PUCCINI’S FAR-EASTERN PARSIFAL
"Turandot" with the new finale by Luciano Berio
A double novelty: the performance of Puccini’s Turandot at this year’s Salzburg Festival not only represents a long overdue re-instatement of his music after an extended absence but is also a true retrieval of his honour. Indeed the completion of the opera by Luciano Berio, which is to be heard for the first time in Austria, brings to an end what has been for the past 80 years a veritable operatic scandal: the worldwide practice of staging Puccini’s last and most important composition in a questionable and provisional form.
The finale of the opera was missing
The background: when Giacomo Puccini died on 29 November 1924 in Brussels as a result of treatment for his cancer of the larynx, Turandot had been almost completely sketched and indeed from February 1924 even notated as a score. Only the finale of the opera, the closing duet when Prince Calaf breaks the resistance of the ice-cold Princess Turandot, is missing and was missing from the very beginning. As if he were afraid of the end, Puccini had broken off work at the point where the slave-girl Liù commits suicide followed by the subsequent funeral march. He wrote down separate ideas for the finale on 23 leaves of sketches that are difficult to decipher with a total of 36 pages of music but did not arrive at a final solution. After Puccini’s death several composers were taken into consideration to complete Turandot: Franco Vittadini, one of Puccini’s close friends, Riccardo Zandonai and finally Franco Alfano, who had been very successful with his works Resurrezione (based on Tolstoy) and La Leggenda di Sakùntala. Alfano took up the challenge and on the basis of the sketches he composed an extensive finale lasting 377 bars. Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the world premiere, felt however, that Alfano’s idiosyncrasies had gone too far and insisted on changes, demanding “more Puccini and less Alfano”. Toscanini made massive cuts, which meant ultimately that over 100 bars were omitted. Until nowadays the opera has been played in this mutilated version, which Alfano never agreed to and whose weaknesses are blatantly obvious – for instance Turandot’s unmotivated transformation or the bombastic hollowness of the final chorus.
Berio Between Tristan and Parsifal
This is now where Luciano Berio, the most renowned Italian contemporary composer, comes in with his performance version of Turandot – an original completion lasting a good fifteen minutes, commissioned by the Festival de Musica de Canarias and which was premiered as a concert performance on 24 January 2002 in Las Palmas. “I completely re-thought out the finale and decided against a happy ending”, explains Berio. Instead his version takes up the thread from two mysterious entries in the sketches: “poi Tristano” and “San Graal Chinese” as noted by Puccini. Berio takes this as an indication to locate the musical language of his version in the harmonic world of Wagner’s Tristan, with the ideal solution of the drama approaching the philosophical world of Parsifal. The end result is a reflective solution, without a particular aim in mind and convincingly brings together the main trends in Puccini’s oeuvre: his enthusiasm for Wagner’s operas and musical exoticism as well as openness towards the compositional innovations of his time. Through Berio, Puccini’s swansong becomes, as it were, a Bühnenweihfestspiel (festival of consecration in a theatre) transported to the Far East.
Christian Wildhagen
Alfred Hrdlicka,
Devotion, 1986
Giacomo Puccini
Turandot
With the completion of the third act
by Luciano Berio (2001)
Sung in Italian with German and English supertitles
Conductor Valery Gergiev
Stage director David Pountney
Sets Johan Engels
Costumes Marie-Jeanne Lecca
Lighting Design Jean Kalman
Chorus master Rupert Huber
Turandot Gabriele Schnaut
Altoum Robert Tear
Timur Paata Burchuladze
Kalaf Johan Botha
Liù Cristina Gallardo-Domas
Ping Boaz Daniel
Pang Vicente Ombuena
Pong Steve Davislim
A Mandarin Robert Bork
Vienna Philharmonic
Vienna State Opera Chorus
Tölz Boys Choir
Grosses Festspielhaus
New production: 7 August 2002
10, 15, 18, 22, 26, 30 August 2002
Performances begin at 7 p.m.
All performances are sold out
Telephone: 0043 662 8045-500
Telefax: 0043 662 8045-555
E-mail: info@salzburgfestival.at