Here is the audio testimony of how Puccini, fed up with humanity’s sentimentality, decided to end his career with an opera where romance manifests itself in the form of threats, poorly managed traumas, and a soprano who is basically an iceberg with vibrato.
The plot revolves around Turandot, a homicidal princess from a China imagined by Europeans with an excess of incense, who beheads suitors as if they were biblical lambs. Calaf, a prince with no past and no respect for boundaries, sees her and thinks, “That’s what my superiority complex needs.” He solves three riddles (as if taken from fortune cookies) and demands love. Not because she deserves it, but because he can hold a note for eight seconds.
Amidst all this delirium and tenor ego, Liù appears, a slave girl in love and the only character with recognizable emotions and a sense of sacrifice. Her aria, “Non piangere Liù,” is the human pause in the midst of imperial delirium. And of course, she dies. Because in opera, emotional dignity always comes at a high price.
Puccini was obsessed with the character of Liù. Some say she was based on the teenage maid who committed suicide after the scandal with his wife. And yes, that was inspiration in 1920. A personal tragedy turned into operatic lyricism and profitable trauma.
Turandot is a parade of grandiloquence: monumental choruses, catchy melodies, and Nessun dorma, the aria that has been hijacked by wedding tenors for the last century. It’s spectacular, yes, like watching fireworks in slow motion while someone yells at you in Italian.
Puccini died before he could finish it, because he couldn’t figure out how to emotionally justify the ending. Franco Alfano tried to wrap up the mess with a happy ending coda, as if a kiss were enough to disinfect an imperial neurosis. Toscanini, at the premiere, stopped the orchestra just before the tacked-on ending. “Here the maestro ended,” he announced. A euphemism, of course. “What follows is pretentious fan fiction,” he really meant to say.
So beautiful, Turandot is excessively incoherent and cynical; like love, only with more severed heads.
