Mini-Cast #12 The Challenge of Turandot - Part 1 of 2?

(Ah, per l'ultimo Volta)

Well, if Verdi's Aida is ground zero of everything people find offensive about opera, then Puccini's final opera, Turandot, is the summit. Turandot is not just yellowface, it's Yalu-face, 'piss-yellowface.' It presents Imperial China as a variety show, in which we're persuaded to delight in the murderousness, the poverty and squalor, the barbarousness of a peoplehood so clearly meant to seem our moral inferiors.

Purely as a piece of music, Turandot is well-nigh perfect. The ear is beguiled by every note of every instrument. The music straddles the line perfectly between the old opera conventions of Verdi and Rossini and Mozart on the one hand, and the very new harmonies and timbres of Strauss and Debussy and Schoenberg on the other. And like in Wagner, Puccini uses this combination of old and new to create something that portrays and feels the ancient, to create unreal myths that are both extremely inhuman yet reside within the archetypes of human consciousness. But while Wagner portrays the archetypes of human heroic possibility innate within his usually German audience, Turandot portrays archetypes of the foreign.

And therein lies the problem. As great a piece of music as it is, Turandot is impossible to like. You're better off not knowing the story, and one you do, it's impossible not to hear the inhumanity within the music. There are certain parts of certain operas I can listen to any time of any day and I'd imagine we all could: Act I of La Traviata and The Magic Flute and Der Rosenkavalier, Act III of Die Meistersinger, the first two acts of La Boheme, so much of Eugene Onegin, the first two thirds of Cunning Little Vixen and the whole of The Marriage of Figaro, such is the humanity the music lends to the opera's characters that it never stops being beautiful. But Turandot is exhausting - once its drug-like grip goes away, you have to put this music away for ten years. It's just too disturbing for everyday use; obsessive Eastern characters who are absolutely unsympathetic. An antagonistic princess who kills all her potential suitors, a hero who allows his father to die and slave to be tortured to the point of suicide rather than be diverted from his quest to obtain this almost literal ice princess. The plot might be considered evil weren't it so stupid.

Puccini showed in Madame Butterfly he could be truly sympathetic, even angry, about the idiotic arrogance of imperialism and misogyny. But Turandot has nothing of Butterfly's compassion, at its premiere during the beginning of the Mussolini era, it could almost be seen as a justification for imperialism, that these barbarous Eastern hordes at best require Western civilization to guide them to greater enlightenment, at worst to break them of their bloody worldview with its own fist of blood.

So therefore Stalinist though the urge to ban works is, when opera endures its final comeuppance in the era of woke, Turandot could endure unofficial bans in some countries the way that Israel bans Wagner.

And yet, like Wagner operas only perhaps even more so, Turandot is an absolutely compelling piece of music, and not just as music, but as a reverential musical tribute to another culture. When Puccini takes the few scraps of Eastern music that were in enough circulation to reach European musicians, Puccini sets them with all the delicacy and respect one great civilization is owed from another. Here's  one example: the Chinese imperial anthem - Cup of Solid Gold.  What magnificent music that is... and Puccini does not cheapen it. When it comes time to introduce the Chinese Emperor, he sets this anthem in a manner fit for the entrance of a Czar in a Mussorgsky opera. Or, on the other end, his delicate melody, Moli Hua - or Jasmine Flower, and now listen into this haunting hymn sung by offstage children's choir called 'The Mountains of the East'.

Is that passage not the most beautiful thing you've ever heard? I used to doubt it possible to be nostalgic for places to which you've never been, but hearing this passage, it occurs to me that perhaps this is the source of orientalism's centuries-long hold on the European mind, who dreamt of so many far away realms of the real that in their minds, were entirely mythic; because reality's mundane concerns applied just enough that they still needed to concern everybody else, but need not apply to the white men who controlled such places, and therefore the main concern of everybody else in such places was to cater to the white men who were treated in these places like gods.

I suppose that artistic inspiration has two basic sources: the familiar and the unfamiliar, or the friendly and the forbidden, or the comforting and the disturbing, the conventional and the strange. A work like La Boheme is an exemplar of the familiar - Puccini is clearly portraying the lost glory days his youth, and a large fraction of La Boheme's popularity can be explained by how it enables us all to relive our own youths when our lives were full of irresponsibility, romance, friendships, alcohol, and celebrations. But generally speaking, familiar themes require familiar kinds of music. If you want to create something sincere enough to create a deep bond with the audience, you can't have any tricks. The music has to be straightforward, plaintive, melodies and dances. But if you want to create music for the theater that is strange and unfamiliar, the plot themes need to be as strange and unfamiliar as the music. I believe it's Tolstoy who said that there are two basic themes in literature: a person returns home, and a person leaves home. It's perfectly legitimate to prefer the familiar or the strange, but there's no verifiable metric by which we can say that one has more inherent value than the other.

But if you find strange things remote, or offensive, or disturbing, your only option in life to rid the strange of its haunting grip upon you is to familiarize yourself with it; to make the strange into the familiar... I suppose one could say that the inability to familiarize oneself with the strange sires the urge to isolate and destroy those elements of life that make us uncomfortable with their unfamiliarity, and those elements will always be there.

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But the Rite of Spring tells its story in the most base of human musical urges - dance. Turandot tells its story in the most grandiloquent and incorporeal of musical urges - song. Stories of tribes are told through dance, stories of civilizations are told through song.



As the Rite of Spring does with absolute music, Turandot is a pass of the baton, but the baton has yet to be picked up. It is a challenge to the musicians of the East: Do better than us. Tell your story to the world in your own voice.

End with Peking Opera