To mark the centenary of its premiere, Turandot by Giacomo Puccini will be staged. Set in a fictionalised China, the opera depicts the conflict between the icy princess and the hero who seeks to win her heart by solving the three riddles set before him. Turandot is undoubtedly one of the most beloved operas and, following La Traviata in 2022 and La Boh&in 2024, it continues the tradition of masterpieces entrusted to young directors selected through the under-35 directing competition.

Turandot is Giacomo Puccini’s final, enigmatic opera. Left unfinished upon the composer’s death in 1924, it was completed by Franco Alfano and premiered at La Scala in Milan in 1926, in an atmosphere already steeped in legend.
We find ourselves in a fairy-tale yet cruel Beijing. Princess Turandot, beautiful and unapproachable, has imposed a ruthless law: anyone who wishes to marry her must solve three riddles. Those who fail must die. It is a challenge that has already doomed many men, but not the unknown Prince Calaf, who arrives in the city and, upon seeing Turandot, decides to take up the challenge. Three riddles. Three answers. Calaf wins. But Turandot does not yield. She cannot love. She does not wish to belong. So Calaf raises the stakes: he offers her a way out. If she discovers his name before dawn, she may have him executed. If she fails, she will have to marry him. On this suspenseful night, the whole city is forced to keep vigil. It is here that one of the most famous arias of all time is born, *Nessun dorma*: a song of trust, of defiance, of victory foretold. Alongside the two protagonists is Liù, a fragile and deeply human figure, capable of a silent and absolute love. It is precisely his sacrifice that will crack Turandot’s armour, opening a glimmer of hope towards a finale of transformation.
Musically, Turandot is grandiose and thoroughly modern: it combines a majestic orchestra and grand choruses with refined exotic elements, creating a rich, luminous and incisive soundscape. It is an opera of contrasts: coldness and passion, riddles and revelations, cruelty and tenderness. A final masterpiece poised between fairy tale and tragedy. An opera that does not merely tell a story of love: it puts love to the test.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES

THE LAST DAWN
Staging Turandot in its unfinished form seemed to me seemed to me right from the start a great dramaturgical opportunity to impose a radical directorial approach on the entire opera, making the most of the dizzying suspension in which the maestro’s work comes to a halt. Everything that was meant to be resolved remains unresolved, open-ended, interrupted, and it is precisely this interruption that forms the basis of the entire dramaturgy of this project.
I wanted to take this incompleteness to an ‘open ending’&’ that would serve as a precise dramaturgical device to pose fundamental questions: is redemption truly always possible? How far can we push beyond what is permitted before realising our mistakes in time? And can the integrity of our minds and hearts ever be restored?
Liù’s death brings the entire opera to a point of emotional and ethical collapse. At that fateful moment, everything is shaken by a harsh and unacceptable truth that no conclusion can remedy: violence has triumphed over compassion, and thedawn arrives with Puccini’s final, drawn-out note – a dawn awaited by the people of Beijing as an apocalypse.
It is the end of the world. The last thing their eyes will ever see. A purifying light which, however, does not save, but blinds and erases everything.
Turandot is the opera that allows us to delve into the darkest corner of our being and shows us the extreme consequences to which hatred, revenge and death. It reveals to us, in a thoroughly contemporary way, how cruelty does not even stop in the face of purity and innocence. In this production, we do not witness a transformation in the character of the princess; instead, she remains irretrievably trapped in her abyss of suffering, for she is too deeply entrenched in the role she plays – a role she has chosen and which, at the same time, has been tailor-made for her. Turandot, the true enigma that no one has ever solved, is the one who, single-handedly, has managed to bind the whole world to her will. The last of a millennia-old ‘divine lineage’, she is culturally regarded as a deity incarnate in the beautiful body of a young woman, and all things are subject to her will—sacred and unpredictable.
Since the themes of ritual and superstition are very important for understanding Turandot’s role, I have chosen to associate the princess with theidol of the Moon, as if she were its living embodiment, the gaunt lover of the dead, the enigmatic and taciturn figure whose radiance the dead still yearn for. The Moon, therefore, is nothing but her face, her white mask accompanied by a constellation of severed heads. These are the chorus of ghosts – that is to say, the countless princes who failed the riddle trial, whose heads, as will happen to the Prince of Persia, have been hoisted up before her. The Moon’s arrival thus becomes a ritual, a moment of collective ecstasy in which even those condemned to death display an unsettling serenity.
The complex cultural world and the tragic present into which this timeless China is set, fuels the figure of the princess, rendering her a hybrid—that is, a deity, woman and demon at the same time. Superstition, which continually echoes through the ghostly mass of the people of Beijing, distorts reality and renders it ambiguous, to the point where we can no longer distinguish what about her is real, and what is merely believed. “Turandot does not exist,” say Ping, Pong and Pang. And in this sense it is true: Turandot does not exist. What exists is the idea that everyone has of her. What exists is the void that the people have filled with fear, veneration and terror. Much of her characterisation is shaped by this ambiguity, heightening her elusiveness and danger. Turandot truly seems to embody the Moon that the people invoke in prayer, and indeed her poisonous spell seems to bewitch all who look upon her. She undoubtedly has control over her world of death, populated by ghosts, and certainly believes she can still hear the screams of her ancestor, but does any of this actually correspond to reality? Or is it merely a figment of the imagination?
What we actually see on stage are the results of her choices and the influences she has been subjected to. All this takes shape in a world that appears, right from the start, to be broken, devastated, terminal. The realm of Beijing is sick, and this sickness manifests itself as a black contamination: a viscous substance, a glossy, invasive matter that spreads from the centre of the stage and seeps everywhere, like a silent yet evident infection. It creeps across the floor, climbs up the walls, and forms organic clumps like the outgrowths of a diseased mind. It is the very extension of Turandot, the visible materialisation of her cult of death and vengeance, a cult that can only ever grow and that grips this world in a suffocating stranglehold. It is not merely a contamination of space, but above all an infection of the souls of all those who dwell within her dark realm. Everyone bears its clear signs in their blackened hands, their soiled clothes and their gaunt faces, ritually painted white.
The space in which the characters move is already a ruin, a place without time and without redemption. It is a broken world awaiting its conclusion, a realm that has now almost lost all memory of its former glory, of which the ministers Ping, Pong and Pang are the regretful custodians. The delicate decorative motifs that still struggle to emerge amidst the decay of the scene are like faded memories of the refinement of a distant past that has been brutally torn apart. Beijing is, in fact, trapped in a shared ancestral trauma, namely a wound that has never healed: the invasion of the Tartars, that is, the devastation of the kingdom and the desecration of Princess Lo-u-Ling.
How, then, can one live without hope for the future when even the past has now become a faded mirage? It is in this state that theexistence of the People of Beijing, who thus become a central figure in the dramaturgy of this project. The crowd inhabiting this world is subjugated, superstitious, reduced to a spectral, pallid mass—a single creature that is a blind multitude yearning for light. The crowd moves as one, stirs, then fades; it is mad and a sick victim of the spell of Turandot , to which they feel completely subjugated. The light, which is a lunar spell, clouds their minds and filters coldly through the cracks in the crumbling walls, like a promise that is never fulfilled.
Amidst this scene of desolation, the Emperor is acclaimed by the crowd to the sound of sublime music, for he represents the last breath of a lost glory. I have decided to render him incapable of any action whatsoever by confining him to a throne from which he cannot descend, upon the gilded summit of a pedestal from which he can only be a spectator to the ruin of his kingdom and his people.
Three outsiders enter this liturgy of frost: Calaf, Liù and Timur. They are three survivors, three exiles whose vital energy is fundamentally at odds with that of all the other characters inhabiting this world. They are the only ones who, despite having endured a long series of injustices, harbour no hatred and seek no revenge. They reveal their full fragility whilst remaining true to themselves. Calaf’s journey is thoroughly human and initiatory. A fallen prince, when the curtain rises he is lost amongst the crowd as just one of many, in a state of identity crisis. His entire journey is characterised by a desperate attempt to rediscover himself and restore his name’s honour. It is Liù who finds him almost by chance, and perhaps if she had not recognised him, Calaf would have remained there, trapped in his anonymity, lost forever amongst the crowd. This is merely the first miraculous act of salvation performed by the most humble of handmaids, a true light in the darkness. A light to which Timur, in turn, entrusts all that remains of his existence. Timur deserves all the composure and dignity of showing us a different way of being in the dark. Despite having lost all the glory that characterised his past – and which still lingers in the ruins of his bearing – he has managed to entrust what remains to him to the sole essence of genuine simplicity that breathes in that world of death and desolation. Just as Turandot is the spectral light, the deadly contagion that spreads and infects, Liù in this production represents theexact opposite of a light that is at last alive and warm, pulsing in the darkness and managing to breathe life into it – the light of dawn that restores renewal to the world, a new spring. For this reason, I decided to associate Liù with the echo that resounds on several occasions like an ancient, forgotten folk song: ‘Up in the eastern mountains…’
Everything will bloom,
everything will shine!
The song ‘There in the Eastern Mountains’ becomes a prophecy of which Liù is the unwitting chosen one destined to fulfil it. A fragile, innocent little girl appears as a sacred vision, unseen by anyone except the slave-girl, to bring her the signs that will lead her to bring about the downfall of Turandot’s kingdom. Everything is suspended; time seems to stand still, and Liù recognises herself in that very little girl. This shift in focus from the figure of Turandot to that of Liù is essential to elevate her ultimate sacrifice. She is no longer a victim, but an offering. Her death breaks Turandot’s spell through a total renunciation and seals the resurrection of the flowers and the light. The black substance begins to change. Where once it devoured space, now it blossoms. Flowers grow from the blackness. The sunrise radiates and at last everyone sees. They see themselves and what they have sacrificed, whilst the figure of Turandot, at this point, dissolves like a god who no longer has a following.
The ending that Puccini did not write remains unspoken on stage as well. No resolution. Only suspension. Dawn bursts forth in an explosion of blinding light that erases everything, cleanses everything, extinguishes everything – and allows everything to begin anew.
Finally, before darkness falls, everyone takes one last deep breath.

Nadir Dal Grande

NOTES BY THE MUSICAL DIRECTOR

The clear and moving humanism of Turandot

Turandot is the symbolic tale of theself and the search for one’s name. All the characters emerge from an indistinct night and from the crowd, acquiring an identity only when their role is defined or their name is spoken. 
Upon their first encounter, all the characters in this opera find themselves lost: in a sense, it is not only Timur who experiences blindness. They therefore need to recognise one another: Liù searches for Timur amongst the crowd, the ‘nameless’ Prince calls out to his father, Liù recognises ‘her Lord’, Timur recognises his son and bestows an identity upon the maiden who guides him (‘It was Liù!’). Upon her entrance, Turandot even needs to recount the story of her ancestor in order to identify herself.
Later in the opera, the third and final riddle – the solution to which truly leaves the Ice Princess vulnerable – will be her very own name: Turandot. The unknown Prince, in turn, will challenge her to reveal her identity by seeking out her name. And Liù’s sacrifice will enable Calaf to keep his secret and thus win Turandot’s heart.
The discovery of one’s name as a moment of connection with one’s identity and, at the same time, as the unveiling of a secret that may lead to the resolution of a conflict or, conversely, to death and loss, is a long-standing theme in literature and music: when Oedipus discovers who he truly is, he blinds himself and, only then, by losing his physical sight, does he ‘see’ his destiny; when Lohengrin reveals his name to Elsa, and with it his identity, he will inevitably lose her. 
Fairy tales of this kind always have an initiatory flavour, because they recount that process of self-discovery necessary to understand who we are and what our purpose is in the world. And love is the driving force, the engine that propels the characters on their journey towards self-awareness.

This existential dimension was probably the factor that most fascinated Puccini, so much so that it prompted him to choose this subject for his final opera. “I believe that Turandot is the most normal and human of all Gozzi’s other productions,” he wrote to Simoni on 18 March 1920: “normal” and “human” are two interesting adjectives, because they emphasise, within a story that is seemingly extraordinary due to its exotic and fairy-tale atmosphere, the truth and universality of its protagonists’ emotions. In this sense, the story of Turandot, despite its formal setting as a fairy tale, is entirely analogous to the stories of Puccini’s other characters: flesh-and-blood characters, “very human” and, as such, contradictory, changeable, moving. 
At least on a theoretical level, Puccini reaffirms in this opera the ideas and aspirations that characterised his entire aesthetic: the pursuit of ‘melody’, the stirrings of ‘feelings’. In a letter to Simoni dated 1 May 1922, he writes: “…by now, the public no longer has the right taste for new music. – It either loves or endures illogical music devoid of common sense – Melody is no longer composed – or if it is, it is vulgar – It is believed that symphonic music must reign supreme, and I believe this spells the end of opera…&”. Yet, the subject matter of this fairy tale ultimately leads to outcomes which, unlike the initial ‘aesthetic programme’, have something novel about them, perhaps heralding a ‘new path’. Puccini himself seemed to realise this; in 1924, he wrote to Adami: “I think, hour by hour, minute by minute, of Turandot, and all the music I have written so far seems to me like a farce, and I no longer like it& 
Gianandrea Gavazzeni, in his essay “Turandot, an unsettled entity” (included in “La bacchetta spezzata”, 1987), ventured the idea that the opera, at a certain point, “fortunately, would slip out of the hands of the three authors [Puccini and the two librettists] to become something entirely different from what was intended”, perhaps even because “it was far too far removed from the culture and taste of its creators, outside their ‘historical’ era”; an opera that creates itself, an opera ‘without authors’”.
The novelty of Turandot lies in the essential nature of its harmonic language and in its orchestral colour. As was already the case with Verdi’s late works, in stark contrast to the aesthetics of his time – which indulged in opulent symphonic style and a grandiloquent, self-satisfied compositional style – Puccini’s style becomes more refined, the harmonies grow sharp (one need only think of the dazzling opening, with the repeated, dissonant and crisp chords of the trumpets and strings), and the sonic atmospheres become rarefied and evocative. Those distinctly French influences found in many of his earlier works undergo a genuine process of distillation here, leading the composer to seek, in the individual sound—even in the individual timbre— the power to move the listener.  
Much is said about the opulence of this score and its large ensemble: that it is a rich score, of course, is undeniable; but we need to examine this richness more closely to realise that we are not dealing with a work by Richard Strauss, with its intricate polyphony and bombastic style, nor with the dense, rhetorical textures of theorchestra of a Giordano or a Mascagni (nor, alas, of an Alfano: and it is in this respect that the distance between its finale and Puccini’s style is most keenly felt). In Turandot everything is transparent and clear, even in the seemingly densest passages and the most passionate or violent outbursts (one need only think of the many choral passages); the virtuosity of the timbral blends never veers towards a self-indulgent overload of expressive means, but rather towards a deep exploration of the emotional dimension. 
And it is no coincidence that so many passages of the work fade into silence: the orchestra seems to thin out to such an extent that it slips imperceptibly towards the crowning pause, the suspension of time and space. The most emblematic example is the solitary piccolo, which, a full three octaves above the strings, sustains its long E flat in pianissimo, accompanying the lament for Li’s death, followed then by silence: a moving portrait of the soul of the ‘young slave’, which (together with that of its composer…) now soars above those who have remained on this earth to contemplate her lifeless body.
The vocal writing and melodic lines, too, respond to this new demand for essentiality. It seems to me that in this opera Puccini even revisits the method of melodic ‘micro-cells’ from a name (thus once again emphasising the almost ‘magical’ value of the latter), following a practice that dates back to theera of Monteverdi and is characterised by symbolic conciseness. A few examples: at the beginning of Li’s final aria, the ‘Princess of Ice’ is associated with the repetition of three B flats (corresponding to the syllables of the name ‘Tu-ran-dot”), which, in their stillness, perfectly capture that character’s coldness; after Liù’s death, however, two descending high notes in the treble register are heard (and there are two syllables in the name “Li-ù”), which are strikingly reminiscent of the call of a nightjar, thus emphasising the delicate melancholy of the ‘little Chinese woman’.
The characters that emerge from this deeply introspective and ‘minimalist’ writing are tormented, torn apart. Even Turandot, the Ice Princess, in her sombre tale of her grandmother Lou-Ling, sings—to a restless accompaniment—a melody that constantly loops back on itself, thus betraying a soul that is anything but cold.&
But the characters who are perhaps the most multifaceted from this perspective, surprisingly, are Ping, Pang and Pong. Commonly and mistakenly interpreted as operetta characters—light-hearted and insubstantial—they are in reality more complex than one might think: in their capacity as ministers of state, they are torn between their duty to obey Turandot and their awareness of a Law superior to mankind, between the power of human desires and their vanity, between the appearance of the sensible world and the nothingness of the Tao… And so they suddenly become nostalgic, twilight-like characters, as they yearn to return to a distant past, to a homeland now beyond reach, to a happiness experienced for a moment and already gone (just how much of Puccini isin them!).

It is within this atmosphere of ‘inner instability’ shared by all the characters that we can situate the question of the opera’s endingopera (and our choice to end it with Li’s death, limiting the score to what Puccini actually wrote). 
We are aware of the composer’s hesitations (but also his satisfaction with the final libretto by Adami and Simoni); we know that a complete finale was played on several occasions by Puccini at the piano before a small circle of trusted friends and collaborators (including the conductor Gaetano Bavagnoli, who recalled that the opera, in that private performance, ended – once again – in pianissimo, unlike Alfano’s glorious, triumphant finale): nevertheless, the opera remained essentially unfinished.
The decision to end the opera at the point where (and where it was interrupted by Toscanini on 25 April 1926) is not merely of historical and documentary value, but is the result of a deeper reflection.  
Ideally, a finale (be it happy or tragic) would have provided an answer to what Denis Gaita (in “Turandot, Amazon or Sphinx”) defined as the “mystery of the war between the sexes, of woman, of death and of the enigma”, which is central to Turandot; ending with Liù’s death, however, leaves the questions unresolved and the fate of the two characters-antagonists open. Puccini, in this way, does not answer questions that recur in almost every one of his operas, but which, in the fairy-tale story of Turandot, lose all historical dimension to become existential questions. With this ‘incomplete’ ending, Puccini leaves his characters “without peace” (Gavazzeni), thus truly interpreting the drama of twentieth-century man: torn apart, lost, and in search, precisely, of a name and an identity.

One hundred years on from its ‘premiere’, as performers of *Turandot* we can and must, first and foremost, carry out a complete (re)evaluation of the originality of this score, aiming to understand and bring to light the most intimate traits of each character and the refined beauty of a composition that is the distillation of an entire artistic journey. But, even before that, we must come to grasp the main themes of this ‘existential fairy tale’ centred on the emotion of the infinite and eternal search for the self, which is inherent in every human being.
As Puccini wrote to Simoni towards the end of 1920: “I have already had a foretaste, above all, of the clear and moving humanism that lies in this story, full of poetry and a special charm”.

Alessandro d’Agostini