Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's Late Style

Six Puccini’s Solution: Integrating the Conventional and Unconventional

168 Turandot is a fitting end for Puccini’s career. The subject is eminently amenable to the directions in which he was moving, especially toward a solution to the formal problem posed in the Trittico: how to achieve a near-total integration of conventionality with unconventionality— that is, an approach that arranges kinetic and static movements into set pieces analogous to conventional melodramatic prototypes and one that simultaneously deploys a series of shorter episodes articulated according to a complex array of musical styles. Puccini seems to have turned to the subject of Turandot on the suggestion of Veronese journalist and playwright Renato Simoni, then working in Milan as editor of La Lettura and drama critic for Il corriere della sera.1Simoni had extensive knowledge of both the eighteenth-century Venetian writer of fantastic plays, Carlo Gozzi (on whom he had written a play, Carlo Gozzi, in 1903), and China (where he had at one time worked as the Corriere’s Asian correspondent). He suggested in March 1920 that Puccini read Andrea Maffei’s Italian translation of Friedrich Schiller’s German version of Gozzi’s Turandot, which Gozzi himself derived from “The Story of Prince Calaf and the Princess of China” in Les Mille et un Jours, a 1710 French translation by François Pétis de la Croix of the ancient Persian collection 1001Days (the Persian counterpart to the Arabian 1001Nights). Schiller’s play had recently been given in a well-known Max Reinhardt production in Berlin, in October 1911, and the story had a well-established history of musical settings: numerous composers in the nineteenth and early twentieth censix Puccini’s Solution: Integrating the Conventional and Unconventional Trittico.indb 168 7/2/10 10:33 AM Puccini’s Solution · 169 turies (including Carl Maria von Weber in 1813) had written incidental music for Schiller’s Turandot, and operas on the subject had been written by—among many other, more obscure examples—Antonio Bazzini (Turanda, 1867, on a libretto by Antonio Gazzoletti derived mainly from Maffei) and Feruccio Busoni (Turandot, 1917, on his own libretto based on Gozzi’s original).2 In some ways the tale is well-suited for an opera with a largely conventional underlying structure. The tale is ancient: Turandot has origins in mythological marriage resisters as diverse as the part-woman, partlion Sphinx and the mythic hunter-athlete Atalanta, and in stories of riddling princesses from the oral and written traditions of a wide variety of cultures, including ancient Greece (in a millennia-old Cretan fairy tale), Persia (in both the 1001Days and “The Story of Turandocht’s Riddles,” one of the Seven Stories of the Seven Princesses by twelfth-century poet Muhammad Elyās edn-e Yusof Nezāmi), and India (where perhaps the oldest riddling princess exists in the form of the goddess Kali, who wears male heads like a string of pearls around her neck). But in other ways the story is ripe for a highly unconventional operatic setting.3 The tale manifests societal tendencies, current in both Puccini’s era and Gozzi’s own, toward a fear of “dangerous” women: women of intellectual prowess and influence, women interested in subverting traditional social hierarchies, and women branded “deviant” for undermining male authority and taking pleasure in the destruction of men. Such women, especially those of intellectual curiosity and emerging cultural authority, were a reality in Gozzi’s Italy and even in his own family, into which the playwright, poet, and entrepreneur Luisa Bergalli had married by way of Gozzi’s older brother Gasparo. Gozzi is known to have harbored fears toward such women and to have been interested in reasserting the order of the social status quo. More than a century later, the same kinds of fears are discernible in the anti-feminist movements that were gaining currency in fin-de-siècle Italy and elsewhere across Europe. Misogynistic views of women as threats to the societal order—reactions to the rapidly growing feminist movement that, in Italy, originates in 1880s Milan—are evident in work of pre-fascist Italian writers Giovanni Papini and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (especially in the latter’s famous Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo of 1909, in Trittico.indb 169 7/2/10 10:33 AM 170 · il trittico, turandot, and Puccini’s Late Style which he glorifies contempt for women), criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero (who together in 1893published an empirical analysis of criminal women...