These early proponents of Turandot’s protagonist/antagonist roles carry us through a wide range of vocal types and weights. Some of the voices are Mediterranean, others Northern or Middle-European or American. Some are intensely vibrated, others much less so, some of highly demonstrative temperament, some of cooler. And despite our personal preferences for this or that voice or manner, somewhere in among them, in a sort of averaging-out, is the standard they set for the effective interpretation of these parts. It carries forward into the first postwar generation of singers, where in a general sense it is met on equal terms by the Nilsson/Corelli combo, the soprano most closely matched with Turner among the older group, and Corelli with Lauri-Volpi. ^(I) The sounds and habits of these postwar artists are entirely compatible with those of the interwar generations’. With Liù it’s a different story. Not having seen such postwar sopranos as Scotto or Zeani in the part, Price remains the most satisfying Liù I have experienced in the theatre. Her vocal format surely matched or exceeded those of dalla Rizza, Zamboni, or Olivero, but with very different structural and timbral characteristics. Moffo was warm and lovely, but again nothing like the earlier Italians. Price and Moffo, both justly cherished, represent the migration of this voice type from the more tensile, lean-and-bright, chest-grounded earlier model to the more rounded, loosely held, and chest-deprived one of recent decades.

The foregoing gives an idea of my mind’s-ear standard for Turandot principals. When it is approximated, an evening with Turandot can serve up plenty of red meat for an opera-lover of healthy appetite. And yet: what about this piece?

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What were they thinking?

Puccini and his librettists, Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, took their subject from a Persian tale as dramatized by Carlo Gozzi, then adapted into German by Friedrich Schiller. It places us in a city and period—Peking “in the time of fables”—that for exotic distancing purposes is effectively identical with the proto-Tokyo of the Edo era that we encountered not long ago in Mascagni’s Iris (see 3/13/21). But in its basic plot-and-character structure, Turandot conforms to the European protagonist-couple narrative that, with only a handful of exceptions, became the dramatic engine of the operatic century to which it brings a close. I assume this was not a conscious choice of Puccini’s, but one of the instinctive, dimly aware sort that draws us toward a narrative to which we ourselves belong. Nevertheless, his opera embraced it in a form faithful to its medieval origins, recounting the tale of the wandering, dispossessed noble aspiring to the hand of a woman of high station—which, if won, will gain him both woman and station. In this case, the Belle dame sans merci component sometimes present in the story (though rarely in its operatic adaptations) is ratcheted to a dizzying height, and the obsessively desired lady is female protagonist and antagonist in one. And since, in the event, our knightly hero turns and runs from his obligations at the first sniff of temptation, we are left with a joust betwixt anti-hero and anti-heroine, and are left with no one we can in conscience award the plume.