**Turandot* Naxos Historical 8.110193–94
- Composer(s):
Puccini, Giacomo
- Lyricist(s):
Adami, Giuseppe; Simoni, Renato
- Conductor(s):
Ghione, Franco
- Orchestra(s):
RAI Symphony Orchestra, Turin
- Choir(s):
RAI Chorus, Turin
- Artist(s):
Cigna, Gina; Merli, Francesco; Olivero, Magda
Puccini was the last in a long line of Italian opera composers who dominated the lyric stage for more than a century, and Turandot was his final opera. It was also the last Italian opera to go straight into the repertoire after its première and it remains popular, three-quarters of a century after it was first heard. The adoption of the aria ‘Nessun dorma!’ as a sort of football anthem has ensured that the work will retain its magic well into the 21st century.
As Prokofiev had done with The Love for Three Oranges, Puccini chose a Carlo Gozzi fairy tale as the basis for his opera. Busoni and Puccini’s own teacher Bazzini had already made attempts at Turandot but their versions had not caught on. Puccini was well versed in orientalism from his work on Madama Butterfly and he was anxious to have a major success after the rather equivocal responses that his three one-acters, Il Trittico, and his operetta La Rondine had met with.
Puccini planned his opera, which he must have sensed would be his farewell to the stage, on the grandest scale. For the first time, he wrote for a genuine dramatic soprano and he surrounded this fabulous personage with what was for him an unusually wide variety of other characters. His earlier operas were perhaps too dependent on the leading soprano and tenor, but in Turandot he not only expanded his range of characterizations but also gave a much larger rôle to the chorus. Puccini also made a special effort to bring his musical style more up to date, without sacrificing the lyricism which was his main asset. As usual with him, the work went fairly slowly. Working with two librettists, the critic Giuseppe Adami and the playwright Renato Simoni, who had suggested the subject in March 1920 after he had rejected their offer of a Dickens adaptation, Puccini gave them no end of problems before the opera took shape. By March 1924 everything was composed and scored except the final fifteen minutes or so, in which the icy Princess Turandot would finally yield to the foreign Prince Calaf in a climactic love duet. By then Puccini was mortally ill with throat cancer and he did not live to resolve this admittedly major problem.
When the composer died in November 1924, the conductor Arturo Toscanini took charge of seeing to the completion of the opera. Franco Alfano, an excellent composer — if no Puccini — was given Puccini’s sketches and asked to write the final duet. At the first performance in the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, on 25th April 1926, however, Toscanini stopped the performance after the death of the slave girl Liù, saying: ‘At this point the master laid down his pen.’ The complete score was heard at the second performance and was duly published, but only comparatively recently has it been discovered that Alfano’s ending was considerably altered, presumably by Toscanini.