Turandot

by Giacomo Puccini Dramma lirico in three acts and five scenes Libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni after Carlo Gozzi in Italian with German and English surtitles

"All'alba vincerò - at sunrise I will 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. The others have to despair instead. Primarily the inhabitants of the city, in which - "nessun dorma" - no one is allowed to sleep because everyone has to search for the name of the stranger on the highest orders and under threat of the death penalty. That Turandot should actually end well by Puccini's standards can be felt - like so much else - in the central tenor aria of the work. Puccini knew better than anyone how to force an emotional involvement on the audience through the merciless immediacy of his musical language. The piece itself ends happily, albeit without Puccini, who had to lay down his arms in his battle against laryngeal cancer before the finale was finished. And so Turandot joins the ranks of the great opera fragments of the 20th century. But not only is the piece more or less a chimera, the title character herself also seems to be primarily a projection: "Turandot does not exist! Only nothingness exists", Ping, Pang and Pong warn the unknown prince, to prevent him from attempting the three riddles that need to be solved in order to win Turandot, the emperor's daughter. Anna Sophie Mahler, whose Stuttgart production of "Saint François d'Assise" was named the "most unusual opera experience of the year" by the trade journal Opernwelt in 2023, 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 nerves stretched to the limit in the opera's finale. Because, one thing is certain: this fluid could certainly be used today.