The final of Turandot, Toscanini and Alfano

Toscanini knew Turandot and Puccini was satisfied with the judgment of Toscanini, who was then the artistic director of La Scala. Puccini wrote to Adami: “Toscanini has just left from here. We are in perfect and friendly agreement and I finally breath…”. But the issue of the duet still remained. “We talked about the duet which I do not really like. What can we do? I do not know… I see darkness… By now this duet made me lose my mind”. In September 1924 in a rehearsal room of La Scala, Puccini met again Toscanini and played those parts of the opera that Toscanini had not heard yet. Puccini, in reality, was already very suffering and nearing the end. After his death, Toscanini, who knew the work, cared of identifying a composer who would complete the final scenes of Turandot. Franco Alfano was appointed and the choise could not be more appropriate, since his style had been modeled on that of Puccini. The teacher had left very detailed drafts that we could classify into three groups: a copy of text including the duet, with some musical annotations wrote down in the margin; a certain number of loose sheets of written music paper on which Puccini elaborated various ideas and, finally, thirty-six pages of a score draft containing a continuous and complete outline of the last two scenes. On this set of materials, Alfano based his work.

Find out more about Turandot’s Final. See Also:

Turandot: Puccini’s latest and most suffered Opera

Turandot: a double torment for Puccini

The final of Turandot and Toscanini

Article written by Maria Primiceri – teacher of Piano at the Tito Schipa Conservatory of Lecce and scholar of women musicians with events and conferences on Nannerl Mozart, the wives of Bach, Maria Szymanowska, Fanny Mendelssohn

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