Mini-Cast #12 - Turandot - First Thirdish

(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.

I find Turandot easy music to love and an impossible opera to like. 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. (talk about Wagner influence and how Puccini came to different solutions than Wagner)

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 that are semi-real, semi-mythic; where 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 such places like gods.

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Turandot is an exceedingly strange piece of music, the characters are absolutely unsympathetic, and the plot is just idiotic. But this is not the world of Boris Godunov or

Perhaps the solution is, as one friend of mine says, to regard Turandot not as an opera but as an oratorio. As contradictory as it seems for an opera whose pageantry is present at the DNA level,

There are two basic orientations in great art. There's the familiar and the unfamiliar. Or the friendly and the forbidden, the comforting and the disturbing, the conventional and the strange.


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