Program notes by Reg Didham from Chorus pro Musica's performance of May 31, 1998.
Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini was born in Lucca, Italy on 23 December 1858, and died in Brussels, Belgium on 29 November 1924. He was born into a family tradition of church musicians, and thus his first musical experiences were those of a church organist—and choirmaster-in-training. He was singing in the choirs of St. Martino and St. Michele in Lucca at the age of ten and began playing organ at the age of fourteen in churches in and around Lucca. He began composing at seventeen, and it was also in that year (1876) that his first exposure to opera occurred, a performance of Aida at Pisa. The opening of this "musical window," as he later called it, signaled his break with his family's tradition and set him on his new path as Italy's greatest composer of opera after Verdi. In 1880 he entered the Conservatory at Milan and there learned both the physical ambience (as in La Boheme) and musical skills that would continue to appear throughout the rest of his great operatic output.
The story of the composing of Turandot is itself almost operatic in its ironies, tragedy, and human idiosyncrasies coming to bear upon what became historic musical art. The composer, after a long and successful career, was seeking new challenges, both musically and in the subjects his librettists would treat for him to set. One of his collaborators, Renato Simoni, suggested a play by Carlo Gozzi, Turandotte. As Mosco Carner, in his article on Puccini in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, says:
For Puccini this five-act play was the most human of Gozzi's dramatic fiabe, and Gozzi himself had felt the same way when writing it. With Turandot Puccini felt that he was moving on to a loftier plane, that an 'original and perhaps unique work is in the making,' compared with which all his previous music seemed to him 'a farce.'
Presented in the winter of 1919–1920 to Puccini by his other librettist, Giuseppe Adami, in an Italian translation by Andrea Maffei of an adaptation by Schiller, the Gozzi story fired Puccini's imagination, but he knew there was still something missing. As Julian Budden writes in his article in the New Grove Opera:
Puccini returned it to him with the instruction to make it the basis of the libretto, adding 'but on it you must rear another figure; I mean—I can't explain!' (clearly he was groping his way towards the conception of the slave-girl Liu).
Continuing to think about other characterizations in the opera, the composer later wrote:
'It is just possible that by retaining them [Gozzi's "masks", the basis for the characters Ping, Pang, and Pong] with discretion we should have an Italian element [commedia dell 'arte] which, in the midst of so much Chinese mannerism&helips; would introduce a touch of our life and, above all, of sincerity.'
From these two examples, we can get an idea of the composer's thought processes as he approached the story. Once that story had reached a form the composer felt he could work with in August 1920, composition began in earnest. During the next year, working from folk music Ricordi had sent him and listening to a Chinese music box lent him by Baron Fassani, he began sketching out musical ideas. With Adami as dialogist and Simoni as versifier, the work continued throughout that year and into the next, 1922. During that time Puccini wrote the second act scene for Ping, Pang, and Pong, as well as Turandot's famous aria, In questa reggia. At the end of the year, Puccini made what Budden calls his "unfortunate decision to have Liu die under torture." This led to the problem of Calaf and Turandot's final duet. For two years, Simoni and Adami sent him version after version of this scene, none of which met with his approval. Halfway through this frustrating process, in the autumn of 1923, the composer had begun to experience throat pain and a year later was diagnosed with throat cancer. X-ray treatments at La Couronne clinic in Brussels, Belgium seemed initially successful, but the strain of it all proved too much for his heart, and he died there on 29 November 1924. Carner describes the completion process:
Puccini left three sets of sketches for the final two scenes of Turandot, of which one, consisting of 36 pages of continuous music in short score, was used by Franco Alfano for the completion of the opera. The first production was given at La Scala on 25 April 1926, when Toscanini ended the performance with the death of Liu, the last scene Puccini was able to finish. On the following evening the opera was played with Alfano's ending.
Franco Alfano (born 8 March 1875, died 27 October 1954) probably deserves as much public sympathy as any composer who ever lived, having been assigned by Toscanini to the totally thankless task of completing the final masterwork by Italy's beloved and recently deceased maestro. That the music does not live up to what goes before is inevitable and forgivable; what Alfano achieved, however, deserves all music-lovers' gratitude: he worked from Puccini's surviving sketches to create a workable completion to the great unfinished masterpiece, one that allows coherent performances as a theatrical work and remains faithful to everything left by Puccini as to his intentions for the finale. Alfano's own operas included one entitled Risurrezione (1903), which had been performed a thousand times in Italy by 1951; L'ombra di Don Giovanni (1913) and La leggenda di Sakuntala (1920) are considered the most important and musically successful of his subsequent works.
In Kobbe's Opera Book, the Earl of Harewood describes the opera's performance history:
&helips; For a few years after the premiere, performances generally followed his [Alfano's] reconstruction. In Italy however the opera was heard in a much shorter version which had the sanction of Toscanini and which was indeed performed at la Scala after the first night, and it was not long before this was generally adopted. Curiously enough, mutterings about the inadequacy of Alfano's work were based on something he neither planned nor executed and it was not until a London concert performance in 1982 at the Barbiean (with Sylvia Sass, Franco Bonisolli and conducted by Owain Arwe1 Hughes) that Alfano's ending was restored in full and was heard as far as was known for the first time for well over half a century. [Today's performance uses the shorter, more commonly heard version that was performed by Toscanini the night after the premiere, with several additional cuts.]
At the close of his New Grove Opera article, Julian Budden sums up the musical importance of Turandot:
Despite its unfinished state Turandot is rightly regarded as the summit of Puccini's achievement&helips; The style remains true to the composer's 19th-century roots, but it is toughened and amplified by the assimilation of uncompromisingly modern elements, including bitonality and an adventurous use of whole-tone, pentatonic and modal harmony &helips; The music is organized in massive blocks, each motivically based—a system which shows to particular advantage in Act 1, arguably the most perfectly constructed act in Puccini's output; while the scoring shows a rare imagination in the handling of large forces (the writing for xylophone alone immediately attracts the attention). These attributes, combined with Puccini's unfailing ability to communicate directly with an audience, have established Turandot as a classic of 20th-century opera.