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But I'll save one word for you

Well, that was a shock . . .

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This has been a good weekend. Friday morning and several hours this afternoon I spent with my good friend Peter Gould, one of the most incredible people ever to walk the face of the earth. Last night went toward the Met's production of Puccini's Turandot, where Krassimira Stoyanova as Liù blew the top of my head off (metaphorically; she wasn't quite that loud). And in defiance of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai, thank you very much, I still like Euripides.

On to what you like. Since I have not yet figured out how to set up livejournal polls, is there something of which people would like to see more at this site? "Assyriology" and "Silly Quizzes" are perfectly acceptable answers . . .

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YOU SAW TURANDOT AT THE MET WITHOUT ME?!?!?! BWAH!

I don't think you can set up livejournal polls without being a paid member.

I'm sorry! I'm really sorry! Can I placate you with promises of Faust in May?

. . . It won't help if I say it was very good, will it?

No, it really won't. :) But you WILL fill me in on the details!

Well, do you mind starting with a question? How old do you think Turandot is?

(Admittedly, my entire familiarity with the story is this production I saw last night. But bear with me for a few paragraphs.)

To me, Turandot only makes sense as a young character. I don't mean a child, but sixteen, eighteen: old enough to be physically mature and unreally beautiful; young enough first of all that romantic/sexual attraction is a foreign concept to her, and secondly that her obsession with the story of her ancestor Louling is believable, the sort of perverse romanticism that an intelligent, proud, and very sheltered girl might wrap herself up in. She's convinced herself that marriage to a man is equal to rape and murder, that falling in love is a form of brutal domination. (In some ways, she is not totally off the mark: as the daughter of the Emperor of China, she is an immediate path to power for the man who becomes her husband. But the political aspects seem to concern her far less than the issues of selfhood and independence, and specifically the sexual aspects thereof.) She will lose not only the game, but herself, if she lets herself become anything other than the burningly cold, unreachable Turandot: herself the third riddle. It's a fairytale motif, the asking of riddles for a lover's hand (Vos kan vaksn, vaksn on regn / Vos kan brenen un nit oyfhern, / Vos ken benken, veynen on treren?), but as deadly as this riddle-game is, it also strikes me as somehow childish. And according to the complaints of the three courtiers at the beginning of Act II, it's for three years now that her suitors have been dying—she cannot have been of marriageable age for very long.

I am not saying that I think she's stupid—in fact, if the riddles are of her own devising, she's been outwitting would-be husbands for years—but I do think she is immature. Calàf seems to be the first man for whom she's felt anything, even if it's only the first stirrings of interest. (Which of course throws the ritual out of whack: how does she deal with a man whom she doesn't want to see executed like all the rest, yet she's willing to torture innocent men and women to get out of marrying him? Mixed messages, to say the least.) And that attraction is what starts her growing up, out of the frozen principessa di morte and into someone who can shed tears, and fall in love, and change.

So the singer who performed Turandot in this production, Andrea Gruber, could certainly sing the role (although as I've said, Krassimira Stoyanova was the one who really blew me away; both in terms of richness of sound and technical control, and the ability to make all the skill seem effortless), but I couldn't believe her as the character. Turandot needs that kind of terrible beauty, in both appearance and voice, that you believe she is someone worth going to a futile death for; that even when she threatens Liù with torture, Calàf would still love her. The audience needs to find her as compelling as all her doomed suitors do, not necessarily seductive but still charged with that fatal attraction. To look at her is to desire her. To desire her is to die for her. All the wonderful bride-bed-as-a-grave imagery (not to mention some creepy resonances with Salomé, what with the moon kissing the dead features of her latest beheaded suitor) that pervades the first act. To pull all those contradictions off, Turandot must both monstrous and sympathetic: and I didn't get any of that feel from Andrea Gruber.

Not to say that the Met's production wasn't an amazing one—go on, ask me about the sets—or the music—or the three courtiers—or Liù—but I found the characterization of Turandot sort of a soprano-shaped black hole in the story. I am curious to hear your thoughts on the matter.

I'm not actually sure how old Turandot is. I remember hearing somewhere, from a source of dubious reliability, that she's supposed to be a child bride, but there's only so young I can reasonably see her as being. Your answer strikes me as one of the more likely, though I think she could be on the older end -- once you create that sort of vision for yourself and the world, and act it out for a few years, I imagine it becomes harder and harder to drop even if deep down you want to. I see her as at this point possibly having a terror of having her foundations shaken that is even stronger than her reservations about men and sex -- which, whatever her original feelings, have remained a scary taboo because, well, they're a scary taboo and such things can be self-sustaining if you believe in them hard enough for long enough. I wonder if, when she tells her story abou the murdered empress, she really has the full conviction of the words -- after all, she's been telling it a LOT, and over the course of her growing up by three years. It would be interesting to see a performance in which her recitation is a bit formal and perfunctory until she catches Calaf's gaze and throws more energy into the telling as she projects onto him. (I also find it interesting that everyone else who voices an opinion also envisions her marriage as her husband stomping on her, with the exception of Calaf and probably her father. She seems really genuinely surprised to find out that there are other options.)

She needs to keep being who she is BECAUSE it is who she is -- never mind why -- and her panic increases as she realizes both her vulnerability to Calaf and how unsatisfying it will be if she wins this one. But she can't drop her role, and without Calaf essentially forcing her to, I don't believe she ever would have -- she would have seen the only person who was intelligent and interesting enough to catch her attention off to the executioner and then lived miserably ever after. And I think she knows it and isn't all that happy about it. "E t'ho odiato per quella! E per quella t'ho amato! Tormentata e divisa fra due terrori uguali: vincerti o esser vinta." She wants him to win -- there's got to be something incredibly attractive, in an infuriating way, about someone as smart as she is that she can't scare -- and the more she wants it, the harder she has to fight him. I think that's also why she's so harsh with Liù -- the only specific non-suitor we see her go after -- and threatens death to the whole city if she can't find out Calaf's name. She's increasingly in a state of barely (if that) suppressed panic. She's WAY more threatened by Liù's description of love as something positive than she is even by the sheer threat of marriage -- what if she's been wrong? And can't let herself stop? This is also why she's so mollified and satisfied when Calaf hands her back her dignity and gives her the power to beat his riddle if she wishes -- it's about much more than bringing her to terms with sexual attraction; it's about showing and giving her another version of herself that she can be and be happy with. She realizes she doesn't have to be the victim of her own construction; she doesn't have to kill him to win.

I'm not sure I've ever heard a version I found satisfying with respect to the interpretation of Turandot. It would be an interesting role to try, if I had anything in the same geological strata of the necessary voice part.

I think you should direct a production. I'd come see it.

...continued, because I apparently exceeded the character limit for a comment:

Liù is another really interesting one -- for a while my automatic reaction was "Agh, another beatific supporting character who duly sacrifices herself to the plot so that the main characters can fulfill their ambitions; why couldn't Puccini have written someone more interesting?" Then I listened more carefully and realized she's plenty interesting -- what she's saying to Turandot is really essentially, "Yes, you're the future Empress of China, and the man I love loves you, and I'm going to die for his sake and you're going to live and be happy with him. But right now I'm delivering you to him as a gift-wrapped birthday present, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it." Whew. There are few characters so obliging and helpful that you so sincerely would NOT want to mess with.

I would be very interested to see a production where Liù and Turandot are portrayed as being essentially the same age -- as you said, somewhere between sixteen and eighteen. In the recordings I've heard, Turandot has come across to me as older, though who knows what the associated productions intended.

You would have liked this Liù, I think: she had the steel-under-sweetness that you describe, and the sheer command of voice to make you believe everything she said. Her "Signore, ascolta" was breath-stopping. (I would have liked her suicide to be a little less stylized, but in general I've found stage direction at the Met to err on the side of the ornamental.) I find it interesting that the alternate portrayal of love that she offers to Turandot is still bound up with death and dying—though that's a connection so ancient, I can hardly argue; and self-sacrifice for love is almost as familiar a theme—but not with a loss of self beyond the physical fact of living. She doesn't stop being Liù because she loves Calàf. If anything, in the moment when she makes this rather damn scary gift to Turandot, she is most herself.

I would be very interested to see a production where Liù and Turandot are portrayed as being essentially the same age
Definitely. They would make much more effective foils for one another that way.

I wonder what the vocal requirements for the roles are; is there something in the range or tessitura that necessitates a heavier voice for Turandot, and thus an older sound? (I didn't immediately think so when I saw the opera. The woman I saw as Liù could certainly have sung Turandot.)

I also found Liù's behavior more understandable when I realized she's acknowledging that Calaf, her love for whom is so central to who she is, is now totally out of her reach whether she wins or loses. That sort of certainty would seem to make drastic gestures easier, particularly at that sort of age.

The Turandots I've heard have all come across as spending much more time wandering around the stratosphere than Liù does, though pitchwise they may be similar. I'm not overly familiar with how to describe voices, but I've always heard Turandot played in a way I found sort of high and thin, though in technical fact neither of these may have been true. I've always been someone annoyed with this, since I think she should sound as attractive as she looks and as interesting a person as Liù, or the sort lacks some intuitive sense -- she always sounds to me royal and slightly hysterically frigid. I always assumed this was just a conceptual disagreement between me and Puccini, but maybe there are other ways to do it.

That should be "whether he wins or loses".

And "or the story lacks some intuitive sense". *sigh*

This Turandot had (as you may guess from my above comments) a heavier, much more edged voice than Liù, who was sort of a tensile, sinewy shimmer. Part of my original complaint . . .

(Is okay. It's getting late.)

I also tend to assume that Turandot wrote her riddles -- they so strongly reflect her vaunted philosophy of life, that hope is a thing of dreams, and men are weak subjects of their passions. She's almost issuing a philosophical challenge at the same time as her intellectual duel to the death "Go ahead, prove me wrong. See, you can't!". And I can't imagine that anyone other than she would have thought to make herself the answer to her own third riddle, particularly not that riddle. Interestingly enough, it just occurred to me, answering that last riddle (and to some degree all of them) is not just a form of beating her with herself; it also requires the victor to correctly assess who she is and how she sees herself. Some who's imposing their own dreams of and passions for Turandot on her might miss that -- "O ragazzo demente -- Turandot non existe!" The trick is not in finding an absolute answer, but in understanding how she would answer.

Also, no one except her actually has a stake in seeing any of the contestants lose, so one imagines if someone else wrote the riddles they might have been a tad easier.

I have a somewhat biased view, since I thought the first and third riddles were no-brainers, especially the last. (I might have died on the second and never had a chance to make it to the third, however; except for the line about "freezing at danger," I'd probably have guessed the second riddle as "a heart" or "passion," rather than "blood." Have you noticed how pertinent to the situation the three answers are?) But I do agree with you, they're very much tied up with her view of the world. If you can't think as she thinks, you haven't a prayer—and very few of suitors, one senses, have ever been interested in doing that. They're fascinated by the externals, the beauty and the unattainability. The woman beyond the ice-mask? Eh, whatever . . . So Calàf is different not only in that he can answer the riddles, but for the reasons that he can: he sees something else.

I thought the connections between the riddles and the answers were no-brainers, but I think I would have been seriously tripped up by all the valid possible answers that come to mind, at least with the first two. I had an exam like that last semester, where the questions were multiple choice and even if you knew all the information the right answer wasn't obvious -- and you could have argued out all the alternatives lucidly in an essay, but you don't have the luxury of that, you need to give one short answer and hope you picked right. The idea that you can know enough and still get it wrong is pretty scary in and of itself. And I didn't even have a crowd surrounding me with bated breath and Turandot glaring at me.

I can also imagine that if any of the other suitors had gotten to the third riddle, at least some of them would have heard the self-description and automatically exclaimed, "Come now dear, you don't really mean that!" and been slain on the spot.

To comment yet again -- I also tend to assume that all riddles in operas, like role reversals and other such mind games, are a certain magnitude harder than they're actually written. Sort of like how you infer the appearances of certain characters regardless of whether the actors actually fit. The alternative is assuming that all the previous suitors were just brainless, which both seems improbable given the numbers involves and makes a less interesting story.

Well, I guessed the first and third without recourse to a libretto; but I take your point.

Recourse to a libretto?

To be fair, I heard the answers before I ever saw the questions, so I have no idea how well they work in drive. So I try to give the benefit of the doubt.

Yes; without knowing them beforehand. I knew the plot of Turandot very imperfectly when I saw the opera, and (partially because we got to our seats literally as the lights went down and I had no chance to read through the synopsis included in the program) had no idea what riddles Turandot would ask, much less the answers. So I guessed two of them and was correct, and would probably not have gotten the third. That's all.

Ah! I thought you were implying that they were clearer in the Italian than in the Met translation. Which is possible -- it's been a while since I've looked at that part of the libretto, and I've unfortunately yet to hear a Turandot who makes the words of the riddles comprehensible -- but seemed surprising.

It just occurred to me that my listening experience with Turandot was essentially the Jeopardy version. That's an amusing thought.

Answers before the questions? I don't think I can visualize Alex Trebek in a fantasy-Chinese court . . .

(You know, I got a great discussion of opera out of this. But I realize that not one person responded to my question of what should go on this livejournal!)

I would say all of the above. And more discussion of resolutely bloodthirsty operatic princesses and weird fake bards.

(deleted comment)

Have you tried writing plays? : )

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But I'll save one word for you

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