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You Fool, You Are In Love With Death
Dec. 7th, 2009 01:10 pmSo: Perhaps in celebration of my surgery and her return from Sudbury, my Mom and I ended up going to see Franco Zefferelli's production of Turnadot "Live from the Met" (ie, on the big screen at the Scotiabank movie theatre) on Saturday. It was three hours long, but my back never gave out, which was great--a truly spectacular rendering, for which Zefferelli had not only also designed the costumes but the sets as well. And at one point, Turandot WAS one of my favorite operas, for obvious reasons; it's a fairytale of cruelty, desire-driven, in which people strike arrogant "moral" stances and blunder on ahead blindly, without ever seeming to realize the incredible damage they're doing to the people around them. It's a narrative in which beauty and "purity" (a type of dreadful innocence, like Noah's in The Village) end up trumping genuine love and self-sacrifice, but you sort of don't mind, because the self-sacrifice in question borders on swoony masochism. And also the central lovers--Principessa Turandot of Peking, embodiment of fatally enticing Yin, and Prince Calaf of Tartary, embodiment of sheer Yang ("But...do you actually even know anything about answering riddles?" "No! But I will conquer!")--really should be together, not so much because they deserve each other as because if they weren't, the horrific imbalance of energy might derail our entire universe.
Interestingly, though, Mom had never seen the whole thing before, and was slightly off-put by it. Oh, she'd heard "Nessun Dorma", obviously--her favorite version is Pavarotti's--but she'd never had to negotiate the entirety of this messy, weird little narrative, and her observations made me look at it a bit differently myself. For example, it's true that Turandot, title character and amazing part that she is, doesn't really have a signature aria; the closest she gets is with "In Questa Reggia", where she outlines her reasons for posing all foreign princes who want to marry her three hard-ass riddles and then having their heads cut off if they miss one (it's a political payback sort of thing, in memory of her raped and murdered ancestress Lou-i-ling, who died at the hands of invaders...so kind of just on principle, as a metaphorical reflection of her intense respect for her Chinese heritage, though one doubts the princes themselves have much cause to admire her commitment to the idea). It also occurs to me that her father, the Emperor, realizes that Turandot's behavior is A) giving his dynasty a real bad name and B) is unlikely to produce any heirs, either. But we don't get too far into any of that, because this is just an opera about Love Conquering All based on a "traditional Chinese" music-box tune Puccini heard once and apparently thought was cute enough to draft a whole set of themes around.
I posited that maybe Turandot's problems are inherent to the fact that it was also Puccini's last opera; is it possible he never saw it performed? Because I can't help but think that if he had, he might have realized that giving Turandot an aria where she explicitly says: "Oh yeah, shit, I was on some bad crack back there, wasn't I? And now [having tortured to death a woman who died to keep your name a secret so you could marry me, because you smiled at her once and she was therefore in looooove with you to the detriment of everything else in her life forever] I understand what love is, plus you kiss real good, so let's get married" would maybe be a good idea, just for the audience's peace of mind. Or, indeed: "So...I would LIKE to marry you, but I don't deserve it! I am the cold embodiment of the moon and everything I touch dies! I must throw myself in the river and drown, or whatever! Enjoy the rest of your long and miserable loveless life, Calaf, when you could've run off with Liu the slave who loved you right at the beginning instead of imprinting on my face like a baby duck who wants to get himself killed, you dumb butthead!"
And here's the sad and rotten truth: It really didn't help that the woman playing Turandot, though she had a flexible and scarily beautiful voice, happened to look like a very bland Russian pudding. Because for Calaf's motivation to make any sense at all, Turandot has to be hypnotically, icily, inhumanly beautiful. She should look like Zhang Ziyi, or Brigitte Lin Chin-hsia--or maybe you should cast a dancer and have the diva sing her part while puppeting the dancer from the sidelines, hidden behind a mask.
One way or another, she's a dream of dark and troubling things, and Calaf will not sleep better for having "won" her--what with those twenty-four bodiless ghosts floating outside the window to stare in on them jealously, while sad Liu wrings her hands and raped Princess Lou-i-ling leans down to whisper in Turandot's ear: You have failed me, great-granddaughter, betrayed at last by your own desires. As I always knew you would be.
Now get up, find a cleaver, and bring me HIS head yourself.
Interestingly, though, Mom had never seen the whole thing before, and was slightly off-put by it. Oh, she'd heard "Nessun Dorma", obviously--her favorite version is Pavarotti's--but she'd never had to negotiate the entirety of this messy, weird little narrative, and her observations made me look at it a bit differently myself. For example, it's true that Turandot, title character and amazing part that she is, doesn't really have a signature aria; the closest she gets is with "In Questa Reggia", where she outlines her reasons for posing all foreign princes who want to marry her three hard-ass riddles and then having their heads cut off if they miss one (it's a political payback sort of thing, in memory of her raped and murdered ancestress Lou-i-ling, who died at the hands of invaders...so kind of just on principle, as a metaphorical reflection of her intense respect for her Chinese heritage, though one doubts the princes themselves have much cause to admire her commitment to the idea). It also occurs to me that her father, the Emperor, realizes that Turandot's behavior is A) giving his dynasty a real bad name and B) is unlikely to produce any heirs, either. But we don't get too far into any of that, because this is just an opera about Love Conquering All based on a "traditional Chinese" music-box tune Puccini heard once and apparently thought was cute enough to draft a whole set of themes around.
I posited that maybe Turandot's problems are inherent to the fact that it was also Puccini's last opera; is it possible he never saw it performed? Because I can't help but think that if he had, he might have realized that giving Turandot an aria where she explicitly says: "Oh yeah, shit, I was on some bad crack back there, wasn't I? And now [having tortured to death a woman who died to keep your name a secret so you could marry me, because you smiled at her once and she was therefore in looooove with you to the detriment of everything else in her life forever] I understand what love is, plus you kiss real good, so let's get married" would maybe be a good idea, just for the audience's peace of mind. Or, indeed: "So...I would LIKE to marry you, but I don't deserve it! I am the cold embodiment of the moon and everything I touch dies! I must throw myself in the river and drown, or whatever! Enjoy the rest of your long and miserable loveless life, Calaf, when you could've run off with Liu the slave who loved you right at the beginning instead of imprinting on my face like a baby duck who wants to get himself killed, you dumb butthead!"
And here's the sad and rotten truth: It really didn't help that the woman playing Turandot, though she had a flexible and scarily beautiful voice, happened to look like a very bland Russian pudding. Because for Calaf's motivation to make any sense at all, Turandot has to be hypnotically, icily, inhumanly beautiful. She should look like Zhang Ziyi, or Brigitte Lin Chin-hsia--or maybe you should cast a dancer and have the diva sing her part while puppeting the dancer from the sidelines, hidden behind a mask.
One way or another, she's a dream of dark and troubling things, and Calaf will not sleep better for having "won" her--what with those twenty-four bodiless ghosts floating outside the window to stare in on them jealously, while sad Liu wrings her hands and raped Princess Lou-i-ling leans down to whisper in Turandot's ear: You have failed me, great-granddaughter, betrayed at last by your own desires. As I always knew you would be.
Now get up, find a cleaver, and bring me HIS head yourself.
