Since the 1990 Football World Cup, when Luciano Pavarotti made 'Nessun Dorma' the aria that millions of sports fans were singing around the world, Puccini’s final opera Turandot has become arguably his most popular. That accolade is especially impressive given that his catalogue also includes all-time-favourites La Bohème and Madama Butterfly. It’s all the more so when you consider that Turandot has one huge challenge: it has no ending.
Turandot was left unfinished prior to Puccini's death, so that on the first night, 25th April 1926, at the La Scala opera house in Milan, conductor Arturo Toscanini stopped the proceedings at the last completed moment written by Puccini, directly after the slave girl Liu meets her tragic end. Toscanini turned to the audience and said, '“'Here the opera ends, because here the maestro died,' and the curtain was lowered. How solemn the atmosphere must have been in the theatre.
'It's all quite trite'
Now we have an ending, because Puccini’s student, Franco Alfano, made a completion and it was this ending that was performed at most subsequent performances in 1926 and has been used in almost every production ever since. It ends with the ‘hero’ Calaf melting the heart of the icy Princess Turandot with an ardent kiss; she proclaims his name to be love, and everyone joins in with a (in my opinion) raucous chorus of 'Nessun Dorma'. It’s all quite trite.
The enormous beauty and profound depth of artistic expression in the final moments of Liu’s life, set against the final, funereal murmurings of the old man Timur and the chorus are characteristic of the composer's pure brilliance for musical drama. To abruptly turn to a bombastic and vulgar acceptance of Turandot’s behavior and Calaf’s blatant disregard for life, family, and love? You won't find anything like that written by Puccini himself.
There have been attempts to replace the Alfano, with numerous other composers going back to Puccini’s sketches and creating their own new endings. Composers such as Luciano Berio, Janet Maguire and Hao Weiya have had a go, and there have been quite a few more.
Some opera companies have also restored Alfano’s much longer original version (which Toscanini insisted be cut to the bare bones). In my view, they’re all missing the larger point, and we have largely been misguided by an entitled sense that things simply must conclude satisfactorily.
'We shouldn't be looking for an ending to Turandot at all'
After all, do we feel that the downbeat ending of Puccini's Manon Lescaut is just, or that Tosca's enormous betrayal of Tosca and Cavaradossi is anything less than profoundly upsetting, or poor Mimi, a character whose death in any production leaves me in a pool of tears, deserves her pathetically graceful end? Surely not.
We shouldn’t be looking for an ending to Turandot at all, because here’s my revelation: Puccini already gave us one. The lack of an ending is the ending! The 'no ending' is in some way at its core the most sincere expression to what Puccini wanted, believed, and could justify.
- We named Puccini one of the greatest Italian composers of all time... and one of the best opera composers ever
The production I’m conducting now, at Zurich Opera, chooses to stop where (as some say Toscanini actually said on that legendary first night) 'the Maestro laid down his pen'. That is, at the moment where Liu dies. Having conducted the opera several times, everything suddenly makes so much more sense to me when it's performed in this way.
'Puccini had plenty of opportunities to finish the opera'
Puccini had plenty of opportunities to finish this opera himself, and he didn’t. Of the mysterious unwritten finale there is no piano score, no full sketch. Even the libretto was getting reworked (without the librettist, which was usual practice for Puccini). Why the blank?
He needed no invitation to put his ideas down onto paper in some way. Consider: up to that point in the action, he had completed the piano score, done all the editing up to the point of Liu’s death - and then he went back and orchestrated the entire thing! Not one bar up to that point was left unorchestrated: the opera is completely finished up that point.
He put the score down for some few months, became aware of his cancer, and never picked up the pen to finish what was in the libretto. So, he decided to just leave the last 15 minutes of the libretto unwritten? He didn’t think to put down even a basic version of an ending when he knew that he had cancer? All we have are very tiny melodic fragments he wrote - that is, basically nothing. I don’t buy it. A man so obsessed with his legacy, and with the characters that he so loved in his operas, could not have left any uncared for.
Princess Turandot - a villain with a positive ending?
The ending Alfano gives us leaves Princess Turandot living happily ever after. Yet Puccini was never a composer who worshipped the bad guy. OK, there’s an argument as to whether Turandot is a villain or not - she is herself a victimised character (traumatised by the abuse of her ancestor, she arranges for the beheading of all suitors).
However, because she victimises others, I do not believe Puccini could bring himself to give her a positive ending. His operas are always about love and always somehow about the marginalized, and/or persecuted woman. In Madama Butterfly, in fact, we actually have no fewer than three female characters, who are all victims (Butterfly, Suzuki and Kate Pinkerton - and look how gracious they are to each other).
Butterfly, without animosity, gives Kate the two things she loves most in the world - her child and the love of her life, Pinkerton. Even in the comedic Gianni Schicchi, the wily title-character is motivated to use his cunning in the cause of facilitating the marriage of his lovelorn, empathetic daughter, Lauretta. No. In the mindset of such a composer, the vicious Turandot cannot, surely, end happily.
Calaf: a great role, but not a hero
And then we have Calaf, the tenor who tries to win her hand. He's not a hero either, even if he does get the famous tune.
He’s cavalier with the lives of his family as well as his own - and he dumps his aged father on Liu without a second thought and just tells her to take care of him! This is also not love, but ambition, and that's another trait that Puccini never rewards.
So how could Puccini edify either of these characters? No. His operas by and large wear the mantle of saintliness - he takes up the causes of the abandoned, the tortured, the betrayed, the ill or frail women.
In Turandot, when we reach Liu’s death, that is where the opera must end. And why not end just like that indeed? In the 21st century we are so used to stories being open-ended. How many movies are there where the resolution is not concrete, from the films of Luis Buñuel to Christopher Nolan’s Inception? Turandot done this way becomes not about the resolution but about the interaction of the characters and the drama - and that is in the music as well.
Stravinsky, Debussy, atonality: the rich world of Turandot
The score is full of references to the savagery of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and to Debussy. There are nods to atonality and bitonality; there are Oriental pentatonic scales, and graceful ‘Pucciniesque’ writing. Everything is in dialogue, musical resolutions are rare in Turandot.
On the subject of the opera's sound-aesthetics, isn't it beyond strange that nowadays people tend to treat the opera as a musical parody, and that with the Alfano ending we are left with a parody of a parody? It's a lazy way to think about it - there is not one element, other than the array of gongs, in the orchestra that is radically different than any of his previous operas, so why should this one suddenly be a shout-fest? That's not just about the ending, but I'll save that for another article!
I think we should embrace and forego the ending that the composer never wrote. Then what remains is a Turandot that embodies the uncertainty of our time. That makes it a truly modern opera.
Robert Treviño
Robert Treviño conducts Puccini's Turandot at Zurich Opera from 30 June 2024. Treviño is Music Director of the Basque National Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, and records for Ondine. His most recent recording was Respighi's 'Roman Trilogy'; his next recording will be released this autumn.