Some readers may recall my interchange with my periodic correspondent Ellen on the subject of live vs. video opera (see Opera in Whole, and Not, 6/11/21). It turns out that Turandot has been an object of intense attention for her over a couple of decades, and since beyond her love of opera she brings a background in both ethnomusicology and archeology to bear on it, she has unusual insights to offer. In the introduction to her own essay, Sphynx and Gryphon, she passes through such matters as ancient Chinese instruments and their uses, the Chinese tradition of riddling, the basic scale systems and themes of traditional Chinese music, the I Ching’s circle of hexagrams, and much else, as grounding for a detailed backstory for the Princess Turandot, particularly with respect to her obsessive channeling of her distant ancestor, the Princess Lo-u-ling. Ellen’s starting point was an effort to explain, at least to herself, a sympathy she felt for this character, who is to all appearances irredeemably sadistic. My own feeling is that if, as I argue, we must hold Calàf answerable to a chivalric moral code, we can hardly let Turandot off the hook as a serial murderess. Nonetheless, Ellen’s essay does what every performer should do with any character he or she undertakes, namely, search out the “why” of her actions and believe in the justice of those actions, no matter how extreme they may be. On that basis, I strongly recommend her article to all singers (sopranos first, of course) as an example (though in this case a bit too thorough to be practical) of how to think about a character, and to anyone else intrigued by “the Turandot problem.” Now for someone to do the same for Calàf—perhaps an even tougher assignment.

Ellen also refers us to a monograph by two intrepid scholars, Johann Christian Petty and Marshall Tuttle, entitled Tonal Psychology in Puccini’s “Turandot.”  There are informative sections of harmonic analysis of the opera (all vexed, naturally, by the inadequacies, variously defined, of Alfano’s workup of the final scene) in the books of William S. Ashbrook and Harold S. Powers, Julian Budden, and (most useful, I’ve found) Michele Girardi. Petty and Tuttle go beyond any of these, not only in a binding together of the elements of the opera’s overall harmonic scheme in relation to the characters, but in their interpretation of these elements in psychosexual terms of Freudian/Jungian derivation. If your inclination is to dismiss such interpretation out of hand, I suggest giving their argument a look, and to think of it in relation to the composer’s own personality and his wish to create “a Turandot via the modern mind.”

Now, I am no music theorist, but I do have one question for the scholars who have given us these interesting and helpful commentaries. If we are speaking of tinte musicali (which we very much are), why is there no attention to orchestration, and its relation to these harmonic observations? Wouldn’t that be a necessary part of the discussion in all of Puccini, but most of all in Turandot? If we aren’t quite in the land of Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie, aren’t we at times approaching it? I only ask.