Giacomo Puccini’s posthumous Turandot (unfinished at the composer’s death in November 1924, with the final scene completed by Franco Alfano) was an event of national moment at its La Scala world premiere in April 1926. Prior to reaching the Met just seven months later, in November of that same year, it had been the subject of lively interest in the New York press. The then general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, filled the stage with stars, comprimarios, choristers, dancers, and supers reported to number between six hundred and seven hundred. Joseph Urban’s spectacular orientalist design, a pinnacle of decor, was just one of his fifty or so Met commissions, an oeuvre still unequaled.
Fifteen opening night
curtain calls spoke eloquently of audience approbation. But most critics
disagreed, some vehemently. The New York
Times reviewer, Olin Downes, for one, embarked on the mission of striking the
opera from the boards. He fulminated at every revival: “a whole resplendent
operatic edifice, destined sooner or later to collapse like a house of cards,
has been made of virtually nothing;” “Puccini had stopped creating when he
wrote it, but had mastered the art of saying nothing exceedingly well; and in a
final insult,” “there is only one work by a great composer of modern times that
we think as bad, and that is the Egyptian Helen by Richard Strauss.” Downes
and his colleagues notwithstanding, Turandot led the box office in
1926–27 and rang up receipts far above average the following season.
Following a run of
twenty-seven performances between 1926 and 1930, Turandot was
dropped, no doubt the victim of high production costs, hefty royalties, and the
departure of the star soprano, Maria Jeritza, who had made the Chinese princess
one of her signature roles. Here she is as Turandot, with Gatti-Casazza.
On the heels of the La
Scala and Met premieres, Turandot made
the rounds of the world’s great opera houses, and the tenor’s third act aria, “Nessun
dorma (No one shall sleep)” quickly became an audience favorite. Calaf, the “Unknown
Prince,” has bested Turandot in their riddle contest, but will renounce his
prize, the princess herself, if she succeeds in discovering his name. At the
climax of the aria, certain that he will prevail in their battle of wills, he exclaims
“Vincerò.” Among the first to record “Nessun dorma” was Spanish tenor Antonio
Cortis, moving in the dreamy opening section and thrilling in the concluding heroic
outburst.
Turandot finally
returned to the Met stage in 1961. The clarion voices of Birgit Nilsson and
Franco Corelli would secure the opera’s place in the company’s canon for good. Here
Corelli sings the Act I aria, “Non piangere Liù (Do not weep, Liù)” in a 1958
Italian television production. Calaf comforts the slave girl, Liù, who has
accompanied his father into exile. Known for his stentorian top notes, Corelli exhibits
the plangent tone and firm legato demanded by the piece.
The direction of the
1961 Turandot fell to Nathaniel
Merrill. But the plaudits went to the delicate chinoiserie of Cecil Beaton’s
long-ago Peking, with décor less grandiose than Puccini’s immense canvas had
known in New York and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s.
Met audiences will see
again this season (the “Live in HD” simulcast is scheduled for January 30, 2016)
the Franco Zeffirelli mise-en-scène which is by now three decades old. No
surprise here. A year after assuming the mantle of general manager, Peter
Gelb told an interviewer: “I promised the Met subscribers when I first came on
board—well, I didn’t promise anything, but I did say that there were two iconic
Zeffirelli productions, Bohème and Turandot, and that the other
Zeffirelli productions are going to be replaced.” Gelb has held fast to his
word. The lavish La Bohème and the
massive Turandot live on.
It was back in 1987,
and thanks to the philanthropy of Sybil Harrington, and to the particular fancy
she took to Zeffirelli’s menageries, that general manager Joseph Volpe’s Met could
take on the expense of the gigantic production. Harrington’s clout provided
another opening for lamentations on the state of opera in New York. One critic
groused that Zeffirelli’s La Bohème, Tosca, and Turandot, all
underwritten by Harrington, had “turned the Metropolitan from house of art into
tourist attraction, a nice conclusion, perhaps, to a bus tour including lunch
at Mama Leone’s.” He may have been thinking of that moment during the Act 2
riddle scene when audiences gasped in amazement, and most reviewers in
dismay, as the princess’s imperial backpack gushed multicolored streamers.
Even without the soon-abolished streamers, Zeffirelli’s overstuffed palace
stands in vivid contrast to Beaton’s elegant staircase, seen above.
Turandot enters to sing
one of the most taxing arias in the soprano repertoire. “In questa reggia (In
this palace)” is a narrative about her ancestor, Princess Luo-ling, who was captured
and murdered by the enemy. Turandot swears vengeance on any man who sues for
her hand. She will put to him three riddles; if he fails to solve them he
forfeits his life. Joan Sutherland, who performed heavier roles before becoming
a bel canto coloratura soprano, is Turandot in this studio recording. She never
sang the part onstage. Sutherland recounts the story compellingly and surmounts
the exacting, high-lying phrases with ease and power.
Pucccini’s music ends
just after the death of Liù, the slave girl who takes her own life rather than
reveal the name of the Unknown Prince. In a lyric outpouring, she predicts that
the ice princess, too, will fall in love with Calaf. Mafalda Favero, who
appeared only twice at the Met in the late 1930s, expresses the grief and resolve
which Puccini invested in the last aria he was able to pen.