On the centenary of Giacomo Puccini’s death, Turandot, the last unfinished opera by the great composer from Lucca, will be staged at the Teatro Municipale in Piacenza on Friday 22 March at 8pm and Sunday 24 March at 3.30pm. The third title of the Opera Season 2023/2024 of the Fondazione Teatri di Piacenza, Turandot, an opera drama in three acts and five scenes on a libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, from the theatrical fable of the same name by Carlo Gozzi and with the finale of the third act by Franco Alfano, will see the musical direction of Marco Guidarini, in the staging signed by Giuseppe Frigeni for the Teatro Comunale di Modena in 2003 and reprised by important theatres in Italy and abroad, inspired in its strong and essential lines by the aesthetic and philosophical laws underlying the Chinese cultural tradition.

Direction, choreography, sets and lighting by Giuseppe Frigeni are by Marina Frigeni with costumes by Amélie Haas. The cast formed by Leah Gordon (Princess Turandot), Giacomo Prestia (Timur), Angelo Villari (the unknown prince Calaf), Jaquelina Livieri (Liù), flanked by Raffaele Feo (Emperor Altoum), Fabio Previati (Ping), Saverio Pugliese (Pang), Matteo Mezzaro (Pong) and Benjamin Cho (A Mandarin) is outstanding. In the pit, the Orchestra dell’Emilia-Romagna Arturo Toscanini; the opera will see the presence of the Lyric Choir of Modena and the Choir of the Municipal Theatre of Piacenza prepared by Corrado Casati and the treble voices of the Municipal Theatre of Modena prepared by Paolo Gattolin, in the co-production that unites the Lyric Theatres of Modena, Piacenza, Ravenna and Rimini.

Introducing Turandot to the public, on Thursday 21 March at 6 p.m. in the Sala dei Teatini with free admission, will be, as usual, the students of Piacenza’s Liceo Respighi, thanks to the #AperiOpera project that will see them involved in acting, music, historical insights and interdisciplinary connections, coordinated by teachers Elena Metti and Arianna Gazzola.

Having reached the last title of an astonishing compositional story, Puccini in 1920 had become infatuated with Carlo Gozzi’s fairy tale Turandotte, and above all with the figure of the protagonist, a fairy-tale Chinese princess with feelings frozen by an excess of pride and resentment towards the male gender.

The need for a new subject, different from any previous one, had led him into the world of fairy tales after a career spent on realistic and sentimental dramas, certainly attracted by the possibility of exploiting spectacle, gesture and oriental scents. The escapism towards the areas of myth, of timeless exoticism, was after all Puccini’s necessary response to the changed post-war atmosphere, now disillusioned with realistic subjects. His will was however also in this case to convert the fairy tale into ‘modern brains’. Gozzi’s capricious maiden thus becomes a haughty, algid, terrible figure, who has taken it upon herself to avenge the rape suffered by an ancestor by sacrificing the suitors to her hand through the arduous solution of three enigmas that none of them manages to solve. The suggestion of an exotic musical colour was nurtured by some melodies heard on a music box that belonged to the Italian consul in China and later ended up in the opera’s score. Left unfinished due to the author’s death, the opera was completed by composer Franco Alfano on commission from Casa Ricordi and Arturo Toscanini who conducted the opera at La Scala in 1926.

“Turandot is not a love story,” comments director Giuseppe Frigeni, “but the failure of an amorous illusion in the overturning of power games, of the laws of an archaic power, traversed by macho cynicism, ambition and the arrogance of Calaf. Turandot is not the legendary executioner, but a woman wounded in her own pride, the victim of atavistic male violence”.

Francesca Benazzi
Press Office

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