“I’ve always thought they’re very offensive stereotypes of Asian women and very stereotyped stories, in spite of some very beautiful music.” Performances of Turandot were banned in China until the late 1990s. “Opera companies are always asking, and I’ve always turned them down,” Chinese-American opera director Chen Shi-Zheng told the Daily Review, an Australian newspaper, last year, after finally acquiescing to staging a massive production in Sydney Harbor. That’s how that opera seems to live today.” “We get to have all of our negative associations of the West coming in and domesticating the East, of women learning the right way to be domesticated. “It is cold comfort to say it’s not really real, because it’s being treated as if it’s real,” says Naomi Andre, a University of Michigan scholar who studies race and gender in opera. “It doesn’t represent China any more than Beauty and the Beast represents medieval France.”īut others have branded Turandot outright racist, staged as it often is and historically has been by mostly white performers whose pancake makeup and choppy, exaggerated movements are basically “yellowface,” or ethnocentric representations of Asians in media and entertainment. “It doesn’t represent China any more than Brighton Pavilion does,” says Rob Kearley, director of Lyric’s current production. But ultimately, why is it popular? Because it has fabulous tunes.”įreud and others tend to dismiss the opera’s Orientalism-the nameless “Mandarin,” the stereotypical dragon queen, the trio of buffoonish jester-ministers named Ping, Pang, and Pong-by describing the work as a fairy tale or fable. “ Turandot was his last opera, and I think he poured into it both a lifetime of experience and a determination to break new ground. “Puccini is a master composer, a master orchestrator, a master writer for voices, both solo and choral voices,” says Anthony Freud, Lyric’s general director, president, and CEO.

Moved by Liu’s example, Turandot gives in to Calaf, dropping her resistance to love, marriage, and domestication.Īsk opera lovers why Turandot is still produced today and they’ll likely cite the power and beauty of the music. Despite admonishments from his father, the exiled Tartar king, and a slave girl named Liu, he strikes a massive gong, signaling his intention to vie for Turandot’s hand.įrom there the plot twists and turns, but by the end of act three, Calaf has bested Turandot’s riddles and the piteous Liu is dead by her own hand, having sacrificed herself to protect Calaf, whom she secretly loves. That doesn’t deter Calaf, a Tartar prince in exile, who falls in love with Turandot after glimpsing her in a window. But even one mistake will doom the suitor to death.

A masked character known only as the Mandarin issues a fearsome proclamation in a deep baritone: the vicious but beautiful princess Turandot must marry any man who successfully answers three riddles, which she herself will pose. Turandot opens in mythical ancient China, replete with sumptuous royals, bedraggled peasants, and a slew of fantastical beasts-phoenixes, unicorns, and giant tortoises carved into the walls of the palace loggia. To ask what it means for Lyric to stage Turandot yet again is to ask what it means to present an Orientalist fantasy for public consumption in 2017. Puccini never visited China (nor did Franco Alfano, who completed Turandot in 1926, two years after Puccini’s death) and suffered from what today might crassly be called “yellow fever,” an obsession with Asian women he twice made the tragic heroines of his work. Lyric has staged it five times in its 60-plus-year history, roughly once a decade both the San Francisco Opera and the Met are also putting on runs this season and “Nessun Dorma,” Calaf’s sung promise to win over the princess, is arguably the most famous tenor aria in opera (and the stuff of many a Pavarotti compilation).īut for all Turandot‘s popularity, and for all Puccini’s efforts to weave Chinese melodies into his score, the opera has always been a problematic exemplification of Western projections about the Far East. Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, now being produced by Lyric Opera through January 27, is one of the most popular operas in the classical repertoire. Get your UnGala tickets: A museum takeover and art party celebrating the Reader's 50ish anniversary Close

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