As Giacomo Puccini was looking for material for a new opera in the 1920s, the world had entered a new phase of upheaval. Political conditions were unstable. Fascism was dawning in Italy. Rapid technological advances, which had always fascinated Puccini, changed the way people lived and thought. Puccini – at this time past his 60th birthday – had the feeling that he had reached a turning point in his compositional work. Despite his self-doubt, he wanted to break free from the tried-and-true patterns of his past operatic successes and try to create something truly new. With this desire driving him, he turned to the story of the frigid Chinese princess Turandot, who refuses to give herself to any man. She poses unsolvable riddles to her suitors, sending them to the scaffold when they fail to answer them – until he appears, and solves them all. The Turandot story broke new ground for Puccini: he could leave the realism of his previous operas behind, and write a new kind of work that reached grand, mythical proportions. The foreign, Chinese aura offered him the opportunity to enrich his compositional style with completely new colors. But the project failed shortly before completion: Puccini couldn’t find a believable ending for the opera, the moment when the ice princess transforms into a woman capable of love. He developed writer’s block and shortly thereafter contracted throat cancer. He died before he could finish the opera. What he left behind was a grandiose, conflictingly dazzling opera fragment with two vocal parts that are among the most demanding dramatic roles in the Italian repertoire: Only the best of the best can take on the roles of Turandot and Prince Calaf. In Zurich, those two are American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, and Piotr Beczała, who will give his role debut as Calaf. Director Sebastian Baumgarten and German conductor Marc Albrecht take the fragmentary character of Puccini’s final work seriously, while also rising to the challenge of translating the Chinese exoticism and pomp of the set, which are integral to the opera, into a contemporary form.