Opera: The Met's HD Turandot

I don't think I ever really got Turandot until today. I had seen it only once before, and that under inauspicious conditions. It was a David Hockney production at San Francisco, with some sort of bleachers/platform built up at the back of the stage. I was way back in the balcony and most of the performance took place way up in those bleachers, so I went through most of the evening seeing the cast only from the waist down. There's a frisson of postmodern hip there, but I can tell you it is distracting.

Having seen today's Met production, I have two words: Zeffer Elli. Everything about this libretto and score is over the top, and you have to have the world's most excessive stager to get away with it. There will never be a Turandot set in a darkened basement or a steam laundry, or if there is, I will stay as far as I can away from it. To do this kind of absurdity with a straight face, there is no one but the Z-ster (not even Hockney? I think not, but then maybe I am not qualified to judge).

The opera itself is kind of a dog's breakfast of materials and styles, based on a Persian story westernized by Schiller and laced with what Puccini seems to have thought was Chinese music. There are indeed some interesting and unfamiliar sounds here, although I suppose you could say the same thing for Hoagy Carmichael's Hong Kong Blues:

It's a story of a very unfortunate Memphis man
Who got 'rrested down in old Hong Kong.
He had 20-year privilege taken away from him
When he kicked old Buddha's go-ong.

An even closer comparison might by Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado, which probably owes at least as much to Japan as Turandot does to China. Now that I think of it, the comparison is not at all frivolous: both stories turn on a poisonous brew of lust and cruelty that would be horrifying if not laced out in the gauze of exoticism. And Turandot herself probably owes more than Puccini would want to acknowledge to Gilbert's Katisha (I suppose it is pushing things to say that Puccini's Ping, Pang and Pong echo Gilbert's Three Little Maids from School).

But accepting this frontal assault on disbelief it is actually a pretty good show--which is I suppose the least I can say for the opera that brings us the one song that says "opera" in every coffee shop, bookstore or romantic movie comedy--that is, Nessun Dorma (the only competitor is another Puccini--O Mio Babino Caro from Gianni Schicchi). Today's Met performance was well sung all around, although I'd give the rosette to Marina Poplavskaya as Liù--the voice is peachy cream although if you listen, you can pick up just a hint of an underlying abrasiveness that makes you recognize tht Poloavskaya the singer isn't nearly as docile as Liù the character.

And that, of course, brings you back to the ineradicable problem with Turandot. I mean really--in the long annals of operatic absurdity, this one really takes the biscuit. No matter how strong the performance, you can't help but find yourself thinking that if Liù had only stabbed that idiot princeling instead of herself, then Turandot would have made her queen consort.