Opera Background

The Source: Gozzi's Turandot

Count Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806) came from a moderately noble and very conservative Italian family. He was the sixth of seven children. After the death of his parents, Gozzi was involved for a long time in legal hassles with his relatives. He spent most of his life in Venice.

At the age of 27, Gozzi joined a league of reactionary intellectuals who fought to restore the "purity of the Italian language." His theatrical concepts were as conservative as his views on language. Gozzi was a passionate supporter of the old Italian comedic style of commedia dell’arte, a type of improvised physical comedy that featured stock masked characters speaking in local dialects. Gozzi opposed the attempts of writers like Carlo Goldoni to reform or abolish the old style. Gozzi made a name for himself as a writer with his Fiabe, "dramatic fables" featuring fantastic, often magical situations, and characters from the commedia dell’arte. The Fiabe were wildly popular in Venice during Gozzi’s lifetime. They were later forgotten in Italy, but continued to capture the imaginations of artists and philosophers elsewhere—particularly in Germany, where Romantics like Goethe, Schiller, and Wagner were captivated by the playwright’s works. Later, Prokofiev based one of his operas, The Love for Three Oranges, on Gozzi’s Fiaba dell’amore delle tre melarance. In the past few years, Gozzi’s work has seen something of a mini-renaissance in the US, spearheaded by director Julie Taymor (The Lion King on Broadway).

Gozzi’s play Re Turandot was based on a fable circulating in Europe at the time (we know this because the Brothers Grimm recorded an extremely similar tale). This work, which was to be the basis for Puccini’s opera, made all sorts of satirical references to injustices in Venice at the time—especially the poor way in which women were treated.

Interestingly enough, Puccini did not base Turandot on Gozzi’s original Venetian-dialect text, but on Schiller’s German, Romantic adaptation of the play. Puccini’s librettists, Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, labored intensely to transform the commedia dell’arte influenced fable into the symbolic epic we know today. Gozzi’s Re Turandot is a fairytale and has a light, sarcastic tone. Puccini’s characterization of Turandot is much more barbarian and cruel, and there is no lightness to her story. One of the most important changes that Puccini and his librettists introduced to the story was the character of Liu, who turns Turandot’s heart from icy coldness to love. Puccini also downplayed the" masks" Ping, Pong, and Pang, who appear in Gozzi’s original as very Italian, out-and-out comic characters.

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