of psychological dysfunction: sadism, masochism, narcissism, paranoia, etc.

Puccini’s earlier works had been firmly rooted in the liberal Romantic tradition and each, in its own way, portrayed a triumph of the human spirit. That, too, is missing from Turandot.

The opera seria of the 18^th century had been able to rely on gods and spirits for the resolution of their plots. The operas of the great period of Italian opera are, at base, founded in humanism and whether triumphant or tragic find their resolution in the human spirit.

I believe that Puccini was unable to find a resolution to Turandot that he found satisfying. He couldn’t bring himself to let gods or spirits resolve his plot for him. As an intellectual of the early 20^th century, he had lost the humanistic spirit that inspired the great earlier Italian works and his own earlier works. He relied instead on the new sciences of psychology and psycho-analysis and those only lead to confusion.