a barbarian within
by Douglas Messerli
Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni (libretto, after a play by Carlo Gozzi), Giacomo Puccini (composer), Franco Zeffirelli (stage director), Barbara Willis Sweete (director) Turandot / 2016 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]
After seeing the Metropolitan Opera
HD-Live broadcast of Puccini’s splendiferous Turandot the other day, I joked to my companion Howard that the
mythical Chinese princess reminded me a bit of the current Republican candidate
Donald Trump. She, too, has built a wall around herself (and metaphorically,
her kingdom) in order to keep foreigners out, partly in remembrance of the
death of an ancestor brutally killed by an outsider; the world in which she
lives, moreover, is a highly dangerous one, with dozens of beheadings in the
past few years—consisting mostly of her would-be lovers who cannot answer the
riddles she keeps posing. Indeed, the opera begins with the death of the
handsome Prince of Persia, whose head joins the others on a stake, thus opening
the work with an act as mad as Salome’s beheading of John the Baptist at the
end of that opera, resulting in that powerful woman’s death.
While her court is as glorious as any
golden tower, the everyday citizens around her, as clearly demonstrated in the
first scenes, live lives of some desperation, and are rather confused about
what they want out of life, at first demanding the failed Prince’s beheading,
only to change their minds when they glimpse his royal demeanor. He is, in
fact, far more beautiful than the later suitor who wins her.
Seemingly by accident, Calàf (Marco
Berti) wanders into the city, coincidentally discovering his long-lost father,
Timur (Alexander Tsymbalyuk), the now blind, vanquished King of Tartary,
accompanied by a poor slave girl, the lovely Liù (the wonderful young Romanian
soprano, Anita Hartig), who is secretly in love with him. But hardly do they
get an opportunity to express their joy in seeing each other again, before
Calàf catches a glimpse of the evidently ravishing Turnandot (Nina Stemme),
immediately falling in love.
Why any sane man might dare make his
love known to her, given her nasty reputation, is quite inexplicable. As court
organizers Ping, Pang, and Pong soon after try to warn him, any attempt to
court the Princess will surely result in his death. But he is not to be
dissuaded, even by the pleas of his father and Liù, whose abandonment means
that he may not be able to escape the cursed land. By the end of the act, the
gong is sounded, and the seemingly foolish young Prince is summoned to the
court.
As anyone who has seen the Met’s
production, designed by Franco Zeffirelli years ago, will recall, the Court of
Turandot and her Emperor father is one of the most startlingly beautiful opera
sets ever conceived. With the full court dressed in their finery, and with
bands of banner- and-flag-waving humans enacting the formal Chinese-like
gestures choreographed by Chiang
Yet at the heart of this beautiful
setting is the mean-spirited and vengeful Turandot, who frightens nearly
everyone around her save the hubristic suitor.
One by one Turandot (powerfully sung by Stemme) poses her three
questions: “What is born each night and dies each dawn,” “What flickers red and
warm like a flame, yet is not a flame?” and “What is like ice but burns?”
weaving together the correct answers, “Hope,” “Blood,” and “Turandot,” perhaps
secretly expressing the three qualities that her wise suitor would possess: the
hope to win Turandot’s hand, the hot blood behind that desire, and the Princess
herself.
But even though Calàf answers all her riddles correctly, the Princess
still refuses to be sexually compliant, begging her Emperor father for further
protection, insisting she will resist the love the stranger openly offers her.
In the Met production Calàf desires desperately to touch her, but grabs
hold only of her garment before giving the icy Princess one more out: he has
only one question that she must answer, to tell him his name before daybreak;
if she succeeds he will abandon himself to death.
In the intermission, Stemme interestingly argued that it is not that
Turandot is sexually frigid, but that she is determined to have a mate who is
equal to her in both intelligence and beauty (unfortunately Berti’s sometimes
strained tenor could not match her Wagnerian-trained soprano voice). But even
after meeting her intellectual match, she continues to behave like a barbarian
within the gates, refusing to allow anyone in the city to sleep until someone
will reveal her suitor’s name, while arresting Timur and Liù and threatening to
torture them.
To save both Timur and Calàf, Liù insists that only she knows his real
name, allowing herself to be tortured at the very moment when she challenges
Turandot with her own love for the Princess’s suitor, a love, she declares, for
which she will gladly give up her life.
Yet, the unbending Turandot continues in her attempt to get an answer,
while Liù, grabbing a knife, kills herself.
In one sense the plot demands that she
die, partly because we know that Liù, in her love and faithfulness, perhaps,
might make a far better match than Turandot. But since Calàf is determined to
have the Princess as his bride, the story requires that the weaker give way to
the stronger.
It is Liù’s selfless death, however,
that finally begins to melt Turandot’s heart, as she recognizes that, indeed,
her suitor is someone special, a man worth being loved. She finally admits that
she feared him and fought him so hard because she was attracted to him, and
deep within she felt the first fluttering of her heart. Impetuously kissing
her, Calàf now releases that inner love which she suddenly recognizes, weeping
for the first time in her life. Daring fate, Calàf reveals his name: the Prince
of Tartary.
As the dawn breaks, it appears, for a
moment, that Turandot may still use what she now knows against him. But when
she appears again in the court she replies to the question of his name, by
answering, “It is love,” revealing her commitment to him.
Perhaps now her kingdom can free itself
from the brutality she has previously imposed, and Ping, Pang, and Pong may
return to their country homes for which they so longed at the beginning of Act
II.
Los Angeles, January 30, 2016
Reprinted in US Theater, Opera, and
Performance and World Cinema Review (January 2016).
Reprinted from On Marriage: The
Imagination of Being (Los Angeles and Bagnone, Italy: Magra Books, 2018).
