03/19/2024
One of the best-loved of all Italian operas is Puccini’s Turandot, first performed here at the New York Met in 1926. By general agreement, the most extravagant, opulent, must-see production of Turandot is the one created by Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, first performed at The Met in 1987 and then more than 200 times since.
Now the Met is staging it again. This production opened on February 28th and will run through June 7th.
The story of the opera takes place in China. Princess Turandot of that country is so beautiful that any man who sees her falls in love with her. Turandot, however, has vowed to marry only the man who can solve three riddles she poses. Answer the riddles correctly, you get to marry the lovely princess. Give a wrong answer, you die.
Yes, I know: this princess sounds somewhat Irish. She is though, I assure you, Chinese.
The plot of Turandot is, however, offensive to the easily offended. Foreseeing this, the Met has tried to cover itself with program notes telling the audience that, quote:
A Western projection of the East, it is rife with contradictions, distortions, and racial stereotypes
They just can’t leave anything alone, can they? In fact Puccini wove into his score considerable respect for China’s musical tradition.
David Goldman pointed that out in a scathing column at Asia Times back in 2021 when already, as he noted “Grumblings about Asian stereotypes in the opera have been around for years” in the West, but that the Chinese had “adopted it as their ’de facto national opera.’”
I can’t resist another Goldman quote, from the very end of that same 2021 piece.
The Protestant missionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries looked at the Chinese as prospective Christian converts. Their descendants, today’s woke mob, have twisted America’s original Christian impulse into a secular pseudo-religion where salvation arises from protecting the fragile identities of the oppressed.They have become clowns. It’s too bad Puccini didn’t write a comic opera about them.
China embraces, woke America denounces ‘Turandot,’ May 19, 2021
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