But no. In the opera we have, Calaf watches Liù’s suicide, then the departure of his father with the pathetic little cortège, then turns around and wins Turandot with sheer dominance, symbolized not by a tender, wondering kiss of awakening (as in Siegfried or Sleeping Beauty), but a sudden, resisted one of the sort that gets governors and CEOs peremptorily fired these days. What was Puccini thinking of? He locked himself in a squalid little room from which there is no exit, and it does not matter what music he might have written had he lived longer to try to make all this—and the old happy ending of the right people marrying the right people— palatable. There is no such music. We are left with a tawdriness, and with a sense of having been complicit in horrible, cowardly acts. And though I’ve always found it too easy a slur, I do think we are also left with an aftertaste of the grandiosity and brutality that haunts the veristic decadence, and its connection to the political and cultural climate that was brewing in the Italy of those times.

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Nov. 2, 2021

With all of the foregoing stipulated, Turandot is still an opera by Giacomo Puccini, one of the last two great opera composers (in the sense of producing a substantial body of work that continues to exert a broad appeal nigh onto a century after its creation), and still in something close to full possession of his formidable creative faculties. Act 1 struggles too long to escape the atmospherics trap the verists kept setting for themselves, and the finale falls on its brassy kisser, but in between there’s marvelous stuff. Liù’s two arias, if they can be called such, are  heart-tugging, and for all that “Nessun dorma” seems to have become the “We Shall Overcome” of the popera mentality, both of Calaf’s are choice bits of late Italian tenorism. The Riddle Scene, the heart of the work, can be spine-tingling, and always makes some effect. The Ping/Pang/Pong interlude takes great dexterity to avoid the feel of a tiresome whiling-away, but can be made charming, ironic, and sad. And perhaps because of the proximity of Meistersinger and Turandot this fall, I was made aware of what seems another instance of Wagnerian dramaturgical modeling—the transition between the two scenes of Act Two (the scene of the masques and the Riddle Scene), which is surely constructed according to the blueprint of that from Sachs’ workshop to the Festwiese. Of course, in terms of emotional gravity and depth of tone, there is no comparison. But structurally considered: in each case, an interior scene with reflective content leads to an ensemble; the ensemble builds to a climax; summoning brass is heard and a sense of festive gathering is in the air; the character of greatest rank in the first scene, a baritone, alerts his companions; and an instrumental entr’acte of growing pomp opens out into a populous panorama of ceremonial aspect, in which the tenor protagonist will undergo a trial for the sake of a lady’s hand. I don’t note this to denigrate: if you see a great move, why not learn it?