A fascinatingly repulsive giant puppet dominates the stage. Towering in the pitch-black hoop skirt, the “People of Beijing” disciplined the crowd of the old imperial city, raging and singing, in brutal despotism, raging with fear. The puppet contains the still invisible princess Turandot, who sends her suitors to their deaths according to plan. Myth of a goddess of vengeance? The secret lies in her three riddles: if the applicant cannot answer them, he will be beheaded. The Persian prince Calaf appears and wants to risk his life for Turandot’s love.
The Berlin State Opera offers an intelligent perspective for this, in other words: The border crosser stages the border crosser, Philipp Stölzl the ice-cold princess, horrible femme fatale from Giacomo Puccini’s last opera. The opera director next to feature films famous music videos (Madonna, Rammstein, Mick Jagger) and commercials, is a clairvoyant detective, he calls Puccini’s unfinished opera, after the play of the same name by the Italian Carlo Gozzi from 1762, “a kind of surreal oratorio”. He quickly found out: “None of the characters has psychological depth in the classic sense.” So in the sense of the earlier operas of Puccini, the soul poet of Manon, Tosca and Mimi.
Anna Netrebko was originally hired as Turandot. Now the Russian Elena Pankratova sings
Zubin Mehta at the rostrum of the Staatskapelle, even as an 86-year-old with a steady hand and an alert mind, Puccini’s exotic sound webs and melodic mixtures from the Far East can shimmer, letting the choral violence (Martin Wright) roar almost barbarically despite all the fine-tuning. Mehta, the most experienced of all Turandot conductors, conducted the opera decades ago at the “original venue” in Beijing. And its London recording went down in history thanks to the legendary cast of singers – with Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé, with Luciano Pavarotti and Nicolai Ghiaurov. Tempi passati?
Anna Netrebko had been hired for Turandot, the heroine with the soprano fire of steel. It has (or has been) cancelled, husband Yusif Eyvazof survived as death-defying Calaf. To Turandot’s indignation, he solves the riddle, endows the role and his only aria, the legendary tenor fanal “Nessun dorma” in Act III, with more roughened ardor than brilliance. And instead of Netrebko, the Russian Elena Pankratova offers the example of ecstatic power development. Her opponent in femininity is the strong-souled Liù of Aida Garifullina, who loves in vain with devotion. René Pape wins as Calaf’s father Timur, Siegfried Jerusalem, the old Tristan hero, now overwhelmed, loses as China’s Emperor Altoum. The ensemble impresses musically and mimetically.
“The outdated image of women is a fundamental problem in opera today,” says Philipp Stölzl
The fact that Philipp Stölzl, born in 1967, embodies the modern opera director as a critic of traditional music theater benefits the Turandot interpretation. Because he mainly sees the symbolic existence of the characters in the piece. Through the puppet, a sphinx, “our central metaphor”, he distances himself from Turandot, the toxic male fantasy of a fusion of love and death. Stölzl wants to eliminate them and says: “The outdated image of women is a fundamental problem in opera today” – Gilda, Violetta e tutte quante.
The theater puppet, visibly pulled on strings by a dozen technicians, becomes a symbol of self-destruction; when the crinoline falls off, it appears with shattered limbs as a skeleton. But Stölzl also likes his urge for effects – with the dramatic chorus crowd, the abundance of garish colors and gestures of China’s rude state power. Of course, in the end he can’t do anything with the illusory love. With him, Turandot must not survive in the embrace with Calaf in the loud music, she must fall.