Puccini: Turandot

Blood upon the Imperial Roofs of Peking

In the late autumn of 1924, in a cancer clinic in Brussels, sixty-five-year-old Giacomo Puccini lay in agony with radium needles embedded in his throat.

Scattered across his bedside table were thirty-six sheets of sketches for the climax of his unfinished opera, bearing the desperate marginal note: “Poi… l’amore” (“Then… love”). Days later, the maestro was gone, leaving Turandot—his mythic depiction of riddle, torture, and blood in ancient Peking—forever suspended before its final dawn.

More than half a century later, in May 1981, Herbert von Karajan—the undisputed emperor of the recording studio—strode into the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. Leading the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera Chorus, Karajan set out to sculpt Turandot on the scale of an immense cinematic epic.

The Ice Princess and the Bronze Prince

In conventional stagings, Turandot is usually entrusted to a stentorian dramatic soprano possessing steel lungs and cutting laser projection, like Birgit Nilsson.

Karajan, however, chose the Italian lyric soprano Katia Ricciarelli. He did not want an invulnerable, screaming monster; he envisioned a traumatized, fragile human being trembling behind an icy ceremonial mask, terrified of male conquest and intimacy.

Opposite her stood Plácido Domingo at the absolute zenith of his powers at age forty-one.

When he launches into the world-famous Act III aria “Nessun dorma,” Domingo’s bronze-tinged timbre cuts through the nocturnal orchestral mist like liquid fire: “Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me… All’alba vincerò!” The incandescent final High B burns with enough heroic conviction to melt a thousand years of imperial frost.

Meanwhile, Barbara Hendricks offers a Liù of ethereal, heartbreaking purity, her floated pianissimi in “Tu che di gel sei cinta” shimmering like teardrops frozen in starlight.

A Sovereign Sonic Canvas

What makes Karajan’s Turandot unrepeatable, however, is the unmatched sound of the Vienna Philharmonic.

The imperial brass fanfares bellow with terrifying majesty; the gong and bass drum strikes plunge into bottomless subterranean depths; and when the night falls quiet, the Viennese strings wrap the listener in dark, velvet moonlight. Karajan paints with broad, luxurious brushstrokes, balancing barbarism and ecstasy upon the same titanic canvas.

This is not a recording to play as background noise. When the needle drops, the walls of ancient Peking close in, gripping you in your seat until the morning sun shatters the dark.