DomStufen-Festspiele in Erfurt 2013
The Chinese princess Turandot despises all men and has sworn never to yield to one, seeking revenge for a terrible injustice once suffered by her ancestor, Princess Lo-uling. To protect herself, she poses three impossible riddles to every suitor who dares ask for her hand. Those who fail to answer correctly are executed. Against all reason—and despite the warnings of his father Timur and the faithful slave girl Liù—the young prince Calaf boldly steps forward as a suitor. Miraculously, he solves all three riddles. Turandot is shaken. Calaf, however, offers her a way out: if she can discover his name before dawn, he will forfeit his claim and accept death. On Turandot’s command, a frantic search for the prince’s name begins. Liù claims to know it, and under the threat of torture, she takes her own life rather than betray Calaf. Deeply moved by Liù’s love and sacrifice, Turandot still refuses to surrender to her own feelings. It is then Calaf himself who reveals his identity—risking everything to let love triumph over fear and death.
Giacomo Puccini worked on Turandot for over four years, from 1920 until his death in 1924. He discovered the subject during a meeting with librettists Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, though he did not base the opera on Carlo Gozzi’s original tragicomedy from 1762, but rather on Friedrich Schiller’s 1802 adaptation Turandot, Princess of China, in the Italian translation by poet Andrea Maffei (1857). In Turandot, Puccini created a sonic world of unprecedented exotic color, weaving original Chinese melodies into his orchestration to reflect both the splendor of the imperial court and the emotional coldness of its icy princess. Yet he never completed the opera. He died on November 29, 1924, leaving the final duet between Turandot and Calaf unwritten. The opera premiered posthumously at La Scala in April 1926, conducted by Arturo Toscanini.n To this day, Turandot remains incomplete—but as opera scholar Ulrich Schreiber has remarked, it nonetheless became “not only a masterpiece […] but also Puccini’s most compelling answer to Nietzsche’s rhetorical question: ‘Are not love and death sisters?’”
Premiere / July 4, 2013
Cast
Turandot Irina Rindzuner, Carter Scott | Altoum Robert Wörle | Timur Vazgen Gazaryan, Sebastian Pilgrim | Calaf Marc Heller, Sergey Nayda, Ricardo Tamura | Liù Daniela Gerstenmeyer, Marisca Mulder, Ilia Papandreou | Ping Florian Götz, Máté Sólyom-Nagy | Pang Jörg Rathmann, Thomas Stückemann | Pong Benedikt Nawrath, Marwan Shamiyeh | A Mandarin Yuri Batukov, Sebastian Pilgrim