Turandot: when a composer's opera echoes his personal issues

I probably should have majored in Psych. When I lecture about opera, I always seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time focusing on the ways in which music drama manifests human psychology. One such aspect is the way in which issues of a composer's personal life can be reflected, consciously or otherwise, in the operas he creates.

Giacomo Puccini - he had issues!

Take Verdi as an example. As a young married man with two infant children, he suffered an unimaginable tragedy. Within a couple of years, he lost his entire family to encephalitis, leaving him with a crushing case of survivor's guilt. Not coincidentally, many of his greatest operas (Rigoletto, Trovatore, Aida, and several others) deal with parents who directly or indirectly cause the death of their children.

Puccini's Turandot provides two fascinating examples of this phenomenon. The first involves the composer's distaste for big cities; the other involves a scandalous episode in his marriage.

For a man whose career called on him to make frequent trips to Milan, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London and New York, it's ironic that Puccini was only at peace at his villa in Torre del Lago, a coastal village in Northern Italy. There, at least until 1921, when the installation of a factory ruined the environment for him, he could indulge his passion for bird-hunting.

Puccini's letters are rife with complaints about city life. Some examples:

"In a few days I shall be back home - and I can hardly wait: I am so sick of Paris..."

"How it bores me to stay here (in Paris) so long! I should like to be at Torre or Chiatri, in solitude and peace."

"The thought of going to (New York) is getting on my nerves. Why did I ever accept? How glad I'd feel to be back in Torre del Lago with my free life and the fresh air!"

Peruse his letters, and such comments flow in a continual stream of wistful resignation.

So in this context, I'm especially interested in the first scene of Act 2 in Turandot, the twelve minutes given over to the three ministers Ping, Pang and Pong as they gossip and ruminate prior to the scene of the three riddles. After a brief conference ironing out the logistics of the Unknown Prince's impending trial, they pause for a trio of infinitely nostalgic, utterly beautiful music beginning with Ping's "Ho una casa nell'Honan". (Listen to it here.) Here's the English text:

PING

I have a little house in Honan with a little blue lake all surrounded with bamboo. And here I am, wasting my life, wearing out my brain over sacred books, when I could go back there to my little blue lake.

PONG

I have forests near Tsiang of which none are lovelier, but their shade is not for me.

PANG
I have a garden near Kiu that I left to come here, that I'll never see again.

Can there be any doubt that the longing in the music of this trio is Puccini's own? Remember: at one point the libretto had omitted the ministers, a version of whom is found in Carlo Gozzi's play (the basis for the opera); Puccini suggested inserting them. They are his personal touch and, in this scene, they are speaking directly for him. It's the composer sharing his greatest desire to us, his audience.

The slave girl Liù was another invention of Puccini's, this time with no parallel in earlier versions of the fable. (His motivation for doing so will be the topic for a future post...) Liù claims to be the only person in Peking to know the name of the prince, information Turandot is desperate to obtain to escape having to marry him. As the prince is restrained, the hard-hearted "princess of ice" has her guards try to beat the name out of the slave, but Liù's lips are sealed to protect the man she loves. It's important for our purpose here to remember that the prince does not return her love; he's obsessed with Turandot. At last, to escape the torment lest she lose her will, the slave girl grabs a weapon and kills herself.

Anyone who has read Puccini's biography should recognize this scene as eerily similar to events in Puccini's life in 1909.

Puccini's married his wife Elvira because he had gotten her pregnant. She was married to another man at the time, but she and the composer bided their time until her husband's death enabled Puccini to "do the right thing" and give their son Antonio a respectable name.

Elvira was a difficult woman, and their relationship was not close. The Catholic prohibition against divorce accounted for the longevity of their union more than any real intimacy. It has been said that Puccini, like Pygmalion loving the statue he sculpted, fell in love with the delicate, ultra-feminine characters he created, like Mimi and Cio-Cio-San, to find the ideal mate lacking in his marriage.

That said, Puccini was attracted to other women, many of whom returned his interest. He once described himself as a "mighty hunter of wild birds, opera librettos and beautiful women". He was, after all, handsome, wealthy and famous. Elvira, naturally, endured this inescapable reality with little grace, a situation that came to a head in 1909.

The Puccinis employed a young woman named Doria Manfredi as household maid. Elvira became convinced that Puccini was having an affair with her, in spite of denials from both parties. She made life misereable for Doria, harrassing her, berating her, and making hysterical scenes in public. Doria, evidently not in a position to defend herself, ultimately committed suicide by poison.

The girl's outraged family demanded an autopsy; it revealed that Doria had died a virgin. In retrospect, the idea that the glamorous Puccini, who undoubtedly was admired by any number of fascinating women, would canoodle with the help was absurd. The Manfredi family brought charges against Elvira, who was convicted and sentenced to prison!

After five months of incarceration, Puccini (perhaps feeling guilty over some actual affairs) used his financial resources to "settle the matter out of court" as they say in the papers, granting the release of his wife. She returned to him, and they remained a couple till Puccini's death in 1924.

A stern and difficult woman torturing a young woman into suicide in a case where the man involved did not love the victim. Yikes.

Was this deliberate? Or would Puccini be amazed if we could show him how Liù's death recalled his own tragedy?

THAT, my friends, is a good question.

Turandot: Puccini out of his comfort zone

Do you keep up with current movies? I'll bet you do, so you've probably heard about Fences, the adaptation of August Wilson's play with a cast including Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. It's nominated for four Academy awards. I haven't seen it yet, but I've been busy; it's on my list.

1926 poster for premiere production.

So what movies in film history are similar to Fences? Ben-Hur? Cleopatra? Lawrence of Arabia? Star Wars: The Force Awakens?

Not hardly. Fences, from all I've read, is a small-scale family drama involving mainly a father, mother and son, taking place mostly in a fenced-in back yard. Those other flicks? Big-budget Hollywood epics with huge casts, special effects, ...the whole shebang.

And this is one of the interesting things about Giacomo Puccini's final opera Turandot: after a lifetime of writing intimate operas akin to Fences, he went for giant-sized spectacle. It's a jarring change. It was a huge artistic gamble.

Consider the cast of Tosca. Like Fences, it focuses on the interactions of three people: Tosca, Cavaradossi and Scarpia. A chorus of church-goers makes a brief appearance in the Act I finale.

Madama Butterfly has a setting comparably limited as that of Fences, all the action taking place in a small house in Nagasaki. Just as the fenced-in yard of the film is a metaphor for the repressed emotions and limited perspective of Washington's character, so Cio-Cio-san's house on top of a hill represents her isolation as she's abandoned by both Pinkerton and her relatives.

And so it goes with the other works pre-dating Turandot. 

The other big departure in Turandot is Puccini's abandonment of any element of the verismo premise of the so-called Nuova Scuola of late nineteenth-century Italian opera seen in works of Mascagni and Leoncavallo.  Gone were stories of starving young artists and their love lives, a painter, a teen-aged Geisha, a saloon-keeper in the Wild West, a disgraced nun, and so on. For his last work, Puccini chose a fairy tale. Any story in which a homicidal man-hating princess is instantly transformed into a vulnerable, loving woman by a single kiss has pretty much derailed off the verismo track.

The source for Turandot is the ancient collection of stories known today as The 1001 Nights. Theses are the tales told by Scheherazade to the Sultan to avoid execution. You knew that Sinbad and Ali Baba characters in The 1001 Nights, but perhaps didn't realize it included Puccini's Ice Princess.

The collection was translated into French in 1710. In 1760, Carlo Gozzi (the author who also gave the world Pinocchio), adapted the story into a play. He added elements of Italian Commedia dell'Arte, with characters who became Ping, Pang and Pong in the opera.

TRIVIA: Gozzi's play has indirect ties to two other productions of the current Virginia Opera season. Friedrich Schiller made a German version of the play in 1802 that proved quite successful. A production at the court in Stuttgart in 1809 featured incidental music composed by Carl Maria von Weber, the composer of Der Freischütz, the subject of my last three posts.

Another link: Bertolt Brecht, who penned the text for our season-opening The Seven Deadly Sins by Kurt Weill, wrote his own version of Turandot after seeing the Gozzi play in 1932. As one might expect, his Turandot became a biting satiric comedy lampooning capitalism.

So: Puccini took a leap of faith, trusting that his skills were equal to the challenge of creating a viable fairy-tale epic with giant orchestra, chorus, and out-sized scenes of pomp and spectacle. Did he pull it off?

We'll never really know, of course, because his death from throat cancer in 1924 not only left the opera unfinished, but also left substantial challenges to be resolved in crafting a successful conclusion. The ending cobbled together by composer Franco Alfano doesn't come close to solving the difficulties that Puccini knew remained in the last scene; at best, it's a tacked-on approximation of Puccini's style whose main value is that it makes the piece sufficiently stage-worthy to allow viable performances.

In the next few posts, we'll explore the nature of those challenges as well as documenting Puccini's struggles and bouts of depression as he labored under the strain of mastering this new style. We'll see why nothing Alfano could have written, or any other composer for that matter, would have produced a completely satisfactory final scene.

And I'll tell you how I, Your Humble Blogger, would have solved at least one of the major challenges.

Whatever remains missing in his incomplete masterpiece, the beauty and variety of the material he did finish resulted in a thrilling opera that is cherished by millions, including Your Humble Blogger. This is an opera that delivers on nearly all of the pleasures of the art form. Puccini's shade can rest easy, though I doubt that it does. Perfectionist that he was, it's got to be driving him nuts that we're staging something he wasn't done with.