OPERA The Italian Opera Company of Chicago

Why didn’t Puccini finish Turandot? One certain answer is, he couldn’t finish it because he died before he could do so. Puccini composed the first part of Act III, up to the death of Liù and the solemn cortege that escorts her body offstage. Feeling his health declining, Puccini remarked more than a year before his death, “They’ll have to say: ‘The opera remains unfinished because the composer died.’” As a matter of fact, that’s almost exactly what happened at La Scala on April 25, 1926, when Turandot premiered. Arturo Toscanini stopped the performance where Puccini’s composition ended, laid down his baton and said with great emotion, “Qui finisce l’opera lasciata incompiuta dal Maestro, perchè a questo punto il Maestro è morte.” (Here ends the opera left incomplete by the Maestro, because at this point the Maestro died.)

Now no one wanted an unfinished Turandot, so when Puccini died in November of 1924, the Puccini family sought to have an Italian composer of some stature complete the work based on the composer’s sketches, brief as they were. Toscanini thought that the best living Italian opera composer was Riccardo Zandonai, whom he nominated for the task. The Puccini family, however, wanted to be absolutely sure that the composer who finished the opera did not take any glory for himself, so they insisted on hiring the less talented Franco Alfano, a veteran opera composer that never had a major success. The Puccini family seems to have gotten exactly what they wished for because Alfano’s ending has been roundly castigated over the years for its obviousness and lack of creativity. Virtually anyone who knows anything about opera and music would have to agree, although the scorn heaped on the very last phrase of the finale, a recap of the main theme of “Nessun dorma” is unwarranted in the light of the ending of Tosca, a blast of the third-act tenor aria, “E lucevan’ le stelle.” (That’s probably where Alfano got the idea!)

So Turandot, the last great opera, has been seen and heard with the Alfano ending for many years and audiences have just had to lump it. Recently, at least two composers, the Italian Luciano Berio and a Thai, Somtow Suchakirkul, have composed their own endings to Puccini’s opera, trying no doubt to improve on Alfano’s pedestrian effort. In the last two years, Berio’s version has been performed several times by some well established companies, including the Vienna Staatsoper and the Los Angeles Opera. I finally heard a recording of the Berio version and it is more serious and technically interesting than Alfano’s, but it is not really satisfying and I’d just as soon hear the opera with the more familiar ending. It appears that there is no real solution to the unfinished opera that would make everyone happy. But it’s possible that there never really was a brilliant conclusion to this work in the cards, not even if Puccini had lived long enough to do the job himself!

The problem with the ending of Turandot has been discussed quite a bit over the years. Simply stated, the problem is: After the suicide of Liù, how can any reconciliation between Calaf and Turandot have any meaning, especially in Puccini’s unique musical and dramatic language? The composer had wanted to be faithful to Gozzi’s fairy tale ending in having the frigid Turandot melt in Calaf’s arms and assuring that the pair would live happily ever after. But how can this happen so that Calaf retains any integrity at all when Liù has just given her life for the tenor because of the bloodthirsty prima donna? The real difficulty here is inherent in the history of the libretto. Back in 1920, when Puccini first agreed to adapt Gozzi’s 1762 play, he suggested that the librettists, Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, create another character who could be infused with the kind of sentiment and emotion that Puccini could pour his talents into as he typically did with his heroines. Turandot is definitely not that kind of character. She is an archetype, not a person (Puccini himself referred to her as “superhuman”), more likely to be found in a Wagner, not an Italian, opera. Her main aria, “In questa reggia,” features the kind of unlyrical bombast one expects from an Elsa or a Freia. It is no fluke that most of the noted Turandots are Wagnerian sopranos.

The typically Puccinian hapless and pathetic woman that Adami and Simoni came up with was Liù, for whom the composer wrote some stunningly beautiful music. And predictably, as with other Puccini heroines, audiences are deeply sympathetic towards the loving slave girl. And that’s the rub, because when she sacrifices her life for Calaf, no matter how quickly Turandot is transformed by true love, it’s impossible for audiences to forgive her, or to be happy for the tenor. And what a shame, too, because the first two-and-a-fraction acts of this opera are musically outstanding. Like Verdi before him, Puccini was able to demonstrate a powerful sense of self renewal, incorporating many of the latest musical concepts into his score and still retain an undeniable uniqueness. As in Madama Butterfly he masterfully, yet unaffectedly, weaves his familiar mosaic of melodic phrases into a typical pattern of recurrent buildups and climaxes. In addition to the use of dominant, pentatonic and whole-tone harmonies found in the earlier opera, he gives a slight nod to atonal devices in Turandot. And as he did in his Japanese opera with music from that country, he incorporates authentic Chinese tunes in his last work, without sacrificing the distinctly Italian feeling that reigns supreme over most of the opera.

Puccini biographers and critics tend to explain the opera’s abbreviated third act via the declining health and then the death of the composer. This is not an easy theory to refute. But the time that Puccini had in reasonably good health, based on his earlier efforts, was certainly enough for him to finish his last work. It looks like Puccini may have simply painted himself into a corner, dramatically speaking. After Liù’s death, there really was no solution to the finale, especially in the love duet conceived by the composer that was supposed to be the dramatic and musical climax of the opera. Here we must note that Puccini was not Verdi, who would never have found himself in this position. If Puccini did not himself impose the deus ex machina device that ends Turandot, he would have had very little choice in the matter even if he had fully recovered from his cancer. This is because, once the character of Liù was created, the libretto was fatally flawed.

If Puccini’s failing health was an issue, it may have been that he did not have the strength to force his librettists to rewrite the third act, or even more, of the opera. But even this could not realistically have happened by the time so much music had been written. So the question is: How could Puccini work so ingeniously on his score with this fatal dramatic error looming all the time? This situation had never occurred with his earlier masterpieces. But then he had the super libretto team of Illica and Giacosa, with whom he fought tooth and nail to shape his texts to his own musical and dramatic purposes. Was he just too weak to fight with Adami and Simoni or had he actually lost his formerly sure instinct for drama? Puccini had lost something all right. It was his mentor and savviest adviser and perhaps a father figure, too – his publisher and friend, Giulio Ricordi, who passed away in 1912. It is absolutely inconceivable that Ricordi, acting in his company’s as well as Puccini’s interests, would have ever approved a libretto like Turandot's. In the composition of Puccini’s greatest operas Ricordi had the final say in all issues – musical and dramatic. He would have seen that the dramatic problems of the third act of Turandot could not be resolved and would not have permitted the work to go forward as we know it.

Puccini once said that he succeeded as an opera composer by dramatizing “great sorrows in small souls.” What Turandot is and what Calaf becomes are not the kind of individuals that Puccini or his audiences were comfortable with. As the story turns out at the end, it wouldn’t matter who finished this opera. It wouldn’t be very much like Puccini even if Puccini finished it. So enjoy the part that Puccini actually did compose, and don’t think too much about what happens afterwards.