A Review of Turandot
The Met Opera, with the Italian Department, April 3, 2024
We got in late. I had to get a guy with a flashlight to show me to my seat in the dark. There was a button somewhere on the banister. I fumbled and felt my finger press it. A little screen lit up, dotted with a previous occupant’s coffee stains. In capital letters it read SOTTOTITOLI, subtitles.
The shock of seeing that language. I am taken back to the loneliness of my gap year, but also the adventure, the feeling of wind and weightlessness. I went to Tuscany in February after working a desk job, seeking some respite from Covid and its filthy little goon anxiety. But I arrived to an insulated region, a zona rossa, a ‘red zone’. Like during the plague in 1348, nobody was allowed in or out of Florence (except for the politicians). No frivolity was allowed beyond the to and fro from the grocery store, or to walk your dog.
Maybe this is how my great-grandfather felt when he heard Italian. A transport back to the memories of the war. A red Italy, a zona rossa, mucked up in fascist blood. SPAM, Sicilian prostitutes, Nazis in Carthage, the bloody strings of veins left where his legs once were. The North African Campaign. Turandot.
The playbill isn’t quite accessible. The plastic gloss over really makes it a disgusting read. A crinkling of monstrous proportions. And the summary is blocked off, at least a dozen pages in after some advertisements from jewelers, the Yankees, and Broadway. The opera itself is more or less a manifestation of the playbill. A lot of froufrou, crescendos, sopranos, Yankees advertisements – the plot itself is kind of thin. In fact, it spans across two pages of an 82-page pamphlet.
But the fragility of the plot is what makes it beautiful. The ability to stretch out so few events into three and a half hours. Truly amazing, and sometimes painful. Turandot, the princess of a nondescript yet evidently Chinese kingdom, has been murdering suitors for their inability to answer three riddles correctly. She does this as revenge for her ancestor’s murder at the hands of a suitor. At least until Calàf steps on the scene, a self-important and rather unremarkable foreign prince.
When he answers them correctly – “Hope,” “Blood,” “Turandot!” – and sees the dismay of the princess, he offers that if she were to discover his name by the end of the night, he would submit to execution. He guessed hers, now she may guess his. Unfortunately, the only person in the city who knows his name is a slave girl, Liù. And so she commits suicide to save ensure that the princess and prince find love, to the chagrin of the state administrators Ping, Pang, and Pong (great, right?).
Puccini dislocates that Italian bloodlust, that proclivity towards encultured violence and obedience to cruelty, and casts it over a Chinese stage. Here the country is pronounced ‘k–ee-nuh’. Principessa Turandot murders suitors because her great-grandmother was murdered. A slave commits suicide to give someone else a shot at love. These scenes and others put on display the violent tendencies bubbling beneath its composer’s surroundings, 1920s Italy, situated between twin peaks of atrocity and indifference to suffering, the world wars. Lives sacrificed for more death, more death brought forward for the sake of ideology. In this case, communism, democracy, and fascism are swapped for love.
The fabric wrapping around the banister is fuzzy, and gives way when I push it down. It was quite distracting. I thought perhaps Turandot feels the same about her court, hundreds of servants giving way beneath her feet. Rulers don’t need the blessing of forgiveness. Turandot kills suitors and kills her townspeople in order to kill more suitors. The fact that she does it out of revenge is not even necessary to her being pardoned by the other members of the court. They take it as a matter of fact that she acts this way. Her movements are untethered to the judgments of others, flying above them.
The squinting was getting to me. I wasn’t aware that an opera house had nosebleeds, but here was my introduction. My eye was trained on that little screen for longer than the stage. The IT guy who chose the font for the subtitles had more of an impact on my show-going experience
than the costume or set designers. It reminds me of the horrid layout of Microsoft Word, and the slightly upgraded design of Google Docs. How many more hours do I spend before those applications than before a painting, or a garden, things intentionally and laboriously designed to entertain the eyes, perfected over the course of human history?
Calàf, the amante of Turandot, sports an ugly costume, gray and designed like a fencing coat, with pieces of rope dangling from his hips and arms. Its blandness greatly exceeds everything else happening on stage. Even so, he manages to win Turandot’s affection, despite his appearance. Act III ends with him being crowned and draped over with a gold cloak – love changes people for the better, I suppose.
No one ever drinks water or takes an anxiety pill or shits in an opera. At least the characters don’t. But the singers themselves do during intermission. A whole cast of pills more colorful than Turandot’s dress awaits each one in their dressing room. Or so I would hope – opera singers acting like Kurt Cobain. It warms me in the same way that Trump’s court-ordered fines do.
I spent a lot of time wondering what type of person would serve as an extra in an opera. There were at least a hundred of them. They were littered all across the recesses of the scene, between the orchestra pit and the singers, off the side near the edges of the stage, everywhere where there is empty space, all in gray gowns and caps. I also spent a lot of time wondering why I couldn’t
relate to the characters. Even Michael Scott evokes torrents of sympathy compared with the vacancy of emotion I felt before the death of Liù.
My inability to have identified or sympathized with the characters is no fault of Puccini or the librettist, but my situation within the audience. I found it hard to shed a tear with no armrest space, when the boy in front of me jostles his chair in an effort to get his mother’s attention, when a glass of wine is $21, or when that pampered, corrosive stench of New Yorkers fills the air I breathe.
Going to see an opera is very ritualistic. No one really enjoys it, but either tricks themself into thinking they do or otherwise suffers it under reverence for the finer things. In the intermissions comes the bacchanal tendencies that marks ancient cult rituals: lining up at the urinal, sacrificing wealth to imbibe at the bar, the various bodies contorting before cameras for Instagram posts, the breathlessness of waiting for the show to come back on. And at the end of the final act, we all give the singers clap in the form of a standing ovation.