Turandot

Turandot

Turandot became Giacomo Puccini’s final opera and is today immensely beloved worldwide. This is the operatic tale of an oppressed people under an imperial dynasty in China. The merciless Princess Turandot is set to marry according to tradition but refuses to face the same fate as an ancestor who was murdered after getting married. She does not want to be reduced to being subordinate to a man and has therefore, in order to delay marriage, imposed the condition that a suitor must correctly answer three riddles. If the suitor fails, he is executed.

Puccini wrote this opera while he was very ill and never managed to complete the work. Instead, his student Alfano finished it according to Puccini’s notes. Since its premiere in 1926 at La Scala in Milan, Turandot has held an unquestioned place in the repertoire of major opera houses. The magnificent music and the setting at the centre of power in China is very captivating, not least through the challenging vocal parts that demands dramatic voices.

By the summer of 2025, we will be able to offer our audience this beloved opera, with the famous aria Nessun dorma, in one of the world’s most unique opera houses, a former sawmill located by the shore of a vast lake, now famous for its acoustics. 

Soloists in the production of Turandot

Opera is a truly wonderful art form, but it also places great demands on its singers. That’s why we at Opera på Skäret  always work with two casts of soloists – and why we have not just one, but two premieres. Information about which singers are in each cast will be shared at a later date.

ARTISTIC PRODUCTION

Director – Lev Pugliese
Conductor– Lorenzo Coladonato
Set Designer – Sven Östberg
Costume Designer – Magdalena Stenbeck
Makeup & Wig – Stephanie Metzner
Lighting Designer – Maria Ros
Repetiteur – Bengt-Åke Lundin
Repetiteur – Samuel Skönberg
Chorus Master – Jonatan Lönnqvist
Repetiteur Chorus – Mats Johansson

26 July – 24 August
Performance duration: approx. 3 hours, including a 45-minute intermission.

Turandot, in this conception, is far more than just a symbol of frigid power; she is a profoundly wounded soul, her famed cruelty, not an innate malice but an ossified carapace, an extreme psychological defence mechanism forged in the spectral fires of an inherited trauma — the unresolved horror of her ancestor Lo-u-Ling’s rape. Her decree to execute suitors becomes, symbolically, a desperate attempt to exorcise the repetition of this ancestral physical and emotional violation. Turandot is, hence, a psychic projection of this long-buried agony. Her arrested emotional development and her rigidity are the only means of survival she has ever known. Visually, her initial presence appears immobile, almost otherworldly, but, enshrined within a sculptural, wearable structure of pale, iridescent metals — not simply a costume — it is an incarnation of her emotional inaccessibility, a magnificent confining armour. Inside this frozen exterior there is a pulsing hidden core, a secret vermillion lining, symbol of repressed life, of denied eros, of the dormant woman, the barely alive ember of the life force she so vehemently denies.

Into this glacial realm appears Calaf, the unknown prince; a figure often perceived as the archetypal hero. We are compelled to interrogate his arrival, his relentless pursuit. Is his quest for Turandot’s hand born from an irresistible coup de foudre, or is there a potent undercurrent of a conqueror’s ambition, a desire to vanquish the unvanquishable, to solve the insoluble? Whilst his courage is beyond dispute — he willingly stakes his life — his initial attitude could be seen as a form of siege. The three enigmas he so deftly unravels are not merely intellectual puzzles, even if doubtlessly they are keys, but they also function as battering rams against the gates of Turandot’s formidable psychic defences. Calaf embodies a fascinating ambiguity: a man driven by a potent mixture of ardour and, perhaps, an unconscious desire for domination. He begins to shed the mantle of conqueror, to transcend this heroic yet potentially predatory stance, only when he discloses his own mystery — his name — thereby accepting the possibility of being put to death. This gesture, deceptively simple, becomes the opera’s only act of true love: love as respect, love as the recognition of the right to freedom, not as an imposition of duty, a debt, a profound act of vulnerability that shifts the dynamic from “winning” Turandot to the possibility of “reaching” her.

The true catalyst, the emotional fulcrum that balances the entire opera and the key figure within this dynamic, is the incandescent Liù. Her psychological landscape is the stark antithesis of Turandot’s frozen grandeur. Unlike the Princess, Liù does not repress, she loves. She loves with the fragile but steadfast strength of one who possesses no armour. Her love for Calaf is not a demand, not a strategy, it is a pure, unwavering, silent emanation of her being, a gentle stream with the power to erode even the hardest stone. Liù asks for nothing, yet gives everything. In her, we witness the devastating beauty of selfless devotion, a quiet strength ultimately more potent than all the imperial power of Beijing. Her significance transcends that of a mere “faithful slave girl”; she is the embodiment of unshielded humanity, the keeper of a warmth that Turandot had long since extinguished within herself. The psychological impact of Liù’s sacrifice upon Turandot is, in this vision, the absolute core of the opera’s dramatic transformation. Her death is not a mere lyrical sacrifice, it is an archetypal gesture, a rupture that sets off Turandot’s crisis. It is not Calaf’s triumphant solving of the riddles, nor his kiss, that begins to thaw the icy princess, but the devastating, irrefutable evidence of Liù’s love — a love so profound it embraces death rather than betray the beloved.

Visually, the moment of Liù’s demise should be one of stark, arresting contrast, rendered through an almost physical silence. The preceding clamour and tension gives way to a stage that empties, where bodies freeze, where time itself appears suspended. The light contracts, focusing intensely first on Liù, then on Turandot’s visceral reaction, as if the world is holding its breath. It is in this sacred, suspended moment, witnessing an emotional truth she cannot deny or deflect with cruelty, that the first true fissures appear in Turandot’s armour. Liù’s death is not a defeat, but a ferocious, beautiful victory of the human heart, planting a seed of empathy in the barren terrain of Turandot’s soul. There, without words, Turandot begins to split inside — not because she is convinced by Calaf, but because she is utterly disarmed by Liù.

The Alfano ending, therefore, takes on a particular, renewed resonance within this psychological framework. Turandot’s utterance of Calaf’s name — “Il suo nome è Amor!” — is no sudden fairy-tale capitulation or romantic surrender, it is, rather, the culmination of a slow inner combustion, a seismic internal shift, a painful and hesitant emergence from a self-imposed prison. It is the first, tentative word spoken in a new language of feeling, a language whose grammar was taught by the silent sacrifice of Liù and the vulnerable offering of Calaf. The grand, collective joy of the finale is thus underscored by a more intimate, fragile hope. We do not necessarily know whether she will be capable of truly loving, or of living within that feeling, but it is her first step beyond the armour. On stage, her sculptural structure might open — not fall, nor shatter, but blossom like a flower, revealing what had until then remained hidden. As with every healing process, love does not rescue, it liberates. Turandot, then, is not so much a Chinese fairy tale, but rather a psychic myth — a disclosure of the power trauma holds, of how it can freeze the soul, and of the fear of tremendous risk (inherent) in opening oneself to another. There is no easy redemption, no guaranteed happy ending, only the deeply human courage to dare to feel.

Lev Pugliese
Director

About the set design

What kind of world might have shaped the characters in the opera Turandot?

In the opera Turandot, it is hard to find, among the main characters, anyone you’d gladly invite over for tea. They all seem brutal and deeply egocentric—perhaps with the exception of the slave girl Liù. But even she doesn’t appear to have what we would usually call a healthy outlook on life. The drama is described as a fairy tale or myth, and under those terms, one can of course accept that people make inexplicable decisions and behave oddly. But even in fairy tales, there must be somewhat credible reasons for why the characters have developed into the figures who populate the world of the drama. What kind of world might have shaped the characters in the opera Turandot?

The characters in Turandot live in a brutal society where the people in power have very little respect for human lives. They live in a closed-off world surrounded by walls. In closed societies, brutality easily develops according to its own laws. The wall, of course, serves a purpose. Walls—whether city walls or palace walls—are meant, like all other walls, to keep the unauthorized out. But walls always have dual functions. They may shut some people out, but at the same time, they shut others in. The city and palace walls of Turandot are important backdrops to the brutality of the society inhabited by the characters in the opera.

Of course, there are walls—and there are walls. All of them shut people in and out, but they can be given slightly different appearances. A white-painted wall might seem less unwelcoming than one built of grey, coarse granite blocks. A wall adorned with decorations looks less like a barrier than a damp brick wall. In this version of Turandot, the walls have been allowed to retain only their essential function: to prevent people from getting in or out. All social systems are complex—perhaps especially so in totalitarian societies. Tonight, we get a chance to see quite a bit of what happens in the shadows, behind the thick walls.

Sven Östberg
Set Designer