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Home Podcast Photos Upcoming Events Videos Concert Reviews Radio Broadcast Schedule History of the EPO Mission and Values Board of Directors 2024-2025 Sponsors 2024-2025 Philharmonic Gives Back Donors 1/17/2023 - 1/17/2024 Thoughtful Tributes 1/17/2023 - 1/17/2024
Program Notes
Written by Bill Hemminger

Turandot

     Italian composer Giacomo Puccini lived from 1858 to 1924.  Puccini grew up in a family of church musicians.  In 1876, after marveling at a La Scala production of Verdi’s Aïda, Puccini decided to devote himself to the writing of operas, and he took the genre successfully well into the 20th century.  Puccini was an exponent of “opera verismo,” works whose melodramatic plots often featured characters drawn from ordinary life.  His greatest operas include La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904).
     Puccini became aware of the story of Turandot in an Italian translation of Friedrich Schiller’s 1801 play of the same name, which itself was an adaptation of an Italian commedia dell’arte by Carlo Gozzi.  Gozzi’s play was similarly uninventive, refashioning a tale from a 12th-century Persian poet.  The protagonist of that story was a Central Asian princess, i.e. a king’s daughter (“dokht,” with the /t/ pronounced) from the town of Turan.  Hence the name Turandot.  
     Puccini began work on this his final opera in 1921.  Earlier, he had been given a music box from an Italian diplomat to China; the box played a number of traditional Chinese melodies, several of which Puccini used in the opera.  In addition, Puccini had a set of gongs created—likewise with a nod to verisimilitude—for use in the production of the drama set in China.  By March of 1924, Puccini had completed almost all of the opera, save for the very end.  He suspended work at that time in order to begin a series of radiation treatments for throat cancer, and though the cancer seemed to be responding to the treatment, Puccini had a heart attack suddenly and died in a Brussels hospital.
     Much drama surrounds the completion of the opera and who would be appointed to put Puccini’s musical sketches together without spoiling the integrity of the work.  These days, the version of Franco Alfano is regarded as the most acceptable conclusion of the work.  The first performance of “Turandot” took place in Milan in 1926 with Arturo Toscanini conducting.  One possibly apocryphal account reports that Toscanini conducted until the end of the music that Puccini had written, at which time Toscanini turned to the audience sadly to announce that the “maestro’s pen” had gotten no further.  

Turandot today ranks among the top 20 operas in terms of its public presentations world-wide. Offended by the opera’s perceived patronizing characterization of the Chinese and their leaders, the People’s Republic of China banned performances of the work—until the 1998 epic performance of the opera with Zubin Mehta at the podium in Beijing.  

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Program Notes
Written by Bill Hemminger

Turandot

     Italian composer Giacomo Puccini lived from 1858 to 1924.  Puccini grew up in a family of church musicians.  In 1876, after marveling at a La Scala production of Verdi’s Aïda, Puccini decided to devote himself to the writing of operas, and he took the genre successfully well into the 20th century.  Puccini was an exponent of “opera verismo,” works whose melodramatic plots often featured characters drawn from ordinary life.  His greatest operas include La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904).
     Puccini became aware of the story of Turandot in an Italian translation of Friedrich Schiller’s 1801 play of the same name, which itself was an adaptation of an Italian commedia dell’arte by Carlo Gozzi.  Gozzi’s play was similarly uninventive, refashioning a tale from a 12th-century Persian poet.  The protagonist of that story was a Central Asian princess, i.e. a king’s daughter (“dokht,” with the /t/ pronounced) from the town of Turan.  Hence the name Turandot.  
     Puccini began work on this his final opera in 1921.  Earlier, he had been given a music box from an Italian diplomat to China; the box played a number of traditional Chinese melodies, several of which Puccini used in the opera.  In addition, Puccini had a set of gongs created—likewise with a nod to verisimilitude—for use in the production of the drama set in China.  By March of 1924, Puccini had completed almost all of the opera, save for the very end.  He suspended work at that time in order to begin a series of radiation treatments for throat cancer, and though the cancer seemed to be responding to the treatment, Puccini had a heart attack suddenly and died in a Brussels hospital.
     Much drama surrounds the completion of the opera and who would be appointed to put Puccini’s musical sketches together without spoiling the integrity of the work.  These days, the version of Franco Alfano is regarded as the most acceptable conclusion of the work.  The first performance of “Turandot” took place in Milan in 1926 with Arturo Toscanini conducting.  One possibly apocryphal account reports that Toscanini conducted until the end of the music that Puccini had written, at which time Toscanini turned to the audience sadly to announce that the “maestro’s pen” had gotten no further.  

Turandot today ranks among the top 20 operas in terms of its public presentations world-wide. Offended by the opera’s perceived patronizing characterization of the Chinese and their leaders, the People’s Republic of China banned performances of the work—until the 1998 epic performance of the opera with Zubin Mehta at the podium in Beijing.  

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