Washington National Opera has ended its 2023–24 season with an odd revisiting of Giacomo Puccini’s last, unfinished, and, it seems, eternally problematic opera Turandot. Those who sought to buy tickets at the Metropolitan Opera this year, for example, were invited by its website to read a program note on the opera’s “cultural insensitivities,” which are apparently so egregious that the Met performed its warhorse Franco Zeffirelli production of Turandot seventeen times. Washington is offering fewer performances in a smaller hall (including, at the performance I attended, errant mice running about) but has doubled down on emphasizing what the bien-pensants think is wrong with Puccini’s opera. According to the company’s general director, Timothy O’Leary, the entire run sold out before the curtain rose on the first performance.
For those bien-pensants, the problem with Turandot usually lies in its depictions of Asians. Turandot, a beautiful and cruel Chinese princess, insists upon following an oath that requires the execution of suitors who fail to answer three riddles she poses in a fateful court ceremony. Calàf, an exiled Tatar prince whose identity is unknown to Turandot, is captivated enough by the princess to take his chance. He solves the riddles, but Turandot is so distressed about losing her freedom that he agrees to let her out of their betrothal—and to lose his life—if she can discover his name before the next dawn. “None shall sleep,” Turandot declares, giving the first line of the opera’s famous aria, sung by Calàf, “Nessun dorma.” But only the faithful Tatar slave Liù knows the prince’s name and, herself in love with Calàf, she commits suicide to keep his name a secret. An ending improvised by the composer Franco Alfano after Puccini’s death, based on the composer’s original notes, created a finale in which Calàf reveals his name voluntarily and places himself at Turandot’s mercy. The princess appears triumphant but then tells the assembled court that his name is “love,” transforming her cruelty into affection and a happy ending.
That might not sound particularly racist. Indeed, in 1998 the People’s Republic of China staged the opera with star-quality international soloists, traditional Chinese performing companies, and hundreds of troops from the People’s Liberation Army in a lavish production in Beijing’s Forbidden City—hardly a sign of the “harm” that overly sensitive Americans of a new generation choose to see in the opera. In case there is any lingering doubt, further inspection reveals that the story is not even particularly Chinese. Its roots lie in the Haft Paykar (Seven Beauties), a twelfth-century Persian romantic epic by Nizami Ganjavi that related a story involving a Slavic princess. Earlier versions of the epic spoke of a Roman princess. The etymology of “Turandot” is not Chinese but rather a compound of Turan, an ancient Iranian geographic designation for modern Central Asia, and dokht, the Indo-European root denoting female offspring. “Calàf” is from the Arabic khalaf, which means “successor.” The character’s father, Timur, who appears in the opera to caution his son against hormonal excess, shares his Turkic surname with the medieval conqueror Tamerlane.
This transnational, and fundamentally very human, tale passed into Western parlance via François Pétis de la Croix’s Les Mille et un jours (The Thousand and One Days), an homage to the famous One Thousand and One Nights. The Venetian dramatist Carlo Gozzi adapted the tale as a romantic comedy, inserting a trio of courtiers inspired by commedia dell’arte stock characters. This trio became the opera’s Ping, Pang, and Pong, whose names may suggest stereotype, but who turn out to be the most grounded and human characters of the opera. Friedrich Schiller followed Gozzi with an earthier Romantic drama that in turn inspired Puccini. In his operatic version, the Italian composer did as much as he realistically could to imbue the score with authenticity, using melodies heard on music boxes, scored Chinese music, and adaptations of pentatonic harmony to create an Asian soundscape that neither settles for caricature nor inflicts disrespect. The most memorable musical theme derives from the Mo Li Hua, a dignified folk tune used on high state occasions and even as an unofficial national anthem.
Washington did not shy away from Turandot’s Asian setting, but the company’s artistic director, Francesca Zambello, rendered it in the grim mid-twentieth-century idiom that predominates in stagings of operas involving tyrannical power and that occasionally pops up in those that do not. Wilson Chin’s sets give us an industrial milieu festooned with symbolic banners that suggest the very Asian despotism we are supposed to believe is an unfair stereotype. Linda Cho’s costumes fuse austere Maoism with Late Imperial ceremonial dress, perhaps a symbolic bow to the communist-empire combinations now employed in China and its “unlimited” ally Russia, which have despotic pasts of both stripes. Jessica Lang and Kanji Segawa, billed as “co-choreographers,” added vaguely Asian dances with large red flags performed by women guards who looked like leftovers from the Cultural Revolution. The dancers often clouded the action. In the particularly sensitive moment when Turandot reels at having her riddles correctly answered, they spilled across the stage, distracting us from her inner anguish.
Washington’s greatest innovation, which made international news, was its decision to commission a new ending to replace Alfano’s effort of the 1920s, which has been derided as “good Alfano but bad Puccini.” This is not the first time someone has written a new ending to Turandot: The Italian modernist composer Luciano Berio wrote a lush expressionist version that is rarely performed but worth listening to on your media website of choice. At WNO, the Chinese American composer Christopher Tin and librettist Susan Soon He Stanton collaborated on a new ending in which Turandot reveals that her terror and cruelty resulted not only from an ancient insult, as in the original, but from her own rape by marauding enemies. The opera’s themes of gender normally take a back seat to the cultural appropriation angle, but the new ending brings it front and center. When this ugly detail is revealed, Calàf appropriately squirms. Tin said in an NPR interview that “Nessun dorma” is a sign of “toxic masculinity.” But in an odd surprise, Stanton’s libretto more or less has the hero tell Turandot to get over it and change her own toxic personality, which the princess then does.
The Polish soprano Ewa Płonka, who sings Turandot in her WNO debut production, was certainly loud in the part, but her top notes tended to sharp and her line was thin. Jonathan Burton, originally scheduled for only one late-run performance, stepped in for the main-cast tenor at this performance to make his own debut as Calàf. His voice is small, and Burton took few risks, but the portrayal was sympathetic. Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, also debuting in this production, gave an affecting Liù, measured at first, but really blooming in the final act. The Chinese bass Peixin Chen sang a powerful Timur. Le Bu was a powerful Mandarin, the official who announces Turandot’s riddles and ground rules. Ethan Vincent, Sahel Salam, and Jonathan Pierce Rhodes sang movingly as Ping, Pang, and Pong, or, as they are renamed for reasons of cultural sensitivity (though apparently in consonance with Puccini’s original libretto), the Chancellor, the Majordomo, and the Head Chef. And what a treat it was to hear the veteran tenor Neil Shicoff, whom circumstances have consigned to a mainly European career, fill the impressive comprimario role of China’s Emperor Altoum. For such a cast, the visual and dramatic circumstances could have been better.