This image of an exotic, authoritative, and icy princess of ancient China, so typical of Turandot, is strikingly different from Chinese perceptions of a grand Chinese princess.
The dilemma in presenting Turandot, the only Western opera with a Chinese setting, to Taipei's audience is: Should the Chinese background represent Puccini's fantasy, or a more "realistic" China. The Taipei City Symphony Orchestra opted for a more believable (here) Chinese interpretation and projected the setting into the Ming Dynasty, as well as shifting the libretto to a Chinese chant.
The six-day presentation of Turandot involved some 300 people, including a cast of Chinese vocalists from home and abroad.
Western opera presentation here began about four years ago as a slated item in the schedule of the annual Taipei Arts Festival. Eventually, debate centered on the possibility of Western opera translated into Chinese. Turandot is the recent result.
Puccini's Turandot, premiering in 1926 at Milan, was credited with a supreme structural mastery, the peak of the composer's achievements. As in Madame Butterfly, an opera of Japanese background, in Turandot, he uttered his feelings of Oriental exoticism and mysticism. Puccini usually established a typical heroine, whose love ends tragically. And so he did in Turandot. But the unfinished opera was completed after Puccini's death by F. Alfano, who provided an ending of fulfilled love, a denouement unlike other Puccini works.
The opera opens on a scene fronting the Forbidden City, the Imperial Palace compound in Peking. A crowd is chanting about Princess Turandot's challenge of three riddles: to any suitor who can solve them, marriage is granted-otherwise, death. Among the crowd are a trio, curious about the scheduled execution of a prince-an aged man, a young man, and a maid. They are told of the riddle by three officials who seek to dissuade anyone from risking his life in this fashion. The maid, Liu, is Puccini's heroine, in love with her master, Calaf, a Tartar prince. She ran away from home with the old, dethroned king and Prince Calaf. Turandot then shows up in the city, and Calaf is dazzled by her regal and frosty glamor. And despite the pleas of Liu, his father, and the three officials, he sounds a gong to indicate his readiness to respond to the riddles.
The second act opens with an intermezzo by the three officials, who praise the beautiful land and the magic of love, but also sigh for the beheaded failures at the riddles. They wish for some lucky one to finally end the cruel tests. Turandot confronts Calaf before he is given the riddles and tells him that her grandmother was tortured to death by a Tartar prince and that she has set up the riddles as a trap of revenge. After a period of tension, Calaf, with three proper answers, destroys Turandot's trap. But she now asks her father to cancel the pledged marriage. The crowd roars in anger. Calaf, amid the rising tension, proposes a riddle of his own name. If Turandot solves it, he will accept his fate.
In the last act, it is late at night. Turandot decrees that no one may sleep until the name of the foreigner is discovered. The crowd and friendly officials urge Calaf to flee. But he is sure his name will be undiscovered. Turandot's soldiers carry off Liu and Calaf's father to force them to speak. Liu, bearing the brunt of the torture to spare the old man, says only that she knows his name, but that she will have death before revealing it. When Turandot asks what gives her such strength, Liu's reply is, "Love." Then, grabbing a soldier's knife, she kills herself. The soldiers and officials mourn her. An angry Calaf later forces a kiss from Turandot, who now agrees to love and marriage, and it is dawn.
In general, Turandot poses a very challenging milieu for Chinese audiences. Puccini adapted the original script of Turandot by Corio Gozzi (1720-1806), possibly based on accounts of China by such Italians as Marco Polo and Mateo Ricci. But whatever the sources, there is confusion in the details.
For example, a last name in Chinese is generally monosyllabic: Liu, Pang, etc. Turandot is a common feminine name of the Uigur people; Timur, the name as signed to Calaf's king-father, derives from Mongolian; and Calaf is a Moslem name.
Then, to Chinese, every dynasty had its special court clothing, etiquette, and customs. So, what time period was involved? That determines the appropriate settings and costumes for a performance before a largely Chinese audience.
Puccini availed himself of a famous Chinese folk song, White Jasmine. It's pentatonic scale imbues his score with Oriental remoteness and sentimentality. Puccini in his musical idioms builds up his China into a grand, precious, and mystical world embroidered in Oriental conventions.
Despite the built-in challenges and the detail demands of a sophisticated Chinese audience, the Taipei City Symphony Orchestra dared Turandot. Secretary of the orchestra Chang Tse-ming, noting that they couldn't "disregard Puccini's ambiguities on China before a Chinese audience," said they were determined to resolve the problems and finally settled on a Ming Dynasty setting, because the Ming ambience is most familiar to stage workers here. And, said Chang, "In terms of music, Turandot is very Chinese. And, since it is the only Western opera with a Chinese background, we thought it most proper to be sung in Mandarin."
The task of bringing a "realistic" Ming court to the Turandot stage fell to designer Ho Chi-ping; the libretto translation was assigned to Huang Ying. The job of recruiting Chinese singers at home and from abroad went to the orchestra itself. With the exception of the prominent Japanese stage director Yashuhiko Aguni and his two crew members, Turandot was an entirely local production.
The cast included two tenors and two sopranos back from Europe, and two tenors and one soprano from Japan.
Turandot was double-cast, Jen Jung and Chiu Yu-lang each taking three days. Jen is a Roman National Music School graduate and winner of many international contests. Chiu is a winner of the Maria Callas competition and of national awards.
Calaf was also double-cast; William Wu and J. Anifantakis each took three days. Wu is a Chinese tenor well-known abroad, now in charge of an opera research center in Japan. Anifantakis was born in Szechuan Province to a Greek father and a Chinese mother. This was his fourth appearance in a Turandot production.
Liu was multi-cast by four singers. Chu Tai-li took up three nights, Chou Tong-fung, Fan Yu-wen, and Shin Yung-shiao shared the other three.
Chu Tai-li spent more than 10 years in Italy studying under the guidance of G. Favaretto and Perea Labia, and won a third place in the international Lonico vocal competitions in 1978.
Discussing the role, Chu saw Turandot as a clear contrast to Liu, strong with hatred, while Liu was strong with love. "I cared for Liu and spent great effort interpreting her. Probably the years I stayed abroad, alone, enhanced my understanding that love is powerful, but sometimes impossible. Liu is caught between love and humbleness, an image I find in many Chinese women."
The chorus, numbering some 100 members drawn from the Taipei Philharmonic Chorus and the Tung-hua Children's Choir, played its role admirably in building up the atmosphere of sympathy in the first act, tension in the second, and pressure in the third.
The setting and costuming drew some criticisms after the presentation. The setting was a temple-like palace, and included two bridges extending into the audience. A huge chiffon curtain with splashing dragon patterns divided the front stage for the intermezzo in the second act. The set was impressive standing alone. But, with a chorus of 100 circled around and the main characters dominating the center, it was greatly reduced in impact.
Many of the participants who had enjoyed Turandot abroad would have preferred more gorgeous, stylish costumes. Chu Tai-li mused, "Puccini's Turandot is abstract, mystical, and exotic. More Chinese means less Puccini, less Italian, and less operatic."
Translator Huang Ying pointed out inherent drawbacks in translating Italian into Chinese, which inevitably breaks a composer's perfect combination between score and text.
When the monosyllabic Chinese libretto superceded the multi-syllabic Italian, the now of intonation was less smooth than the original.
Huang spent six months working on a translation that would do the least possible damage to the composer's vision. The result was a pretty rhyming verse. "In fact," said Huang, "I didn't do translation. I just considered the total meaning of a passage and wrote a new text. When it came to changing the meaning of a line or damaging the music, I chose the former, because the music is the most important."
In spite of the translation, the Chinese libretto itself drew some difficulties in direct audience comprehension. But one soprano noted that Chinese texts were much easier to remember, and remarked that when the main singers performed, they knew how to react and build up the atmosphere. "We knew what we were singing," she said.
The Chinese Turandot was an experiment. More Chinese-language Western opera is not a certainty, just a wish. In comparison to five former opera presentations at the annual Art Festivals—including Faust and Carmen—Turandot did draw greater interest, which certainly encouraged those involved.