Turandot, Puccini’s latest and most suffered opera

Turandot is Puccini’s latest opera. The Master had started working in Turandot in the early 1920s and for four years he tried desperately to complete it. He devoted himself completely to it between moments of great hope and profound despair. He felt in Turandot the fulfillment of “an original and maybe unique work” and just six months before he died, he wrote to Adami: “I think hour by hour, minute by minute, to Turandot, and all my music written so far seems to me a joke and I do not like it anymore “. In his letters you can feel the feverish rush to complete the job. He reprimands the poets, urges them to hurry, he feels them negligent towards him. One could not help thinking that Puccini felt the life was getting away from him and he would not be able to complete Turandot. And so it was. The Master had said: “The opera will be represented incomplete, then someone will come out of the limelight and tell the audience: ” At this point the Master is dead”.
Puccini died on November 29th 1924 and Turandot was represented for the first time at La Scala on April 25th 1926 directed by Toscanini who, after the scene of Liù’s death, put down his baton and addressed the audience, with a barely audible voice, said: “Here the opera ends, because at this point the Master is dead”. Then adding something like: “Death in this case was stronger than art”. The following evening the opera was performed with the Alfano’s finale.

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, Toscanini and Alfano

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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