Apparently, after all the sweet opera girls he had sung, Giacomo Puccini had had enough. Turandot, the princess in his last musical theater piece, which premiered in 1926 after his death, is a really nasty woman.
All marriage suitors who can’t solve her riddles, she has her head cut off. Your Beijing in fabulous times turns them into a dictatorship that brutally keeps their people in check. And all to avenge the rape of an ancestor. You can do worse
To make matters worse, Turandot drives the slave Liù to her death because she knows the name of the foreign prince who finally defeated Turandot. But is this opera also misogynistic? Not really, despite the parabolic flat layout of the characters conceived as fairy tales by Carlo Gozzi, it’s more of a fairly accurate period piece from Italy under Mussolini. This time with a negative protagonist.
Turandot does not exist at all, she is a chimera. At least that’s what director Barrie Kosky thinks. Turandot never existed. With this daring thesis, Kosky – after an uneven “Tosca” – provocatively continues his three-part Puccini cycle at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam.
A disembodied nightmare of collective desires and feelings. So so. And that’s why there is no Beijing in Amsterdam. Just a foggy, cold box of half-fogged mirrors designed by Michel Levine. In it, the fabulous choir romps almost continuously, really ingeniously lit by Alessandro Carletti.
At first everyone lies there as if dead, wrapped in at least 50 shades of everyday gray by Viktoria Behr. In an aesthetic somewhere that practically does not raise any accusations of cultural appropriation.
They are all zombies, who are now stomping through the dance of the Puccini undead for two hours without a break. This is so virtuosic when it corresponds to the plot, how annoying when choreographer Otto Pichler has to keep soloists, choristers and dancers fidgeting all the time.
But at first it works well, we see another of those reduced, black, energetic Kosky productions, totally focused on one point of interpretation. There is only a skull as a prop, and the protagonists emerge from the sometimes threatening, sometimes helplessly bustling crowd, almost indistinguishable.
The expelled ruler Timur (inelegant: Liang Li), his found son Kalaf (rough tenor: Najmiddin Mavlyanov), the slave Liù (like most of the soprano cuties: Kristina Mkhitaryan), the three cabaret-smoothly flirting ministers (Germán Olvera, Ya-Chung Huang , Lucas van Lierop). With ghost dancers in silver lining outfits, frosty glamor also comes into the evil-enthralling game.
In the second act, of course, this flattens out. The ministers have fired their powder, the scherzo of their dream private pleasures, so ingeniously laid out by Puccini between chinoiserie and commedia dell’arte, is no increase, the glittering skeletons now dancing are no longer a change.
For the riddle scene, the ancient Emperor Altoum appears as a jeweled scaffold of glittering bones that is pulled out of the crypt using a butcher’s cleaver. The ministers move it, Marcel Reijans sings from behind.
Doors swing open, behind which skulls are stacked like in a giant ossuary. Instead of Princess Turandot, only a giant skull descends, from which ballet worms are crawling. But Tamara Wilson stands on a lighting bridge and sings invisibly with a wafting, sharp soprano amplitude.
One wonders what or who could actually have triggered Kalaf’s passion as an idée fixe? She can’t even be understood as an avatar, bugbear, projection.
It’s finally getting light for “Nessun dorma”, the mirrored ceiling has lowered to the slant, revealing floor dance arrangements like in the old musical films by Busby Berkeley, performed by flower-red and yellow beings, who apparently celebrate Halloween at the same time as the Dià de Muertos.
While Liù is being tortured and finally shoots himself, the walls collapse and neon glows. And then it’s just over: Barrie Kosky stops where Puccini died and where Toscanini once lowered the baton in the premiere.
There is neither the post-composed Franco Alfano ending, nor the new Luciano Berio finale that premiered in Amsterdam. But the scene is not prepared at all. Everyone falls down again like dead, “Turandot doesn’t exist,” whispers the ghostly voice in Italian; blown away by the opera wind.
Kosky has a thesis, but scenically it only works out partially satisfactorily. That was already the case in his “Tosca”, the Puccini, apparently trimmed to conventional functionality, is difficult to crack.
Lorenzo Viotti, the musical partner at the podium of the Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest, has once again agreed to this somberly pointed reading. Appropriately hardened, he pounded the score, letting it sparkle encased in ice, but it was also often clumsy and emphatically slow.
This works as a theatrical support, but Viotti only partially does justice to the abundance of the music, which is as dazzling as artificial Chinese as it is sophisticatedly bombastic, even comfortably bubbling. Kosky/Viotti still have a chance for Puccini: In the coming season it is the turn of “Il Trittico”.