Turandot

by Giacomo Puccini

seen by live streaming from The Metropolitan Opera New York on 12 October 2019

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts Christine Goerke as Turandot, Yusif Eyvazov as Calàf, Eleonora Buratto as Liù and James Morris as Timur in a revival of Franco Zefffirelli's 1987 production of Puccini's last opera.  

The first thing to say is that of course it is both musically powerful and visually splendid. The Met orchestra under their new musical director delivers the score with an astonishing punch, rendering the gaudy splendour of the Imperial scenes almost overwhelming, but also providing a more sensitive accompaniment to the more intimate scenes of bewilderment and growing love. In this they are mtched by some great singing from the three principals Goerke (icily imperious and then troubled), Eyvazov (passionate and determined) and Buratto (hopelessly in love and self-sacrficial). Unending streams of chorus provide the necessary heft to complement the orchestral fireworks in the great set pieces in all three acts. The overall result is viscerally thrilling.

The next thing to say, is that so much of the story is really quite distasteful. A fable of three riddles to be answered by the hero to win the princess is elaborated into some sort of realism by the presence of grisly heads on pikes, the remains of unsuccessful suitors; a back story for the princess justifying her implacable antipathy to men by a creepy identification with  long-dead ravished forebear; an over-the-top unrequited devotion to death of a slave girl; and a crowd whose fickle emotions run from bloodlust to sentimental pity almost without pause for breath, not once, but twice. One should not press for plausibility in opera libretti, but the gorgeousness of the music only barely redeems the unpleasantness beneath, and the orientalising of the setting seems to be an excuse for glossing over the nastiness with spectacle, exotic costumes and preposterous soldiery. (One may well ask, by the way, why Turandot et al should take Liù at her word, after torturing her and watching her die, and fail to question the old man she is with about the stranger, who is actually his son. It's obvious that Liù is covering for him, and any self-respecting tyrant or tyrant's stooge would realise this. But basically, Liù and Timur are just picked up and dropped by the exigencies of the story as needed.)

These reservations prompt lingering unease whenever I watch a production of this opera, or listen to it. In some ways the barbaric splendour of Zeffirelli's designs, seeking to bring Chinese scroll illustrations into three dimensions, underscore the problems as much they distract from them. But one can hardly fail to be impressed by the brilliance of the first appearance of the ice princess in a pavilion that rises as if through mist behind the squalor of the poor city dwellings of the chorus, or of the great revelation of the imperial audience chamber in the second act after the comic interlude of the courtiers Ping, Pang and Pong. Zeffirelli certainly knew what he was doing with the enormous resources of the Met's stage.