Turandot

"All'alba vincerò - at sunrise I shall win", the unknown prince bawls out to the city, making him one of the few heroes of Italian opera whose arioso sleeplessness is due to confidence rather than despair. That Turandot should actually end well by Puccini's standards is something we sense - like so much else - in the work's central tenor aria. The piece itself ends happily in principle, but without Puccini, who had to lay down his arms in his battle against throat cancer before the finale was finished. And so Turandot joins the ranks of the great opera fragments of the 20th century. Anna Sophie Mahler, whose Stuttgart production of Saint François d'Assise in 2023 was named the "most unusual opera experience of the year" by the specialist magazine Opernwelt, will embark on a search for the "fluid of love" 100 years after the premiere of Puccini's enigmatic last opera, with which the composer wanted to pacify the tense nerves in the opera's finale.


Dramma lirico in three acts and five scenes
Libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni after Carlo Gozzi

by Giacomo Puccini