The story unfolds in Imperial China, and pits the Tartar Prince Calaf against the beautiful but cruel Princess Turandot, daughter of the Chinese Emperor. Gozzi's Chinese fairy tale offered Puccini an exotic setting and a chance to pepper his score with some "ethnic" music for local color, something he always enjoyed doing (especially in Madama Butterfly, which is rife with Europeanized Japanese tunes). But Giuseppe Adami, who had already worked with Puccini as the librettist on La rondine and Il tabarro, and Renato Simoni, a Gozzi scholar and former editor of the Corriere della sera, Italy's equivalent of The New York Times, steered Puccini toward Turandot. (Busoni actually beat Puccini to using the subject for an opera, reworking his incidental music in 1917, though Busoni's version is only occasionally revived.) Other proposed subjects included Sly, based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (which was eventually taken up by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari and staged at La Scala in 1927), a new play by David Belasco (the author of the plays on which Madama Butterfly and La fanciulla del West were based), or an adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.
Memories of that production lingered with Puccini, for in 1919, Turandot came up as a possibility for a new opera during a meeting of the composer and his collaborators. The composer was in Berlin, where he attended the celebrated director Max Reinhardt's production of the play at the Deutsches Theater, with incidental music by Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924). He took the subject, made it his own, and from it created his final masterpiece.Īs with several of his other operas, Puccini first encountered Turandot in the theater, in a staging of 18th-century Italian dramatist Carlo Gozzi's play. But, of course, Puccini did not merely imitate. The 19th-century aphorist Charles Caleb Colton once said that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," which certainly holds true in the case of Puccini's Turandot.
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