TURAN DOKHT HOLLAND FESTIVAL TURAN DOKHT Aftab Darvishi Miranda Lakerveld Nilper Orchestra thanks to production partner patron coproduction CONTENT Info & context Credits Synopsis Notes A conversation with Miranda Lakerveld About the artists Friends Holland Festival 2019 Join us Colophon INFO CONTEXT date & starting time introduction Wed 5 June 2019, 8.30 pm by Peyman Jafari Thu 6 June 2019, 8.30 pm 7.45 pm venue Hamid Dabashi – Persian culture on Muziekgebouw The Global Scene Thu 6 Juni, 4 pm running time Podium Mozaïek 1 hour 20 minutes no interval language Farsi and Italian with English and Dutch surtitles CREDITS composition production Aftab Darvishi World Opera Lab, Jasper Berben libretto, direction with support of Miranda Lakerveld Fonds Podiumkunsten, Gieskes-Strijbis Fonds, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, conductor Nederlandse Ambassade Tehran Navid Gohari world premiere video 24 February 2019 Siavash Naghshbandi Azadi Tower, Tehran light Turan Dokht is inspired by the Haft Bart van den Heuvel Peykar of Nizami Ganjavi and Turandot by Giacomo Puccini. The fragments of costumes Puccini’s Turandot are used with kind per- Nasrin Khorrami mission of Ricordi Publishing House. dramaturgy, text advice All the flights that are made for this Asghar Seyed-Gohrab project are compensated for their CO2 emissions. vocals Ekaterina Levental (Turan Dokht), websites Arash Roozbehi (The unknown prince), World Opera Lab Sarah Akbari, Niloofar Nedaei, Miranda Lakerveld Tahere Hezave Aftab Darvishi acting musicians Yasaman Koozehgar, Yalda Ehsani, Mahsa Rahmati, Anahita Vahediardekani music performed by Behzad Hasanzadeh, voice/kamanche Mehrdad Alizadeh Veshki, percussion Nilper Orchestra SYNOPSIS The seven beauties from Nizami’s Haft Peykar represent the seven continents, the seven planets and the seven colours. The number seven, in turn, symbolises harmony. In the prologue, the seven women come together. A curse has been cast; the equilibrium between the planets has been lost. Two souls appear, about to be born. Will they restore harmony? Under the sign of Saturn, the black planet, a prince is born in Persia. Astrologers predict a brilliant future for the boy, but his father is jealous and sends him away. The boy grows up. When his father loses the throne, the prince returns to his homeland to reclaim it, and war breaks out. The seven princesses appear and send him on a journey. A very special young woman lives in the country of Turan. She is beautiful, has special gifts and is proficient in all the arts and sciences. But she doesn’t want to get married because of a cen- turies-old family curse. A distant ancestor was once dishonoured during wartime. Her scream still reverberates through the daugh- ter of Turan. Her father agrees to build a castle on a mountain sur- rounded by a magical green garden. Anyone who wishes to reach the castle, but whose intentions are impure, runs into enchanted talismans that immediately decapitate them. The prince makes it all the way to the castle and falls in love at first sight, but the garden is red with the blood of fallen suitors. The prince is afraid and begins to lose his resolve. Is there any point going into the garden and possibly losing his life? The daughter of Turan appears and tries to shoo him away. She doesn’t want there to be any more casualties, but he digs in his heels. He dresses in blue for protection and undergoes the Ceremony of Riddles. By looking deep inside his own soul, the prince is able to answer all questions in the ceremony, until the daughter of Turan asks him the final, ultimate question: what is her name? Looking at the starry sky, he finds the right answer. She is the first and the last; her name is love. After he has given the right answer, the sun rises, casting its golden rays on the landscape. The curse has been broken, and old wounds are healed with the scent of pink sandalwood. The ancestors are reconciled, and the couple gets married, dressed in brilliant white. In the epilogue, the seven beauties come together again. The power of love has broken the curse. Now they are finally free to go back home, to their planets, from where they lovingly observe life on our Earth to this day. NOTES The opera Turan Dokht by Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi and director/librettist Miranda Lakerveld is inspired on the epic poem Haft Peykar (‘The Seven Beauties’) written by the 12th-century Persian mystic and scholar Nizami Ganjavi. It’s a mystical frame narrative in which the symbolism of the number seven plays a key role. Seven princesses tell stories from different cultures to a prince. Each tells her story in a different coloured pavilion. The red pavil- ion’s princess tells the story of Turan Dokht, presenting the prince with riddles to test his self-knowledge and the moral correctness of his actions. The protagonist in the beloved opera Turandot by Giacomo Puccini is based on this princess but, inspired by playwright Carlo Gozzi’s version of the story, librettists Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni moved the story to China and made Turandot into a vengeful princess who kills her suitors. In Turan Dokht, Darvishi and Lakerveld bring Turandot back to her origins. Where the princess in the Puccini opera is a female Bluebeard, Turan Dokht is about an inner search for self-knowledge and humility. Puccini had already combined Eastern and Western elements in his opera. Darvishi, who was born in Iran and completed her music education in the Netherlands, takes this one step further. Her music for the Nilper Orchestra, which is complemented by Iranian percussion and a kamanche (an Iranian bowed string instrument), is based on Western tonality, but with flourishes derived from Iranian music. Darvishi’s use of repetition gives voice to the mys- tical aspects of Nazimi’s text. The performance includes projec- tions created by Siavash Naghshbandi based on the miniature paintings illustrating Haft Peykar. A CONVERSATION WITH MIRANDA LAKERVELD by Vincent Kouters On February 20th 2019 the opera Turan Dokht received its world premiere at the iconic Azadi Tower, Tehran. As the Dutch director Miranda Lakerveld and the Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi de- scribe it, they have created an ‘intercultural rewriting’ of the an- cient Persian tale about Turan Dokht, ‘the daughter of Turan’. This character is the heroine of many operatic and theatrical pieces, of which Puccini’s Turandot is the most famous. The production will be seen for the first time in the Netherlands at the 2019 Holland Festival. Where did the two of you begin your journey towards Turan Dokht? Miranda Lakerveld: ‘After the premiere of Sacrifice, in 2017, for which Aftab wrote the final chorus, she said she wanted to create a full evening opera, and that she’d really like to do it in Iran. My answer to her then was: “You’re completely crazy. We’re not going to do that.” But meanwhile the idea really did start bugging me.’ Why is that so crazy? ‘There’s almost no opera in Iran, and strictly speaking it’s prohib- ited. There are regulations, which you can get around, if you’re creative. But then there’s the enormous bureaucratic mill that a production has to go through. The structures for putting on an opera just don’t exist there. And here in the West almost no one wants anything to do with Iran, because of the sanctions. Fortunately, the Holland Festival was really enthusiastic about the project. Anyway, it looked like a good moment to do this. It was relatively quiet at that point. President Rohani had just been re-elected, some sanctions had been lifted, the situation was full of hope. That was the moment to do something. We thought it would be a long road to get the project going, but not that it would be well-nigh impossible.’ So what did you do? ‘In my work I always try to search within the opera repertoire for links to other cultures, in this case Persian culture. I think it’s really important that we raise questions in art about what links us with each other. Opera can do that extremely well. It’s a form of art that permits multilingualism and in which universal myths are well represented. Opera has many different routes to other cultures.’ ‘For a project in Iran operas such as The Magic Flute or works by Handel seem obvious, because they often feature Persian kings. But these pieces didn’t have the right resonance. I was looking for a story in which both the European and the Persian cultures are represented.’ How did you track down Turan Dokht? ‘I read Nizami Ganjavi’s Haft Paykar (‘The Seven Beauties’) and then suddenly realized: crikey, Turandot doesn’t have Chinese origins after all. It’s a Persian story. Then everything fell into place for me. I really love Puccini’s Turandot, but I’ve always found it an odd piece, with all those mystical elements and the chinoiserie. In 2015, when I was working on The Inner Landscape for the Holland Festival, with Frank Sheffer and Guo Wenjing, I was actually in China. One day I asked a Chinese opera company, which had Turandot in their repertoire, if they knew where the story came from. Was it really a Chinese fairy tale? They didn’t know the an- swer either. It was a folk tale. That was all they could say.’ What are you doing with this story? ‘Our production is a dialogue between Nizami Ganjavi’s story and the European Turandot tradition, which reached its zenith with Puccini. It’s a very rich tradition.