Music: Puccini’s Last

Twenty-four years ago, when Arturo Toscanini conducted the world premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s unfinished opera, Turandot, he abruptly stopped the show in the middle of the third act—at the point Puccini had reached when he died. In what was to Toscanini a perfectly adequate explanation, he turned to the audience in Milan’s La Scala and announced simply, “Here Puccini ended his opera.” He refused to go a note farther on that occasion, even though he admitted that Puccini’s fellow composer Franco Alfano had done a good job of completing the score. Conductors since have not been so finicky; but even so, Turandot (roughly rhymes, with two afloat) has never been as popular as Puccini’s Tosca, Madame Butterfly, La Boheme. Last week a New York City Opera audience heard some of the reasons why.

To put on the first New York performance of Turandot in 20 years, City Opera’s Director Laszlo Halasz had reached all the way into Yugoslavia to find a soprano, the Zagreb Opera’s buxom, dark-haired Dragica Martinis, 29, who could, and would, sing the cold, high-ranging and ungrateful title role.

The story of Turandot comes from the same shop as Prokofiev’s delightful The Love for Three Oranges, but it is a far less juicy piece of fruit. Puccini’s librettists, like Prokofiev, took their story from an 18th Century “fable,” i.e., play, of Count Carlo Gozzi, who in turn had been inspired by a Chinese-Persian legend about a beautiful but petulant princess of ancient Cathay. The princess announces she will marry any man of noble blood who can answer three riddles; if he misses an answer, he loses his head.

Even though the handsome tenor wins the princess’ hand in the end, Turandot hardly offers much opportunity for dramatic movement on the stage. In the City Center production, Stage Director Vladimir Rosing and Designer H. A. Condell had succeeded in getting up some colorful pageantry; three Gilbert & Sullivan types named Ping, Pang anu Pong, the emperor’s ministers, did their best to give the opera some comic relief; and Soprano Martinis sang her stony and stolid role with a voice that was as strong, hard and cold as a wire cable. The chill was hardly her fault: singing her first Turandot, she found the part “so cold—really musicless.”

Puccini, in failing health, had not adorned his last opera with his most powerful or appealing music. It was the kind of piece opera fans wanted to hear once, for the historical’interest. But Turandot got a big hand and an A for effort.