When French president (then-candidate) Emmanuel Macron waxed lyrical about his passion for the composer Gioachino Rossini in spring 2017, the transatlantic chattering classes gushed in admiration (and made snide comparisons to Donald Trump). But when British foreign minister Boris Johnson was caught on a hot mic a few months later quoting Rudyard Kipling’s imperial-era poem “Mandalay” on a trip to Myanmar, the reaction was swift, sharp, and negative. Not all cultural literacy, it seems, is created equal.
Seems like there’s a straightforward rule at play here, right? We want a cultivated elite, but not a bigoted one. Know your culture, but stay away from the less-enlightened stuff—particularly if you’re representing your country abroad. But on closer inspection, the division may not be so clear. While “Mandalay” has a disparaging reference to Buddha (the poem is written in the voice of a former enlisted soldier), Johnson didn’t quote that bit. He had just rung a temple bell, then said to a companion, “ ‘the temple bells, they say / Come you back, you English soldier.’ Remember that?” Which seems like a natural enough invocation. Meanwhile, two of the compositions Macron namechecked are Rossini’s Maometto II (about the Turkish sultan Mehmet II) and Mosè in Egitto (Moses in Egypt). Among the Italian composer’s other works are L’Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers), Il turco in Italia, Semiramide, and several others with similar East-meets-West themes. If you follow the late Edward Said, as many in the intellectual firmament still do, the very act of enjoying something like this partakes of and enables the oppression of the Eastern “other.”
These thoughts were in my head as I watched the last of the great Italian operas, Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, at the Met this season. Turandot has been performed more than 300 times at the Met, and Franco Zeffirelli’s ultra-lavish staging, which premiered in 1987, is one of the Met’s staples. It is also, as my fellow millennials say, very “problematic.”
Turandot is the story of the eponymous (and fictitious) princess of China who has taken a vow: No man shall wed her who cannot answer three riddles—and those who fail shall be put to death. As our story starts, the body count stands at 25, though soon a new victim, the prince of Persia, is added to the tally, his head carried onstage and impaled on a pike. Just as the suitor is condemned, however, Calàf, the disguised prince of Tartary, catches a glimpse of Turandot and falls head-over-heels in love. Despite the protests of his deposed father Timur and Liù, a slave who has faithfully followed Timur due to her own semi-hidden love of Calàf, Calàf takes up the challenge of the three riddles.
In the second act, Calàf appears before the court and—wouldn’t you know it—guesses the three riddles correctly. Turandot is devastated, for she had taken her radical vow in memory of an ancestor who was enslaved and murdered by a conquering prince. She begs her father, “You can’t give me to him . . . like a slave.” The emperor, who seems relieved that the slaughter he has been forced to oversee is at an end, is inflexible: The same vow that made him an executioner will now make her a wife. But Calàf, feeling his oats, makes a counter-offer: If she can guess his name by morning, she can execute him. If not, she shall wed him.
Enraged and scared, Turandot has her soldiers toss the city, while the prince sings the famous, soaring “Nessun dorma” aria, boasting that they will never learn his secret. The soldiers come across his father and Liù, whom they torture. When the princess, impressed by the slave’s resistance, demands to know why she holds out, Liù confesses her love for the prince. Then, fearing she will no longer be able to endure, she commits suicide. Timur mourns her and chastens the excited onlookers.
Then follows what is widely considered the least believable, most troubling part of the opera: Calàf, who has seen all of this and not stopped it, issues one or two lines of protest and then immediately goes back on the offensive. Only this time, he grabs Turandot roughly and kisses her. This somehow causes Turandot’s icy heart to melt, whereupon Calàf realizes he wants her to choose him freely, and so tells her his name, putting his life in her hands. Standing before the imperial throne again, Turandot declares she does know the stranger’s name—it is “Love!” From torture to betrothal takes about 20 minutes.
Even for opera, this is fast work, and ever since its 1926 premiere, Turandot has been labeled a “flawed masterpiece.” In Puccini’s defense, he died just before completing it (the last duet and final scene were finished by Franco Alfano), and it’s impossible to say what revisions Puccini might have made before it premiered; on the other hand, it is clear the ending reflects his overall vision.
Rosa Raisa originated the role of Turandot at La Scala in 1926. [Mario Castagneri / Charles Mintzer Collection via Wikipedia]
The key to all this, I think, is that it’s not just an opera, it’s also a fairytale. Puccini and his librettists adapted the story from plays by Schiller and 18th-century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi, who in turn got it from the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami’s Haft Peykar (Seven Beauties), a collection of erotic and philosophical stories built from pre-Islamic tales. Therein lies the key to some of the unreality—fairytale characters are archetypes—as well as some of the cruelty. Fairytales, pre-Disney, were as bloody as they were magical: In the original story of Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet in order to fit the slipper; the original Sleeping Beauty story involves a rape, spousal murder, and attempted cannibalism. And of course, fairytales are often cross-cultural: Nizami’s original tale that became Turandot is told by a Slavic princess to her Persian husband.
Today, between the sexual politics and the cultural ones, Turandot feels something like opera in a minefield. How much of this is due to the opera and how much due to the production is an important question. On the one hand, the crowds of cowering peasants and scowling guards whipping them back, the half-naked headsman, the advisers with their exaggerated Fu Manchu facial hair are all part of this particular production. But it was Puccini, after all, who named Turandot’s three ministers Ping, Pang, and Pong, characters whom a 1926 review labeled as “three prattlers who have escaped from a perverted dream of Gilbert and Sullivan.” It was Puccini too who added the Oriental tones to the music, which arise in both dramatic and comic moments and which would be audible in even the most “cleaned-up” presentation.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that squeamishness about Turandot is a bit of a cottage industry at this point. Every revival of the Met’s Turandot for the last few years has prompted hand-wringing from critics over its sexual politics, cultural imperialism, or both. Recent productions by the Opera Company of Philadelphia and Lyric Opera of Chicago led to calls to mothball the whole opera.
But if worrying over Turandot is a cottage industry, Turandot is an industry, full stop. The Zeffirelli production, much like his production of La Bohème, remains a mainstay of the Met’s repertoire. It’s not hard to see why: The sets are visually stunning, particularly the second act’s imperial throne room, and the public likes faithful productions far more than most critics ever will. Economically, these are the gold standard for opera productions, paying off 30 years after the initial investment—and helping to keep the Met open to experimentation in other areas. And the backlash that hit in 2012, when a modern Tosca displaced a Zeffirelli production, put the management on notice not to try to replace the classics. Ultimately, it’s Puccini who has put us in this bind; the music is simply too good not to stage.
Ronald Naldi (background) as the Emperor Altoum and Oksana Dyka in the title role of Puccini’s ‘Turandot’ at the Met earlier this season. [Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera]
Can the current state of affairs last? Is it possible for the great and the good to go on enjoying Turandot and the rest of the operatic repertoire while their children—figurative and literal—have been allowed to grow into would-be Thomas Cromwells, bent on self-righteous iconoclasm, even as the whole thing gets papered over with a little condescension and a lot of hypocrisy?
This isn’t to say that Turandot in particular is going to be the target of our next lightning-strike cultural contretemps. It’s to say that opera is a target-rich environment. Just in the main run of the repertoire alone, Aida, Madama Butterfly, Die Zauberflöte, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, L’Italiana in Algeri, Otello, Carmen, and Il Trovatore, among others, present “cultural imperialism” and “Orientalism”-style problems, while everything from Don Giovanni to Cav/Pag has questionable sexual politics. And don’t even get me started on Wagner. If you took out everything that jars with modern sensibilities, you’d be left basically with Don Carlo and La Bohème, the latter of which is only acceptable because broad stereotypes of Paris don’t offend us in the same way that broad stereotypes of Peking do.
Of course, nuanced reevaluation of the canon, through sensitive new productions, is possible—even desirable. But nuance is not our era’s forte. In the millennials (of whom I am one), we have a giant demographic cohort, of increasing economic power, convinced that it knows The Truth about our horrible history and what must be done about it. Our enervated center-left cultural elite nurtured and tolerated these attitudes in universities. The resulting protests, which have escaped the bounds of the academy, have not been pretty.
Germans, in response to uncomfortable historical echoes in the texts of some operas, have adopted another way: Starting at the post-WWII Bayreuth Wagner festivals, Regietheater (“director’s theater”) has allowed directors to stage operas in ways that fly against the text and are often absurdist or surrealist. But the Met is justly famous for the (nonpolitical) conservatism of its audience, and judging by the boos that greeted a recent production of Siegfried in Bayreuth, wherein humping crocodiles interrupted the main duet (yes, this was recently a thing), there’d probably be riots in Lincoln Square if Regie were attempted on a consistent basis.
The ideal approach is to trust that anyone cultured enough to see an opera, even for the first time, is probably sensible enough to get the difference between watching Puccini’s Peking and going off to conquer China. There are signs that such distinction-making is possible. Notably, Aleksandrs Antonenko, who, in the first half of this season’s run of Turandot, played Calàf in the traditional costume—which involves exaggerated, curved eyebrows—refused two years ago to wear blackface for a new production of Otello, suggesting some level of differentiation on his part. The Otello was a highly successful reimagination of the opera, revealing different but not unfaithful subtleties from the usual version. Meanwhile, in China, where Turandot was banned until 1998 because of its depiction of the Chinese, the opera has achieved something of the status of a “national opera” and was performed at great public expense in conjunction with the 2008 Olympic games—but notably, it has also featured revisions that make it more dramatically believable while keeping the story arc intact.
You can see the room for middle ground here. Insofar as the Zeffirelli Turandot can be uncomfortable, it’s often because the blocking is so wooden as to make the acting cartoonish. In 1987, the Met did not have its seat-back translations—these would not come in until 1995—and so the shows needed to be (literally) spectacular, while the acting could be of the just-face-the-audience-and-sing variety. Today, since you can follow the drama word-by-word, the lack of emotion in some scenes and rough blocking in others (particularly the final duet) produce jarring results. This could be fixed by a new, still somewhat faithful production or, though it isn’t the done thing at the Met, reblocking within Zeffirelli’s traditional set. (Why not make an exception for the master?)
Still, there is reason to worry. Short of a total departure from the story, it is difficult to imagine a restaging of Turandot that would not invite accusations of racism or sexism. Certainly, I can’t see a production team not fearing such accusations. That will probably keep the Zeffirelli production with us indefinitely. As far as the production goes, that’s not in and of itself the worst of worlds, but this kind of caution, when repeated, can lead to stagnation.
We have one consolation, those of us who think that the canon is better preserved with its faults than scrapped because of them: the transcendent music. It is hard to imagine Turandot being lost over the long term. But in the short-to-medium term, I am worried.
Nicholas M. Gallagher writes on opera, culture, and politics from New York.
