TURANDOT - Seattle Opera

2 2012/13 SeaSon at Seattle opera
spotlight on
TURANDOT
Music by Giacomo Puccini
Libretto by GiusePPe adami and Renato simoni
First performed milan, 1926
In Italian with English Captions
At Seattle Opera auGust 2012
Production Sponsors the KReielsheimeR endowment Fund
and eulalie schneideR

Long Story Short
ice princess learns how to love.
Who’S Who?
TurandoT, the beautiful princess of china,
decapitates any man who’s interested in her.
The unknown Prince loves her so intensely
he’s happy to risk his head. his name is “calaf”
(but you aren’t supposed to know that yet).
Timur, his father, is the old, blind, dethroned
king of tartary.
Liù, a meek slave girl, fell in love with the
unknown Prince’s smile long ago. she is old
timur’s faithful companion in exile.
aLToum, turandot’s father, is the feeble, ancient
emperor of china.
Ping, Pang, and Pong are mandarins in turan-
dot’s imperial bureacracy. their job is to attempt
to slow down rash, lovesick young princes, but
they aren’t very good at it.
Where and When?
the Forbidden city, in the days of legend.
What’S going on?
the Prince of Persia, like so many before him,
has failed to answer turandot’s three riddles
and will be beheaded at the rising of the moon.
as the bloodthirsty crowd gleefully anticipates
the execution, the unknown Prince bumps into
his long-lost father, and the two share a tearful
reunion. old timur introduces his son to liù, the
gentle slave girl who has supported the old man
ever since his kingdom was sacked. the Prince
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Turandot, Pittsburgh Opera, 2011 (David Bachman photo)

asks her what inspired such devotion, and she
responds, “once, you smiled at me.”
at the rising of the moon, Princess turandot
gives the signal for the execution of the Prince
of Persia. totally mesmerized by a single glimpse
of her, the unknown Prince rushes to strike the
sacred gong and announce himself as turandot’s
next suitor. But turandot’s ministers, Ping, Pang,
and Pong, burst out of the palace and try to
block his path, to scare him off, to reason with
him—but to no avail. liù and timur also plead
with the Prince not to risk his life, but he breaks
free from all of them, strikes the fatal gong three
times, and declares himself ready for the test.
Before the trial, turandot explains that she had
a beautiful, chaste, and wise ancestor, Princess
lou-ling, whose kingdom was overrun. lou-ling
was raped and murdered, and turandot will
forever avenge her death upon all men. she asks
the Prince her three riddles—and he answers
them all.
the people salute turandot’s conqueror, but
turandot implores her father not to give her
away like a slave. the Prince, who wants only
her love, proposes a riddle of his own: if she can
tell him his name before dawn, he will forfeit his
life. turandot’s stormtroopers immediately start
ransacking the city, seeking the Prince’s name,
slaughtering anyone who cannot help them. they
are about to torture timur when liù cries out
that she alone knows the
name. she remains silent
as they torture her, and
turandot asks her the
source of her strength.
“Princess, it is love,” says
liù. she describes her
love for the Prince and
prophesies that before
dawn, turandot will love
him too. then she grabs
a dagger from a nearby
guard and kills herself.
turandot and the unknown
Prince are arguing
about what has happened
when suddenly
they kiss. he is amazed
to see her first tears.
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she asks him to leave and take the secret of his
name with him, but at dawn he tells her who he
is. they appear before the emperor again, and
turandot tells her father she has discovered the
stranger’s name: “it is love.”
gozzi’S TurandoTTe
Turandot is based on a play by one of Venice’s
most illustrious sons, carlo Gozzi, whose stylistically
unique plays commemorate the fall of a
once-mighty empire: the most serene Republic
of Venice.
Born in 1720, Gozzi came from an old Venetian
family that had fallen on hard times. he was
staunchly conservative, an enemy of all things
modern, including the enlightenment, and,
in the theater, the realistic kind of situation
comedy developed by another great eighteenthcentury
Venetian playwright, carlo Goldoni.
determined to bring back the good old days of
italian theater, Gozzi developed a kind of play
he called the fiabe, or fable. most of these plays
take place in an oriental fantasy world along
the lines of the arabian nights; the plots work
like fairy tales, and there’s always a role for the
traditional clowns of commedia dell’arte. Gozzi’s
works are odd mixtures of witchcraft and sorcery
in far-off lands with the kind of improvised
carnival buffoonery that had been the stuff of
italian theater for centuries. Turandotte, Gozzi’s
best-known play, finds the man-hating Princess
of ancient china employing four Venetian
nincompoops as her ministers-of-state. (Gozzi’s
Pantalone, tartaglia, Brighella, and truffaldino
become Puccini’s Ping, Pang, and Pong.) Turandotte
was so popular that there already existed
eight other operas based on the play before
Puccini sat down to write his version.
the MuSic of TurandoT
when Giacomo Puccini came onto the scene in
the 1890s, italian opera had reached a crossroads.
For hundreds of years, operas had been
constructed by stringing together lots of independent
musical pieces and connecting the
musical highlights with quasi-musical dialogue
that advanced the plot. You were always getting
either story or music, never both at the same time.
But over the second half of the nineteenth century,
two opera composers—the German Richard
wagner and the italian Giuseppe Verdi—changed
all that, inventing a new kind of opera where
the music and the drama are one and unfold
simultaneously. in the italian tradition, Puccini
picked up where Verdi left off. and he learned a
great deal from wagner as well. Turandot, Puccini’s
final opera, is musically a summation of his
entire career. all the reasons people love Puccini’s
operas are packed into this one score.
A performance of Verdi’s aida changed Puccini’s life when he was a teenager and made him want to be an
opera composer. turandot, his final masterpiece, shares aida’s barbaric splendor and compelling love triangle.
Seattle Opera, Aida, 2008 (Rozarii Lynch photo)

Ping, Pang, and Pong sing some of the most beautiful music Puccini ever wrote.
exoTic grandeur. when he was a teenager,
Puccini famously walked almost 40 miles to
attend a performance of Verdi’s Aida, the
first italian opera to attempt an authentic
musical representation of an exotic location.
Turandot goes even further than Aida in terms
of presenting a grandiose spectacle, the italian
answer to what was known as “French Grand
opera.” not only is it set in a fabulous, faraway
world of barbaric antique splendor, bold warriors,
sly priests, cruel princesses, and suffering slaves,
Turandot features authentic foreign music.
unlike Verdi, who made up an “ancient egyptian”
scale out of thin air, Puccini actually researched
chinese music—and more diligently than he had
Japanese music when he composed Madama
Butterfly 20 years previously. he added bells,
gong, tam-tam, glockenspiel, xylophone (plus
bass xylophone, newly invented for this opera)
to his standard western percussion section,
and quotes eight traditional chinese tunes. For
example, one famous folk song, “mo li hua”
(Jasmine Flower), becomes a recurring motif
attached to the character of turandot.
TheaTricaLiTy and breviTy. elaborate
grand operas from the nineteenth century are
rarely given nowadays, because modern theaters
have a hard time justifying the enormous
resources they demand. But grand operas like
Turandot continue to hold the stage, partly
because they’re quite a bit shorter (Turandot is
about half as long as your average nineteenthcentury
French grand opera), and partly because
they’re conceived for modern theatrical tastes.
Puccini had an unfailing instinct for what makes
exciting theater. his operas are suspenseful
and involving, with nothing extraneous, and he
always knew when to leaven tragedy with a bit
of humor.
modern harmony. traditional western
harmony was breaking up by the time Puccini
began his career, and his score for Turandot,
although overwhelmingly tonal, employed all
the latest harmonic techniques. listen for
bitonality—what happens when two nearby key
areas are set up at the same time—whenever the
curtain goes up; this jarring sound indicates that
something is very wrong in the accursed china of
Princess turandot. Puccini also uses the special
whole-tone scale, with its prominent tritone, the
forbidden diabolus in musica, to characterize the
bloodthirsty Princess, her sadistic servants, and
the ghosts of all those who gave their lives for
her sake. and, appropriately for an opera set in
the east, Puccini makes much use of pentatonic
music. many eastern musical traditions rely
on the pentatonic, or five-note scale (instead
of the eight-note diatonic scale of western
Turandot, Pittsburgh Opera, 2011 (David Bachman photo)
AriA reAdy?
lori phillipS, turandot
“in questa reggia”
Turandot explains the origins of her
vendetta against men.
So: Why is this an important moment
for your character?
lP: turandot tells calaf that thousands
of years ago, in this same kingdom,
her ancestor, Princess lou-ling, cried
out—and that cry has taken refuge in
turandot’s soul.
So: does Turandot always explain
herself this way, each time a prince
undertakes her riddle test?
lP: Yes, i think that turandot explains herself
this way each time and, furthermore,
that she is disappointed each time the
suitor chooses to ignore her story.
So: Which emotions does Turandot feel
when she sings this aria?
lP: turandot appears to be strong and
confident, but she is really experiencing
intense fear and deep sadness.
So: If you could advise an operagoer to
listen for one thing during this aria,
what would that one thing be?
lP: try to listen to the regal quality of it—the
beautiful serenity at the beginning that
builds to a more intense, declamatory
conclusion.
So: Why do you love this aria?
lP: i love the way Puccini built “in questa
reggia.” he starts it securely, serenely,
with consistent, lyrical lines and leads
the soprano into intense leaps (middle
c#s to high as) in the middle and
through to the end of the aria, culminating
in a dueling high c with calaf.
Nashville Opera, 2006 (Marianne Leach photo)
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music). make up a tune at a piano using only
the five black keys, and you’ll hear its charac-
teristic sound. in Turandot, Puccini’s pentatonic
tunes—both the ones he created and the ones he
quoted—underscore the opera’s asian setting.
unforgeTTabLe arias. Puccini understood
from long experience that an opera succeeds
when its characters have great arias to sing, and
he duly composed magnificent opportunities
for the singers playing liù, the unknown Prince,
and turandot to wow the audience with their
beautiful voices and their characters’ passions.
For more on turandot’s famous entrance aria, “in
questa reggia,” see page 11. liù’s beautiful arias
(“signore, ascolta” in act i and the double aria
of her death scene) are so sincere and heartfelt
she generally makes it difficult for turandot to
win back the audience’s sympathies. and, ever
since luciano Pavarotti chose it as his signature,
the Prince’s act iii serenade “nessun dorma” has
become one of the world’s most cherished pieces
of music. You hear it at soccer matches and arena
and rock concerts in addition to opera houses.
wisTfuL nosTaLgia. although he could
write music for every possible emotion, Puccini
excelled at depicting a certain familiar, gentle,
homesick yearning, particularly as voiced by his
male characters. the tenor-baritone duets in La
bohème and Madama Butterfly, cavaradossi’s
tearful “e lucevan le stelle” from Tosca, the sad
folk songs of the miners in La fanciulla del West,
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Turandot, Pittsburgh Opera, 2011 (David Bachman photo)
Above: In her aria “Del primo pianto,” composed by Franco Alfano, Turandot weeps for the first time in her life.
Below: Old Timur laments the death of Liù, who has been his faithful companion ever since the fall of his
kingdom.
and michele’s overwhelming cry of “why don’t
you love me anymore?” in Il tabarro—these are
some of his greatest, most moving achievements,
and in every case they’re a musical lament for a
blissful happiness that’s no longer available. in
Turandot, you’ll hear this sound when the trio of
ministers sigh for the peaceful country life each
has forfeited in order to play their role in turandot’s
psychotic court.
the PoSthuMouS PreMiere
of TurandoT
seattle opera celebrates one of the greatest
italian composers this season by presenting
three extremely different operas from different
points of his career. over the course of his life,
the transformations in Puccini’s art followed the
multitudinous changes taking place in the world
around him.
Puccini was only 62 years old when he began
writing Turandot, but he felt like an old man.
the world had changed as a result of world
war i; an entire generation of young men had
been decimated, and the old world was falling
Nashville Opera, 2006 (Marianne Leach photo)
apart. Puccini sensed that Turandot would be his
swan song, and he wanted to create an opera
that would be both modern and popular, an
exhilarating spectacle both fantastic and deeply
human. he set to work with two inspired young
librettists, Giuseppe adami and Renato simoni.
But Turandot did not come easily; far from it.
Puccini and his collaborators wrote and rewrote,
changed the number of acts, added characters
and deleted them, and were often on the
verge of giving up in despair. Puccini worked on
Turandot longer than he had on any other opera,
and still he was unable to finish it. the duet for
turandot and the unknown Prince, following the
suicide of liù, caused him the most trouble. how
was the prince supposed to melt the heart of the
bloodthirsty princess and turn her into a decent
and sympathetic human being?
as Puccini struggled with the ending of Turandot
he began to complain of a persistent sore throat.
specialist after specialist was called in: the
diagnosis was advanced throat cancer (Puccini
was a heavy smoker). the composer was sent to a
clinic in Belgium, where he underwent radiation
therapy. seven crystals of radium were injected
into his throat, killing his tumor. unfortunately,
the radium also weakened Puccini’s heart, and
he died shortly after the operation.

Puccini had asked the great conductor arturo toscanini to see Turandot to
the stage. toscanini hired a composer named Franco alfano to complete
the duet for turandot and the Prince. working from Puccini’s notes,
alfano wrote the conclusion to the opera that is generally played when
turandot is performed today. the first performance took place five months
after Puccini died. it was quite a night for toscanini; first he got into a
fight with Benito mussolini and had him evicted from the opera house.
(mussolini had wanted toscanini to begin the evening by playing “Giovi-
TurandoT:
lori phillipS
Soprano (Providence, RI)
Recently at Seattle Opera:
Amelia, Un ballo in
maschera (‘02)
a thrilling dramatic
soprano with several
sentas and turandots
in her background, lori sings this difficult
role easily and with real beauty.
Marcy StonikaS
Soprano (Elmhurst, IL)
Former Seattle Opera Young
Artist
Recently at Seattle Opera:
Second Lady, The Magic
Flute (’11)
no one can question
the size or power of marcy’s voice. in audition,
turandot sounds easy for her; it’s time
that she do one onstage.
caLaf:
antonello paloMbi
Tenor (Spoleto, Italy)
Recently at Seattle Opera:
Foresto, Attila (’12)
to my mind one of
the few true italian
dramatic tenors in the
world who combines
power and thrust with a superb legato and
great taste. his triumphs in five previous
roles at seattle opera make him obvious for
calaf.
luiS chapa
Tenor (Monclova, Mexico)
Recently at Seattle Opera:
Don José, Carmen (’11)
his don José during
the 2011/12 season was
strong; calaf is a role
that this fine mexican
tenor has sung many times before with great
success.
Speight JenkinS introduceS
The ArTisTs of Turandot
Liù:
lina tetriani
Soprano (Tbilisi, Georgia)
Seattle Opera debut
Grazia doronzio
Soprano (Stigliano, Italy)
Seattle Opera debut
i had the good fortune to hear both sopranos
audition at about the same time. Both displayed
warmth, melting high notes, and
superb legato. Both are young and attractive. i
decided on the spot to have each perform four
of our liùs. i think each will be a huge asset to
seattle opera.
Timur:
peter roSe
Bass (Canterbury, UK)
Recently at Seattle Opera:
Falstaff, Falstaff (’10)
one of the great basses
of our time, Peter will add
an amazing and rich color
and quality to the role of
calaf’s father, timur.
Ping:
patrick carfizzi
Bass-Baritone (Newburgh, NY)
Recently at Seattle Opera: Dr.
Bartolo, The Barber of Seville
(’11)
a funny Bartolo and a
superb nourabad in The
Pearl Fishers, Patrick will
take on a role that might seem less than those
he has sung before. it, however, has been the
nezza,” the Fascist anthem; toscanini told him “la scala is not a beer hall!”)
and then toscanini stopped the performance immediately before the love
duet. he turned to the audience and said, in a choked voice, “the opera is
incomplete. it ends here, because at this point the maestro died.” there was
a moment of silence before the audience leaped to their feet and cheered
the fallen Puccini for half an hour. Puccini was the last great composer in
what has been called the “Golden century” of italian opera, and Turandot
was the last italian opera to achieve worldwide popularity.
preserve of great baritones, including theodor
uppman and Giuseppe de luca.
conducTor
aSher fiSch
(Jersusalem, Israel)
Recently at Seattle Opera:
Tristan und Isolde (’11)
our principal guest conductor
and a favorite at
dresden and the Bavarian
state opera in munich,
asher has previously only conducted wagner
and Richard strauss in seattle, but his experience
includes the whole repertory, and it will
be exciting to hear his Puccini.
design Team
renaud doucet
Stage Director
(Cannes, France)
Seattle Opera debut
andré barbe
Set and Costume Designer
(Montreal, Canada)
Seattle Opera debut
Guy SiMard
Lighting Designer
(Montreal, Canada)
Previously at Seattle Opera:
Faust (’98)
the first time at seattle opera for this design
team, they are now working together all over
the world. the photographs of this Turandot
are very exciting.
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