Турандот: История пьесы и ее музыкальные воплощения

Turandot (1762) is a commedia dell'arte play by Count Carlo Gozzi after a supposedly Persian story from the collection Les Mille et un jours (1710–1712) by François Pétis de la Croix (not to be confused with One Thousand and One Nights). Gozzi's Turandot was first performed at the Teatro San Samuele, Venice, on 22 January 1762. Gozzi's play has given rise to a number of subsequent artistic endeavours, including combinations of: versions/translations by Friedrich Schiller, Karl Vollmöller and Bertolt Brecht; theatrical productions by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Max Reinhardt and Yevgeny Vakhtangov; incidental music by Carl Maria von Weber, Ferruccio Busoni and Wilhelm Stenhammar; and operas by Busoni, Giacomo Puccini and Havergal Brian.

Turandot was written deliberately in the Commedia dell'arte style by Gozzi, as part of a campaign in his literary war against the bourgeois, realistic works of Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni. Gozzi was intimate with the out of work theatre troupe of Antonio Sacchi, an inveterate commedia Truffaldino. It was first performed by Sacchi's troupe at the Teatro San Samuele in Venice on 22 January 1762, and received seven subsequent performances. The choice of theatre itself was a pointed attack on Goldoni, since he had been the theatre's director between 1737–1741. In the end, Gozzi won his literary war: according to his Memoirs, "Chiari stopped writing when he saw that his dramas ceased to take. Goldoni went to Paris, to seek his fortune there, whereof we shall be duly informed in his Memoirs."

The poet and playwright Friedrich Werthes (Buttenhausen, 12 October 1748–Stuttgart, 5 December 1817) made a translation of Gozzi's complete plays, employing prose rather than verse for the characters' lines. Schiller's Turandot (see below) is partly based on Werthes' version.

Carl Maria von Weber based his 1805 Chinese Ouverture on a Chinese theme found in Jean Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique. Weber's friend, the composer Franz Danzi, was employed as Kapellmeister in the Stuttgart court of King Frederick I of Württemberg, and when Weber obtained a non musical position as the private secretary of the King's brother, Duke Ludwig, Danzi encouraged Weber to write some music for a performance of Schiller's play at the court theatre. The result was his 1809 Incidental music for Turandot, J.37 which incorporated the Chinese Ouverture.

Franz Danzi later wrote his own singspiel Turandot based on Schiller in 1816, which was performed in Karlsruhe in 1817.

The lawyer and composer Johann Vesque von Püttlingen was a friend of Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn. Born in the Lubomirski Palace, near Lublin, West Galicia, he grew up in Vienna and trained as a lawyer, rising to section director in the Austrian Foreign Ministry under Metternich. Under the pseudonym 'J. Hoven' (after Ludwig van Beethoven) he composed over 300 songs and 8 operas, among which was Turandot, Princess of Shiraz, libretto after Schiller, first performed on 3 October 1838.

Schiller's play was re translated into Italian by his friend Andrea Maffei in 1863.

Antonio Bazzini's opera Turanda, with a libretto by Antonio Gazzoletti, was first performed at La Scala, Milan, 13 January 1867. Bazzini later taught composition to Giacomo Puccini and Pietro Mascagni at the Milan Conservatory.

A free English translation from Schiller by Sabilla Novello was published in 1872.

After reading Gozzi's play, Ferruccio Busoni began sketching out some incidental music to accompany it (1904 1905). He swiftly expanded the sketches into the Turandot Suite, first performance 21 October 1905, published in 1906. Busoni added a further movement to the Suite in 1911 for the play's first Berlin production (see below), and substituted another in 1917 after completing his opera on the same subject.

After completing his Turandot Suite Busoni approached Max Reinhardt in late 1906 about staging a production of Gozzi's play with Busoni's music. His idea eventually came to fruition four years later at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin in 1911, in a production by Reinhardt. Karl Vollmoeller provided a German translation of Gozzi's play, dedicated to Busoni; the sets were by Ernst Stern. The incidental music (probably the published Turandot Suite with the additional number) was played by a full symphony orchestra conducted by Oskar Fried.

Vollmoeller's play was produced in the USA by the Shuberts at the Hyperion Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut, on 31 December 1912. The producer was J. C. Huffmann, whose production designs were influenced by Reinhardt's. The cast included Emily Stevens, Josephine Victor, Alice Martin, Margaret Greville, Frank Peters, Pedro de Cordova (José Luis Medrano), Edward Emery (see Florence Farr and John Emery), Lennox Pawle, Daniel Gilfeather, Anthony Andre and 20 others. Incidental music by Oscar Racin. According to a New York Times report, the Vollmoeller script arrived without scenes or acts being designated, and was tidied up by Huffmann; however, the play was not a success.

In the wake of the failure of Vollmoeller's play at the Hyperion Theatre, Lee Shubert asked Percy MacKaye to revise Turandot for American audiences. In the end MacKaye wrote a new work, A Thousand Years Ago, which was presented a year later at the
Shubert Theatre on 1 December 1913. The production re used Huffmann's earlier set designs and incorporated the ideas of Reinhardt and Edward Gordon Craig. It transferred to the Lyric Theatre (New York) in January 1914.

Isaac Don Levine and Henry Alsberg translated and adapted Turandot to open the 1926 season at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York.

Giacomo Puccini said in a letter that " Turandot is the most normal and human play in all Gozzi." The libretto for his (unfinished) opera Turandot (1920 1924) is by Adami and Simoni. Apart from Gozzi's original they used Andrea Maffei's Italian translation of Schiller's German version. They also made reference to the libretto by Gazzoletti for Antonio Bazzini's Turanda. Although Puccini had heard reports about Busoni's opera, he didn't see it himself.

Prinzessin Turandot is a German black and white sound film made in 1934. It was directed by Gerhard Lamprecht with a script by Thea von Harbou, and starred Käthe von Nagy as Turandot and Willy Fritsch as Kalaf, the Birdseller. The film includes the song Turandot, bezaubernde Turandot by Franz Doelle and Bruno Balz (recorded by Herbert Ernst Groh in 1935).

Havergal Brian based the libretto of his opera Turandot (1949 1951) on Schiller's play. Like Busoni, Brian also wrote an associated orchestral Turandot Suite. Brian composed his Turandot between his 8th and 9th Symphonies. In a letter, he wrote: "Turandot. I have not seen any music of the work by Busoni or Puccini My reason for tackling 'Turandot' was that I read a German translation and enjoyed it so much that I started work on it as an Opera."

Bertolt Brecht also made his own adaptation of Gozzi's play, Turandot, or the Whitewashers' Congress (1953–1954). Brecht's library contained a 1925 edition of Vollmoeller's translation. Brecht's epic comedy was first performed (posthumously) in Zurich (the same city as the premiere of Busoni's opera), in the Schauspielhaus on 5 February 1969.

Turandot has been recently rewritten and interpreted in different forms of Chinese xìqǔ (literally, 'theater of song'), often referred to as Chinese opera.