Turandot. Full Score

Partitura (nuova edizione riveduta e corretta).

"Turandot" is the last opera Puccini wrote: left unfinished, its last duet and finale were completed by Franco Alfano. The premiere took place at La Scala on 26 April 1926, conducted by Toscanini. The libretto, by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, is adapted from an 18th-century dramatic fairy-tale by Carlo Gozzi. It tells the story of an inaccessible princess who sets riddles and demands sacrifices, propagating desire and death. Turandot is "a thing of pure gold", yet she seems almost not to exist except in the amorous delirium of those who long to have her. The orient imagined by the 18th-century, the unreal harshness and the excess of pathos in the tragic fairy-tale second Puccini's sentiments of sympathizing disenchantment. Amorous passion is embodied in music which, in tis melodic invention and its imaginative employment of harmonies and timbres, fuses delicate orientalizing elements with novel strokes of expression.

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