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.
no subject
(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.