Turandot

“All’alba vincerò—at sunrise I shall triumph,” the unknown prince proclaims to the city, making him one of the few heroes in Italian opera whose sleeplessness in his arias stems from confidence rather than despair. It is the others who must despair. Primarily the inhabitants of the city where—“nessun dorma”—no one is allowed to sleep, because everyone must search for the stranger’s name by the highest command and under threat of the death penalty. That Turandot was actually meant to end well by Puccini’s standards, we sense—as with so much else—in the work’s central tenor aria. Like no other, Puccini knew how to virtually force emotional engagement upon the audience through the merciless immediacy of his musical language. The piece itself ends, in principle, on a happy note, though without Puccini, who succumbed to his battle with throat cancer before the finale was completed. And so Turandot joins the ranks of the great opera fragments of the 20th century. But it is not only the opera itself that is, to a greater or lesser extent, a chimera; the title character, too, seems above all to be a projection: “Turandot does not exist! There is only nothingness,” Ping, Pang, and Pong warn the unknown prince to dissuade him from attempting to solve the three riddles that must be solved if he is to win the emperor’s daughter, Turandot. Anna-Sophie Mahler, whose Stuttgart production of Saint François d ’Assise 2023 was honored by the trade journal Opernwelt as the “most unusual opera experience of the year,” will set out in search of the “aura of love” 100 years after the premiere of Puccini’s enigmatic final opera—an aura with which the composer sought to soothe the nerves stretched to the breaking point in the opera’s finale. For one thing is certain: this aura would certainly be useful even today.