Up to a fairly late point, Calaf minds his manners insofar as his pursuit of Turandot goes. True, the striking of the gong is not a blandishing serenade or poetic recitation. But it’s in the local Peking town ordinance for such cases, and he follows through by undertaking the perilous trial though well informed of the usual harsh consequences. Having solved the riddles, he gallantly grants his conquered foe a second chance—the equivalent of helping the fallen knight to his feet rather than plunging the sword into his breast. Thenceforward, however, Calaf’s chivalric compliance collapses in disgrace. All along, we have been meant to understand that Calaf is not merely drawn to the Princess, or seized by thoughts of regained power, but truly under a spell, stricken at first sight by the same ensorcellment that has ensnared the long train of previous decapitants. That is part of the fairy-tale, “legendary” ingredient of the old yarn, symbolic of women’s irresistible sexual power over men, and meant to absolve the abject male of moral responsibility and to persuade us that the end justifies the means. We’ve arrived at the queasiness.

I’m sure many of my readers took note when Will Crutchfield, in his guest column of two weeks since, called Turandot “repulsive.” That very afternoon, a good friend asked, “What’s Will Crutchfield so upset about with Turandot? Must be something about the story?” Replying that I assumed it was, and that I shared some of the same feeling, I said something about Liù’s suicide and Calaf’s callousness to that and to the plight of his own father. My friend said that he’d first known about this tale (as had I—we are of an age) from The Arabian Nights, with the wonderful illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, and that he’d always taken it as simply a fairy tale, not meant to be understood literally. True enough, and when we meet such stories at age eight or so, we certainly aren’t bothering our half-formed heads with moral considerations. There’s a catch, though—two catches, actually. When we take a fairy tale and set it on the stage (except, possibly, in a childrens’ theatre version), we’re no longer dealing with an envisioned fable. We’re presented with flesh-and-blood individuals who are singing and acting the tale, in this instance to music by Puccini, whose greatest virtue as a composer was his genius for drawing us into intimate emotional contact with his characters. The characters may not always have great psychological depth (these don’t), but they do have strong feelings, powerfully expressed, and we become vicariously invested in them. Second catch: Among these characters, the one in Turandot with the strongest emotional pull is Liù.

Without Liù, there wouldn’t be a Puccini Turandot. She isn’t in the old tale, or in Gozzi or in Schiller. But Puccini, perceiving that the fable needed fattening-up to morph into a grand opera, and not about to set a foreshortened plot (i.e., Calaf solves the riddles, the night passes without Turandot coming up with a name, and she emerges at dawn to say “You win”), was also not up for leaving us with a blood-and-ice princess who has to be bludgeoned into being in love as his view of femininity. There has been much commentary on Puccini’s need to somehow insert his favorite sort of girl (for whom, we must note, he always wrote wonderful music) into any scenario he selected. The trope is somewhat overdone (Tosca isn’t like that, or Giorgietta, or Puccini’s real-life lovers), but it is true that he insisted on sticking into his last opera this slave girl, sacrificially loyal because Calaf had once smiled upon her, because he felt another major character was necessary, and his predilections dictated that a Liù-like person would fill that bill. This invention is not without dramatic validity. Liù functions as the plot’s Other Woman, but in an inverted posture. Instead of posing the threat of power deployed, she exudes the lure of powerless devotion; instead of a heart closed to love, the heart that bleeds for it; instead of assured triumph of one kind or another, the certainty of loss and despair. It’s a gripping binary, whose dramatic strength is augmented (or would be, if ever made clear in performance) by the status of Timur and Calaf himself as interlopers from the very tribe that (long before, but held in vivid atavistic memory) had ravaged the kingdom—”‘Twas when the king of Tartary unfurled his seven banners,” murmurs the chorus in the midst of “In questa reggia“— and that, by the hand of “a man like you, like you, foreigner”) silenced the Princess Lo-u-Ling. It’s possible, and an interesting backstory speculation, that Liù herself is not Tartar, but a Chinese captive, as her name seems to suggest, in which case her devotion to her lord and master, while back among her own people, is all the more remarkable.