Puccini’s ‘Turandot’ opens Lyric season
Soprano Andrea Gruber, who starred in the title role of Puccini’s “Turandot” as Lyric Opera of Chicago began its 2006-07 season, loves the part so much that she has the opening words and notes of her character’s first aria tattooed on her lower back.
It’s good someone loves the Chinese ice princess so much — because she’s definitely a hard person to like.
People love “Turandot,” the opera, just fine, and Saturday night’s audience proved it with cheers. But Turandot, the character, is another matter. If nothing else, her habit of having suitors beheaded makes her a bit daunting.
And Turandot, the role, doesn’t appeal to many sopranos. It’s considered the roughest Puccini ever wrote for a woman. Turandot sings for only about 25 minutes, but she has to do so with a power approaching that needed for some Wagnerian roles — and in the highest reaches of her range. Many sopranos noted in the role, such as the late Birgit Nilsson, have had the vocal power to handle it, but have lacked the physical allure and the acting skills to humanize Turandot effectively — if it can be done at all.
That’s what made Gruber’s triumph Saturday night more than just a vocal one. Slimmed down and showing no ill effects from her recent spinal surgery, she looked good enough you could almost understand how tenor Vladimir Galouzine’s Prince Calaf could risk his life to win her love. She acted, too — and effectively.
One of the Turandots of the early days, the late Dame Eva Turner, insisted that the princess’s overriding emotion was fear. Gruber appeared to take that to heart. Although she was hampered facially by her stylized Chinese court makeup, the soprano managed to use posture and head movements to convey an overall sense of fear. There was fear of Calaf, fear of sexual awakening, and even fear of her own cruelty.
The problems of “Turandot” go back to the opera’s beginnings. It wasn’t quite finished when Puccini died in 1924, and the task of completing it went to a lesser-known composer named Franco Alfano, whose ending disappointed many critics. At its premiere in 1926, conductor Arturo Toscanini famously stopped it with the last notes Puccini himself had written.
Puccini’s last completed scene involved the suicide of the slave girl Liu, who stabs herself to avoid revealing the name of Calaf, whom she secretly loves herself. Her sacrifice enables the prince to win the hand of Turandot, but it’s a hard act for the other principals to follow. Perhaps Puccini could have pulled it off, but it’s generally conceded that Alfano didn’t quite manage.
Liu, who was beautifully sung and acted by American soprano Patricia Racette, has a tendency to steal the show emotionally. It’s to Gruber’s great credit that she could hold her own after Liu’s death.
As Calaf, the Russian Galouzine was a good match for Gruber. He looked the part of the exiled Tartar prince, and his dark tenor voice proved nimble enough to grab both high C’s in the riddle scene and to seize the soaring finish of the opera’s best-known aria, “Nessun dorma.”
Although “Turandot” has a Chinese setting (and after many years of being banned there is now highly popular in the People’s Republic), the only Chinese singer in the production was bass Hao Jiang Tian, and he played one of the few non-Chinese parts, that of Calaf’s father, King Timur.
In truth, “Turandot” is Chinese on the surface, but thoroughly European at the core. Puccini did, however, incorporate Chinese folk tunes in his score, and used loud pentatonic xylophone riffs at crucial moments to create an Asian atmosphere.
Lyric artistic director emeritus Bruno Bartoletti conducted the many-layered score because the current music director, Sir Andrew Davis, is recuperating from surgery.
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