CHAN 3086 Book Cover.qxd 21/5/07 5:33 pm Page 1 CHAN 3086(2) CHANDOS O PERA IN ENGLISH CHAN 3086 BOOK.qxd 21/5/07 5:36 pm Page 2 Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) Turandot Lyric drama in three acts Libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, after Gozzi’s dramatic fairy-tale Lebrecht Music Collection Music Lebrecht Princess Turandot............................................................................................Jane Eaglen soprano The Emperor Altoum, her father....................................................................Nicolai Gedda tenor Timur, the dispossessed King of Tartary...............................................................Clive Bayley bass Calaf, his son.................................................................................................Dennis O’Neill tenor Liù, a slave-girl ................................................................................................Mary Plazas soprano Ping, Grand Chancellor ............................................................................Peter Sidhom baritone Pang, General Purveyor Ministers ..............................................................Mark Le Brocq tenor Pong, Chief Cook } ...................................................................................Peter Wedd tenor A Mandarin .................................................................................................Simon Bailey baritone Prince of Persia ..............................................................................................Mark Le Brocq tenor The executioner (Pu-Tin-Pao)..........................................................................................silent role Geoffrey Mitchell Choir New London Children’s Choir Ronald Corp musical director Philharmonia Orchestra David Parry Giacomo Puccini Gareth Hancock assistant conductor 3 CHAN 3086 BOOK.qxd 21/5/07 5:36 pm Page 4 COMPACT DISC ONE Time Page Time Page Act I Act II 1 ‘People of proud Peking’ 4:11 [p. 84] Scene 1 Mandarin, Crowd, Guards, Liù, Unknown Prince, Timur 13 ‘Hallo Pang! Hallo Pong!’ 3:10 [p. 96] 2 ‘When all was lost’ 1:21 [p. 85] 14 ‘I’ve a house in fair Honan’ 4:11 [p. 97] Timur, Unknown Prince, Liù, Crowd Ping, Pong, Pang 3 ‘Sharpen the axe!’ 2:27 [p. 86] 15 ‘Do you remember when the Royal Prince of Samarkand Crowd, Executioner’s Assistants came?’ 5:17 [p. 98] 4 ‘Is the moon never rising?’ 4:45 [p. 87] Ping, Voices within, Pong, Pang Crowd 5 ‘How young to die!’ 5:27 [p. 88] Scene 2 Crowd, Unknown Price, White Priests of the Procession 16 ‘With the three enigmas ready’ 4:26 [p. 101] 6 ‘Son, are you mad?’ 1:47 [p. 88] Crowd Timur, Unknown Prince, Liù, Prince of Persia, Crowd 17 ‘I am the pris’ner of a ghastly promise’ 4:20 [p. 101] 7 ‘What do you want? Who are you?’ 1:54 [p. 89] Emperor, Unknown Prince, Crowd Ping, Pong, Pang, Unknown Prince 18 ‘People of proud Peking!’ 1:50 [p. 102] 8 ‘Why so much noise?’ 1:45 [p. 91] Mandarin, Crowd Turandot’s Handmaidens, Ping, Pong, Pang, Unknown Prince, Timur 19 ‘Within this Palace a story lives forever’ 2:38 [p. 102] 9 ‘Nights without a gleam of starlight…’ 2:35 [p. 92] Turandot, Crowd Pang, Pong, Ping, Voices of the Shadows, Unknown Prince, Timur 20 ‘O Princes who in caravans of splendour’ 3:24 [p. 102] 10 ‘I beg you, hear me’ 2:29 [p. 93] Turandot, Unknown Prince, Crowd Liù 21 ‘O stranger, now listen!’ 7:54 [p. 103] 11 ‘Don’t cry for me, Liù’ 2:07 [p. 93] Turandot, Unknown Prince, Sages, Emperor, Crowd, Liù Unknown Prince, Liù, Timur 22 ‘Emp’ror and father! Son of Heaven!’ 3:01 [p. 104] 12 ‘Ah! How can you ignore us?’ 2:36 [p. 93] Turandot, Emperor, Crowd, Unknown Prince Timur, Liù, Ping, Pong, Pang, Unknown Prince, Crowd 23 ‘Three enigmas that you asked me’ 4:18 [p. 105] Raimondo, Lucia TT 78:13 4 5 CHAN 3086 BOOK.qxd 21/5/07 5:36 pm Page 6 COMPACT DISC TWO Time Page Jane Eaglen as Turandot and Dennis O’Neill as Calaf Act III Scene 1 1 ‘The Princess Turandot commands’ 3:18 [p. 106] Heralds, Distant Voices 2 ‘None shall sleep now!’ 3:30 [p. 106] Unknown Prince, Women’s Voices, Ping, Pong, Pang 3 ‘These girls should please you!’ 4:07 [p. 107] Ping, Pong, Pang, Maidens, Unknown Prince, Crowd, Guards 4 ‘How pale you look, O stranger!’ 3:18 [p. 109] Turandot, Unknown Prince, Liù, Crowd, Ping, Timur 5 ‘Yes, I love him so deeply!’ 3:21 [p. 110] Liù, Turandot, Ping, Unknown Prince, Crowd 6 ‘You who with ice are shrouded’ 2:58 [p. 111] Liù, Crowd, Unknown Prince 7 ‘Liù!… Liù!… Wake up!’ 4:49 [p. 112] Timur, Ping, Crowd, Pong, Pang 8 ‘Deathly Princess, so heartless!’ 3:24 [p. 113] Unknown Prince, Turandot 9 ‘What have you done?’ 3:15 [p. 113] Turandot, Unknown Prince, Voices 10 ‘I never wept before’ 4:47 [p. 114] Turandot, Unknown Price Scene 2 11 ‘Glory to our Emp’ror!’ 3:32 [p. 115] Crowd, Turandot TT 40:26 6 CHAN 3086 BOOK.qxd 21/5/07 5:36 pm Page 8 Dennis O’Neill as Calaf Jane Eaglen as Turandot CHAN 3086 BOOK.qxd 21/5/07 5:36 pm Page 10 probably Puccini’s idea. It would certainly duet with Turandot at the start of Act III). Turandot – Old and new be typical of one who thirty years before Hereby he created a problem whose solution had insisted on the need for a ‘luminous would elude him until the end. The ‘An opera really new for Puccini’ – such was minor distinction, neither of whom was figure’ with whom the audience can conversion of a glacial, vindictive Fury, the view of Andrea Della Corte, critic of the prepared to serve up conventional operatic sympathise. who has witnessed the self-sacrifice of an Turin paper La Stampa, reporting on the fodder in the manner of their nineteenth- The opera’s growth and gradual innocent victim without turning a hair, into a premiere of Turandot in 1926 at La Scala, century predecessors such as Piave or transformation can be briefly charted. At first warm, loving human being, is a task that Milan; and it was echoed in musical circles Ghislanzoni. It was Simoni who first put Act I comprised two scenes, the second of would have daunted the greatest musical throughout the world, nowhere more strongly forward the idea of Gozzi’s ‘fiaba’ at a which ended with the solving of the riddles. genius. Over the next two years Puccini was than in Britain, where its composer’s fame (or, meeting with Puccini in Milan early in 1920; Act II dealt with the frantic search for Calaf’s tireless in his demands for a suitable text for as was often the case, notoriety) rested on and he handed the composer a copy of identity, the bribes offered to him by his final duet; and there are some who believe La bohème, Tosca and Madam Butterfly. In fact Schiller’s adaptation of it in the translation Turandot’s ministers and the torture of Liù; that if only his librettists had managed to novelty had always been a preoccupation with by Andrea Maffei. Puccini bit at once. ‘I think Act III with the Princess’s final surrender. By supply it in time, he might have completed Puccini, as it had been with Verdi; hence his we should keep to this subject,’ he wrote September 1921 Puccini was demanding that the opera to his satisfaction. But that seems habitual readiness to take up a wide variety of back. ‘Altogether I think that Turandot is the the last two acts be amalgamated into one – to me unlikely. To misquote Shakespeare’s subjects only to drop them once he found most normal and human of all Gozzi’s but fortunately not for long. By the New Year Mark Antony, his heart was in the coffin himself unable to reduce them to his own theatrical works. So Turandot, then, by way of the present distribution had been arrived at, there with Liù. terms. The gestation of Turandot was a the modern mind, yours, Adami’s and my Act I ending with the ensemble in which Indeed the pure-hearted girl who dies for particularly long and tormented one, during own.’ The poets duly drew up a scheme Timur, Liù and the ministers try vainly to love is rightly held up as Turandot’s link with which he was at times tempted to abandon the which satisfied him in broad outline; but it dissuade the Prince from his enterprise. March its predecessors in the Puccini canon. But it is entire project and even, so he told his English would undergo drastic alterations over the 1922 saw the addition of the opening scene of by no means the only one, least of all on the confidante, Sybil Seligman, to adapt the next four years. Of particular interest here is a Act II, conceived as a kind of intermezzo (‘una musical level. More perceptive than Della music already written for it to a new plot letter from Puccini to Simoni written in chitarrara’, as Puccini called it), to be followed Corte, Giulio Cesare Paribene of L’Ambrosiano devised by Giovacchino Forzano (author of August, 1920: ‘Have you given much in August by the insertion of Turandot’s ‘In observed that ‘Turandot bears witness to the Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi) with a thought to the new introduction of the little questa reggia’ (Within this Palace), though this whole of its author’s life in music, in the sense similar Chinese ambience. His difficulties woman? I do beg you, make it succeed as would not be composed until April 1923. In that it sums up all the evolutionary phases of a were compounded by the literary pretensions God wills – that is, excellently.’ So it would the meantime Puccini had taken the fateful composer who, while remaining true to of his two librettists, Renato Simoni and seem that the slave-girl Liù as substitute for decision for Liù to die during her torture (in himself, does not disdain to take note of all Giuseppe Adami, both of them playwrights of Gozzi’s scheming Princess Adelma was the original scheme she had been given a brief the discoveries of our present, restless age in 10 11 CHAN 3086 BOOK.qxd 21/5/07 5:36 pm Page 12 the matter of form and expression.’ In other longing for another sight of their beloved.