Washington Opera Offers New Ending for Puccini's Final Work

NEW YORK (AP) Since Giacomo Puccini died without completing his last opera, Turandot, audiences have delighted in his soaring melodies like that of Nessun Dorma, but may also have lamented the lack of a fitting ending .

Now Washington National Opera is offering an alternative, commissioning both new words and new music for the last 18 or so minutes of the piece. The production, with a libretto by Susan Soon He Stanton and music by Christopher Tin, will run Saturday through the 25th.

Turandot tells the story of a Chinese princess who condemns all her suitors to have their heads cut off if they fail to answer three riddles. When an unknown prince succeeds, Turandot is forced to marry him, but he gives her a way out of the deal if she can guess his identity.

In the final scene, according to the original libretto, the prince kisses Turandot then, confident that he has won her love, reveals that his name is Calaf. The opera ends in general joy.

Francesca Zambello, artistic director of the WNO, is among those who find this ending unsatisfactory.

You have a very proud and fiery princess who spends the whole opera saying no, she says. Then Calaf arrives, he ignores her No, then plants a big kiss on her against her will, and suddenly, she suddenly transforms into this kind and magnanimous leader.

Now that the the copyright in the work has expiredshe said, I wanted to change history in a way that I hoped Puccini's ghost might approve of.

The character of Liu, a slave so devoted to Calaf that she commits suicide rather than reveal her name under torture, adds to the implausibility of the resolution. In the final scene, Liu's fate is barely mentioned and quickly forgotten.

Puccini had completed his score up until Liu's death, but left only musical sketches for the remainder when he died in 1924 while undergoing treatment for throat cancer.

Franco Alfano was hired to complete the music from Puccini's notes and it is usually a version of his score that is performed today, although there have been several attempts to improve it.

Luciano Berio orchestrated a new ending created in 2002; Chinese composer Hao Weiya created his own version in 2008, and Opera Delaware will offer a conclusion in May composed by Derrick Wang, whose previous Scalia/Ginsburg opera chronicled the friendship between the two Supreme Court justices.

But none went as far as WNO in rewriting the text and music of the final scene.

Stanton, playwright and screenwriter who worked on hit television series Succession, said she was trying to understand Turandot's character and motivations in a way that rang true psychologically. And she came to a surprising conclusion.

In Turandot's opening aria In questa reggia, she describes her cruel behavior in sending suitor after suitor to their death in revenge for the fate of her ancestor, Princess Lo-u-ling, who she believes was sexually assaulted and murdered.

But Stanton said, “I just didn’t believe her.” The death toll is so high that it didn't make sense that she would kill all these men because of something that happened to an ancestor a long time ago.

It seemed more like a traumatic reaction from someone who is really afraid of getting married, Stanton said. So, in the new final scene, Turandot reveals that it was she herself who was raped.

And now it's Turandot who initiates the kiss, first shyly, then passionately, making her a more equal partner in her relationship with Calaf.

Stanton also brings Liu back into the story. In the new version, Turandot's father died during the night, and his first decree as ruler is to announce that the slave girl will be buried in a place of honor alongside the emperor, hinting at a egalitarian society to come.

To create new music for this revised story, Zambello turned to Tin, a Grammy Award-winning composer who has written for film, television series and video game soundtracks.

Zambello said she told Tin she didn't want it to sound like a completely different musical language. I wanted to have something that felt like maybe Puccini wrote it, but put through a contemporary filter.

Tin said he made extensive use of the melodies and themes that appear in the parts of the opera that Puccini had completed, but reworked them to fit the new libretto.

In some ways, he said he thought he was better suited for this mission than Alfano, who was of the next generation after Puccini and who took a somewhat more modernist approach to his music.

I am a very melodic composer, Tin said, I write musical structures that are very easy to analyze. And that makes me a very good candidate for this position. It's always intimidating because you already have 100 years of opinions on what you should write.

Ultimately, the only way for me to proceed was to sort everything out, he said. Ultimately, no one wants to hear second-rate Puccini. But someone might want to hear top-notch Christopher Tin.

Source: job