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PUCCINI'S TURANDOT PRINCETON STUDIES IN OPERA Puccini)s Turandot: The End oft he Great Tradition by William Ashbrook and Harold Powers (1991) Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narration in the Nineteenth Century by Carolyn Abbate (1991) PUCCINI'S TURANDOT -----------~--------------- THE END OF THE GREAT TRADITON ~-------------- WILLIAM AsHBROOK AND HAROLD PowERS PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright© 1991 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ashbrook, William, 1922- Puccini's Turandot: the end of the great tradition I William Ashbrook and Harold Powers. p. em.-(Princeton series in opera) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-691-09137-4 (cloth: acid-free paper) ISBN o-691 -02712-9 (paper : acid-free paper) r. Puccini, Giacomo, 1858-1924-Turandot. I. Powers, Harold. II. Title. ML4ro.P89A7 1991 782.1--dC20 90-8890 This book has been composed in Linotron Galliard Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 24681097 For our children Cornelia Powers and William Ashbrook III CONTENTS ------------$------------ PREFACE ix INTRODUCTION: The Contexts CHAPTER I: The Opera !2 Turandot and the Great Tradition !2 Turandot as a Number Opera !5 Turandot and the Prince 37 CHAPTER II: The Sources 43 Turandot as a Spoken Play 43 Turandot as Opera before Puccini 52 CHAPTER III: The Genesis 59 Rising Action 59 Falling Action 72 CHAPTER IV: The Four Colors 89 Chinoiserie 94 Dissonances and Half-steps roo Persian Prince and Chinese Slave !07 The Puccinian Norm III CHAPTER V: The Two Duets II5 The Enigma Scene n6 The Final Problem I3I CHAPTER VI: Turandot Staged I4I The Prima assoluta I4I The Travels of Turandot !56 APPENDIX !65 NoTES !69 REFERENCES !85 INDEX !89 PREFACE ------------$------------ THE AUTHORS of this book were seduced early in life by the "Great Tra dition" of Italian opera in the form it took in William Weaver's Golden Century ... from Rossini to Puccini. For both of us the first encounter with Puccini's unfinished Turandot was the magnificent Cetra/Parlophone re cording of 1937/38, with Gina Cigna, Francesco Merli, and Magda Olivero. In our writings and scholarship since World War II, Ashbrook has re mained remarkably faithful to his first love, but Powers has returned to it only recently, after straying into strange paths. The occasion for our collab oration in a book on Turandot has given us both an opportunity to probe into our own hitherto unanalyzed special love for the work, and our feeling that it is more than merely a significant historical symbol, an epitaph for an artistic epoch. For each of us it is a beautiful, imaginative, powerful work of art as well, and we attempt here to find those things in the work and its life that make us feel that, and try to call attention to them in a way that makes our sense of the work plausible. We have done so first for the work as a whole, summarizing its culture-historical context in the Intro duction and the work itself in outline, and its principal problems and sym bols, in Chapter I. In Chapters IV and V much of the music of Turandot is discussed, taking off from two particularly significant aspects, Puccini's use of tonal coloration and his treatment of the two major dialogues for the Prince and Princess. But a work of musical art also exists in its prehis tory and its posthistory: in the generic expectations, musical and dramatic suppositions, and creative ideas that gradually took firm shape in a blue print for production, that is, the score; and in the continuance and the reception of the work, that is, in the congeries of representations and crit ical interpretations that followed the completion of the blueprint. The pre history of Puccini's Turandot is discussed in Chapter II, a brief summariz ing of its predecessors and its sources, and especially in Chapter III, in which its transformation over a four-year period from an exotic suggestion into "the last grand opera" is described with some care. Its posthistory from the first representation to the present is sampled in Chapter VI. And discussions of any one of these three phases of the work's life-its back ground and creation, its design and dynamic, its representations and recep tion-necessarily often look forward or backward in anticipation or recol lection of aspects of the other two. The book is collaborative in that each of us has contributed to every phase of the whole, has read, reread and edited every sentence, but the primary responsibilities of writing and research have been weighted ac- ix