Puccini’s final opera may be dramatically flawed, but musically it is certainly one of his strongest works. Although the composer is best known for his soaring, emotion-wringing tunes, he should be better known for his ability to create the perfect sonic environment or musical atmosphere for the drama at hand. In the case of La bohème, for instance, we are ushered immediately into the playful, masculine, scrappy world of Rodolfo and his companions. We know within the first few bars of the score what ’world’ we’re in and we don’t question its appropriateness for a moment. The music creates a perfect background, a canvas for the human details to come. The score of Turandotdeals similarly with ’ancient’ China (although it is a fictional China) and the given situation, which is the announcement by the mandarin of the next princely suitor who is about to lose his head, is deftly handled by the announcement from the full orchestra of a disjunct, angular melody followed by unrelenting dissonant chords ’stabbing’ away in accompaniment.
This brief musical introduction is, in miniature, a perfect model of the entire score. The orchestral color is bright and heavy, with an emphasis on bi-tonal dissonances which give the opera its remarkable overall texture. Tunes in the opera are more often angular than overtly lyrical, almost as if Puccini were attempting to work against his natural gift for expressivity (Listen to the mandarin’s very first utterance, Popolo de Pekino, an octave leap downwards followed by a leap up of a minor sixth. Nothing could be less Puccinian.) Adding to the unusual color of the opera is the collection of percussion instruments that add a kind of ’Oriental’ flavor, and we mustn’t disregard the addition in the score of a number of authentic Chinese folk tunes that go even further in creating the perfect atmosphere.
But the score is decidedly different from the earlier operas which make up the more familiar Puccini oeuvre in our audiences’ ears: Bohème, Toscaand Butterfly.We tend to forget about operas that we rarely see these days, La fanciulla del West, La rondine, Il trittico, which, once known, show us quite vividly that Puccini was constantly growing, ever evolving towards Turandot. What accounts for the growth that we hear? It’s always good to remember that Puccini was very much aware of the musical current flowing about him in Europe during this time. He was familiar with Stravinsky (experiments in bi-tonality), Richard Strauss (orchestration), and Claude Debussy (the use of whole tone harmonic structures and the pentatonic scale).He was also certainly acquainted with the 12-tone experiments of Arnold Schoenberg, having attended the first Italian performance of Pierrot Lunaire.
Using all the compositional techniques at his disposal, Puccini created a score which is loaded with atmosphere. He then lays in the details, never forgetting that an opera audience must have its melodies, and Turandotis filled with lyrical moments freshly minted from the Puccini gold: Signore ascolta; Non piangere Liù; the threefold climax of In questa reggia and of course, Nessun dorma. Combined, the bright orchestral and atmospheric yang and the lyrically expressive and vocal yin create the perfectly balanced opera. Unfortunately the opera was left incomplete at Puccini’s death, and the perfectly balanced ending has yet to be devised.