It’s a cynical start to the Royal Opera’s season to have this 1984 production of Puccini’s last opera Turandot. Not that a new production would improve things, whatever it was like. Turandot is an irredeemable work, a terrible end to a career that had included three indisputable masterpieces and three less evident ones, counting Il Trittico as one. Any operatic composer who gets to the stage, as Puccini had, of searching through one play or novel after another, dissatisfied with any subject he is offered, should almost certainly give up. The greatest and most successful either produce operas like cows produce milk, Handel and Donizetti being obvious examples, or have them wrested from them by the sheer impact of their experiences and the imperative need to give them artistic form, Wagner being the clearest case.
Puccini’s agony was that he had become, and knew it, more sophisticated and canny a composer the longer he carried on, but he had already created works in which his favourite subjects, tormented and suffering women, and the various kinds of men who caused their suffering or who suffered because they did, were exhausted. So his masterpiece Butterfly was eventually followed by the medium-high camp of The Girl of the Golden West, then there is the moderately charming operetta La rondine, and the Trittico, which has lots to be said for it, but doesn’t reach the height of the Big Three. Turandot had some of the right constituents for him: hopeless and ignored love, frigidity, torture and an exotic setting, enabling him to employ unusual instruments. But fatally it has a happy ending, which Puccini couldn’t really believe in, and his own death prevented him from working it out as painstakingly as he had the rest of the piece — not that it could have saved an opera that is already disgusting.
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