The cruel Chinese princess Turandot does not want to belong to any man. She poses unsolvable riddles to all the suitors who ask for her hand in marriage, and has them beheaded if they fail to answer. Until the one comes along who solves all the riddles... When Giacomo Puccini set about transforming the old Eastern fairy tale of Princess Turandot into an opera in the early 1920s, he wanted to break out of the tried and tested waters of his previous operatic successes – and once again create something new. With this material, he was able to leave behind the realism of his previous operas and write a piece that reaches into the grandly mythical. The exotic aura of the story offered him the opportunity to enrich his compositional style with completely new colors. But the project failed shortly before it reached its goal: Puccini could not find a believable resolution for the opera’s conclusion – that is, how to transform the ice-cold princess into a lover at the end of the story. He fell into a writing crisis, contracted throat cancer, and died before he could finish the opera's finale. What remained was a grandiose, contradictorily dazzling opera fragment. We present this classic of the operatic repertoire in Sebastian Baumgarten's production, which premiered last season and has taken on the task of transferring the Chinese exoticism and the pomp of the set, which are inherent in the opera, into a contemporary form. For the two main roles of Turandot and Calaf, only the best in the business will do, and the Italian soprano Anna Pirozzi and the Italian tenor Piero Pretti can rightly claim that accolade.
Turandot Anna Pirozzi
Altoum Martin Zysset
Timur David Shipley
Der unbekannte Prinz (Calaf) Piero Pretti
Liù Elbenita Kajtazi
Ping Xiaomeng Zhang
Pang Iain Milne
Pong Nathan Haller
Ein Mandarin Amin Ahangaran
Performer Kilian Haselbeck