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Turandot State Opera Vienna - Wien Wed 10.Feb 2027 replace me !Turandot State Opera Vienna - Wien Sun 14.Feb 2027 replace me !Turandot State Opera Vienna - Wien Wed 17.Feb 2027 replace me !Turandot State Opera Vienna - Wien Sat 20.Feb 2027 replace me !Turandot State Opera Vienna - Wien Tue 23.Feb 2027 replace me !When Calaf, the dethroned Mongolian prince who has fled to Beijing, falls in love with Princess Turandot, he puts himself in mortal danger:
For only he who solves the princess's three riddles can become her bridegroom. Anyone who fails will be executed - like all previous suitors. Calaf's father Timur and Liù, whom Calaf loves without his knowledge, summon him in vain. He accepts the challenge.
Director Claus Guth heightens the surrealism of this initially extremely cruel fairy tale, which he prefers to see as a »parable«, into the grotesque. Guth sees Calaf, son of the fugitive Tartar king Timur, »thrown into a world that he cannot understand«. It is a system that functions according to its own logic: Princess Turandot, in order to protect herself, has built a bureaucratic apparatus around her that is as brutal as it is effective. For director Claus Guth, it is clear that Turandot is describing her own experience when she speaks of the terrible things done to her ancestor Lu-o-lin; the terror state is her reaction. The stage by Etienne Pluss, the costumes by Ursula Krdina and the choreography by Sommer Ulricksen show it from the outside as well as the inside - and also its decay, which is the necessary prerequisite for Turandot and Calaf's happy ending.Turandot poses three riddles. Three ministers warn of the death that awaits those who fail to solve the riddles. And three artists attempt to complete Giacomo Puccini's unfinished work in the spirit of the late composer.Puccini encoded his score with sound symbols that his audience would undoubtedly assign to a Far Eastern cultural area: a pentatonic-based tonal language and the pointed use of percussion. Embedded in Puccini's own world of sound, they create a new context of meaning, a Puccini-Peking that seems to transport us to distant worlds, but in fact does not exist outside the theater space.
A famous source for Turandot was a music box owned by Baron Edoardo Fassini-Camossi, from which Puccini took the themes that mark Turandot, the Emperor and Ping, Pang and Pong. Puccini stylizes his hero Calaf with music familiar to European ears as a figure of identification and as a romantic hero, exemplified by »Nessun Dorma«, probably the most famous tenor aria in the history of opera.
Puccini's composition ends with the death of Liù, at which point the composer died. The new production performs the original version of the post-composed ending, which Franco Alfano produced after Puccini's death on behalf of the Ricordi publishing house.
In the score of the great musical narrator Puccini, the individual and society confront each other in a highly irritating way. The implacable system that Turandot has erected around herself bears traits of ceremony and grotesquerie, of total organization and controlled mass hysteria: a world that spans between the impenetrable, deadly attraction of Turandot and seemingly incessant rituals of application, warning, trial and murder. Shadows and priests populate it. Garishly overdrawn ministers speak their warnings in a tone that also oscillates musically between provocation and mockery - you believe them at their word that they are preparing a wedding and a funeral at the same time. The basis of all this - the score as well as the state - is the crowd, which alternately screams for blood and begs for mercy for the condemned. An unpredictable, uncanny force.Order your tickets for the Vienna State Opera and book your tickets now at viennaticket.at.
(Source: wiener-staatsoper.at)
