Puccini’s riddle

Puccini’s last, incomplete opera Turandot is a work that I usually find disgusting and boring, so much so that it is one of the very few repertoire works that I avoid seeing.

Puccini’s last, incomplete opera Turandot is a work that I usually find disgusting and boring, so much so that it is one of the very few repertoire works that I avoid seeing. However, having loathed Christopher Alden’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream so intensely a fortnight ago, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see Turandot done by Welsh National Opera in his production of 1994, now revived, and I wasn’t disappointed: I found it disgusting and interesting.

Alden and Turandot are made for one another. It is updated, of course, and like Dream has an enclosing claustrophobic set, with costumes suggesting a totalitarian regime, though it is postmodern enough to include dilapidated emperors. You can tell the tenor hero because he wears a shabby dark overcoat, now obligatory among trendy directors for tenor heroes. Turandot, when she finally appears to sing, is power-dressed but nervous, a brilliant stroke which makes her aria ‘In questia reggia’ more unnerving than usual. Portraits of her luckless suitors cover the walls in Act I: by my count 108, who all failed to solve what have always seemed to me three absurdly easy riddles — and I’ve never been able to solve one in a Christmas cracker.

Even admirers of Turandot admit that the scene in Act III in which the slave girl Liù is tortured to get her to reveal Calaf’s name, and kills herself rather than reveal it, while Calaf, who had previously seemed quite fond of her, looks on in unconcern, is hard to take. Alden, in a conversation in the programme, agrees, and says he gets round it by making Liù and Timur ‘ghosts or memories from Calaf’s past’, so that nothing really happens to her.