# Conrad L. Osborne on Turandot



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

An enjoyable entry on _Turandot_ in veteran Osborne's ongoing blog hit my mailbox today.

Osborne focuses on the dramatic and moral difficulties raised by the opera's plot, with special attention to that clueless, callous cad Calaf. Osborne concludes with some observations on the Met's latest revival of Zeffirelli's production, in which neither the staging nor the current leading lady, Christine Goerke, fare at all well.

https://conradlosborne.com/2021/12/31/some-considered-musings-on-turandot/


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## ScottK (Dec 23, 2021)

Woodduck said:


> An enjoyable entry on _Turandot_ in veteran Osborne's ongoing blog hit my mailbox today.
> 
> Osborne focuses on the dramatic and moral difficulties raised by the opera's plot, with special attention to that clueless, callous cad Calaf. Osborne concludes with some observations on the Met's latest revival of Zeffirelli's production, in which neither the staging nor the current leading lady, Christine Goerke, fare at all well.
> 
> https://conradlosborne.com/2021/12/31/some-considered-musings-on-turandot/


I loved the piece. Turandot is one I'm getting to know, very fond of, and hope that live performance will take me further. But as you and CLO and it seems to me everyone I hear discuss this opera say, the more you know Calaf the less you like him! Might be a good time to turn more of my attention to that major piece of the Puccini genius...the fragile young woman. Thanks for the heads-up!


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## DeGustibus (Aug 7, 2020)

Ugh. I freely admit Osborne has forgotten many times as much about opera than I will ever know. I find him almost unreadable though. Setting aside his pomposity (if that's possible) his writing veers from cliched to impenetrable, with a side helping of unnecessarily verbose.
Just two examples from this piece:
"When it is approximated, an evening with Turandot can serve up plenty of red meat for an opera-lover of healthy appetite." Trite in any case, and the "healthy appetite" is a silly extension of the cliche. It's not like Turandot is a Wagnerian marathon.
 "for all that "Nessun dorma" seems to have become the "We Shall Overcome" of the popera mentality," What does that even mean? What does "We Shall Overcome" signify for him?

Basically, like a lot of self-published people, he badly needs an editor. 
But, as I said, I almost always learn something from him.
So, de gustibus, I guess.


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## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

It was a good article and expressed many interesting facts but frankly I am a bit surprised that he didn't touch on the dichotomy of Turandot's strong, protective feelings for Lo-U-Ling but just stood icily by, interested only in securing the name of the Prince, and never addressed the fact that an innocent girl was made to be bullied by her own orders to the point where Liu finally had to kill herself.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DeGustibus said:


> Ugh. I freely admit Osborne has forgotten many times as much about opera than I will ever know. I find him almost unreadable though. Setting aside his pomposity (if that's possible) his writing veers from cliched to impenetrable, with a side helping of unnecessarily verbose.
> Just two examples from this piece:
> "When it is approximated, an evening with Turandot can serve up plenty of red meat for an opera-lover of healthy appetite." Trite in any case, and the "healthy appetite" is a silly extension of the cliche. It's not like Turandot is a Wagnerian marathon.
> "for all that "Nessun dorma" seems to have become the "We Shall Overcome" of the popera mentality," What does that even mean? What does "We Shall Overcome" signify for him?
> ...


_De gustibus_ - "of taste." Me, I have a taste for knowledge, experience, expertise, eloquence, and wit - all of which Osborne exhibits in exceptional measure. His prose can be a little denser than suits the modern taste, and perhaps a small percentage of the imagery that darts from his fertile mind misses fire, although most of it is right on target.

The two examples you've picked to illustrate what you regard as his "faults" - pomposity, verbosity, impenetrability and unreadability, with a tendency toward cliche - don't seem to me to demonstrate any of those faults, not least because they're among the least essential statements in his entire lengthy discussion. The "We Shall Overcome" reference escapes me too, but the first example seems to me entirely unproblematic. The only thing that baffles me is your reference to Wagner and, apparently, the length of his operas. _Turandot_ is shorter than _Tristan_, and so...what?

I hope that lacking a taste for Osborne's writing style won't keep people from appreciating and benefitting from his erudition. This isn't the first of his articles I've posted on TC, and it's unlikely to be the last. He's been a source of knowledge and insight for many since he was a brilliant young reviewer for High Fidelity Magazine in the 1960s, and I owe much of my understanding of opera and the potentialities of the human voice to him. Still going strong, and with apparently undiminished passion for his field, in his 80s, he's worth the little extra effort his thoughtful prose demands of those who've grown up spoon-fed by TV dialogue, advertising, political slogans and (anti)social media.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

nina foresti said:


> It was a good article and expressed many interesting facts but frankly I am a bit surprised that he didn't touch on the dichotomy of Turandot's strong, protective feelings for Lo-U-Ling but just stood icily by, interested only in securing the name of the Prince, and never addressed the fact that an innocent girl was made to be bullied by her own orders to the point where Liu finally had to kill herself.


There's certainly much more to be said about the opera. I recall an interesting conversation right here on TC which I had with HumphreyAppleby (whatever happened to him?), in which he mounted quite an eloquent defense of the opera's characters' peculiar and apparently heartless behavior. He argued from the story's mythical aspect, seeing it as a tale of transformation and redemption with Liu as the necessary sacrifice to bring that about. He didn't convince me to find Calaf's and Turandot's behavior less distasteful, but it was a pleasure reading his thoughts.

As you might expect, Osborne's comparison of Puccini's attempt at a quasi-mythical tale with Wagner's use of mythical subjects struck me as quite accurate. He writes, 'Wagner succeeded in taking stories and characters of mixed historical/legendary provenance, and even of purely mythological origin, and "humanizing" them, i. e., rendering them recognizable and compelling in modern psychological terms, while still retaining the numinous quality of myth. He did so, though, with material he'd been intimate with for years, that was part of the identity-formation of his own culture and crucial to his own sense of self, not by reaching out to a culture whose very fascination was its exotic strangeness.' Wagner always penetrates to the human, and ultimately the moral, heart of his stories. Puccini with _Turandot_ seems to have been so caught up in the fascination of the exotic that he could only restore contact with his familiar emotional world of pathos and give the tale a heart by importing into the story a hapless female victim, Liu, who is as badly treated as Madama Butterfly and who similarly takes her own life for love. As Osborne points out, the story could have ended very differently if Calaf had revealed his name rather than letting Liu be tortured. It would have been a different, and more morally meaningful, way for Turandot to experience the power of love. But apparently Liu had to suffer and die in order to balance out a cold piece of Chinoiserie with some genuine Puccinian pathos.


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## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

Funny but the one thing that I DID understand was the reference of "We shall overcome" and "Nessun dorma."
I got a small snicker from it in fact.

I believe he was trying to show how overplayed both those phrases are. We have been made "we shall overcome'd" to death to the point where it has lost the depth of it's original message, and we have been bombarded beyond belief with the now driving-me-crazy "Nessun dorma". 
Too much of a good thing?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

nina foresti said:


> Funny but the one thing that I DID understand was the reference of "We shall overcome" and "Nessun dorma."
> I got a small snicker from it in fact.
> 
> I believe he was trying to show how overplayed both those phrases are. We have been made "we shall overcome'd" to death to the point where it has lost the depth of it's original message, and we have been bombarded beyond belief with the now driving-me-crazy "Nessun dorma".
> Too much of a good thing?


A possible parallel lies in the idea of overcoming adversity and winning. Calaf repeats "Vincero! Vincero!" - "I will win! I will win!"


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## ScottK (Dec 23, 2021)

*Puccini with Turandot seems to have been so caught up in the fascination of the exotic that he could only restore contact with his familiar emotional world of pathos and give the tale a heart by importing into the story a hapless female victim, Liu, who is as badly treated as Madama Butterfly and who similarly takes her own life for love. As Osborne points out, the story could have ended very differently if Calaf had revealed his name rather than letting Liu be tortured. It would have been a different, and more morally meaningful, way for Turandot to experience the power of love. But apparently Liu had to suffer and die in order to balance out a cold piece of Chinoiserie with some genuine Puccinian pathos.[/QUOTE]*

Is there also the question of what Puccini might have accomplished, in his continued work on character and theme, had he lived? I don't know his story well enough to know if he left us with knowledge of what his hopes and intentions were. But the transformation of Turandot, the incorporation of Liu into this story without Calaf coming off so ignoble...it seems a man of the theater like Puccini would have considered these to be important concerns.


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## ScottK (Dec 23, 2021)

DeGustibus said:


> Ugh. I freely admit Osborne has forgotten many times as much about opera than I will ever know. I find him almost unreadable though. Setting aside his pomposity (if that's possible) his writing veers from cliched to impenetrable, with a side helping of unnecessarily verbose.
> Just two examples from this piece:
> "When it is approximated, an evening with Turandot can serve up plenty of red meat for an opera-lover of healthy appetite." Trite in any case, and the "healthy appetite" is a silly extension of the cliche. It's not like Turandot is a Wagnerian marathon.
> "for all that "Nessun dorma" seems to have become the "We Shall Overcome" of the popera mentality," What does that even mean? What does "We Shall Overcome" signify for him?
> ...


I really don't get the "pompous" thing at all! I'll admit I'm a fan but I can't even imagine what, in this piece of writing, made him seem pompous. He ALWAYS strikes me as passionate.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

> Is there also the question of what Puccini might have accomplished, in his continued work on character and theme, had he lived? I don't know his story well enough to know if he left us with knowledge of what his hopes and intentions were. But the transformation of Turandot, the incorporation of Liu into this story without Calaf coming off so ignoble...it seems a man of the theater like Puccini would have considered these to be important concerns.


From what I can glean, Puccini wasn't doing or planning any further work on character and theme. He saw Turandot and Calaf as fairytale beings who needed to learn to be fully human, and Liu's death in the name of love was the sacrifice with the power to bring this about. But this is the problem: Liu did not have to die. Calaf could have saved her - and that would have been a fundamental change in the story, for which Puccini had already written the opera's most poignant music. As a man of the theater, Puccini had what he needed for the maximum of pathos, focused on the theme that seemed to inspire him most: the suffering of an innocent young woman. There's no indication that he was contemplating a radical revision of his dramatic premise; his main concern was the grand love scene which he hoped would convey the miracle that supposedly transformed his protagonists. Personally, I suspect that he didn't finish the opera because he couldn't find a satisfactory solution to the problem of making us care about Turandot and Calaf as human beings. Like Osborne, I can't conceive of any music capable of doing that. All we can do is enjoy the sensuous thrill of the Puccini/Alfano score and not think too much about what we're being asked to swallow. For that purpose I prefer Alfano's original, long version, which gives me more time in which the sad and horrifying spectacle of Liu being tortured and dying - while Calaf and Turandot just stand there - can recede from memory.


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## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> A possible parallel lies in the idea of overcoming adversity and winning. Calaf repeats "Vincero! Vincero!" - "I will win! I will win!"


True -- but does this line sound like a positive statement to you?

"...and for all that "Nessun dorma" seems to have become the "We Shall Overcome" of the popera mentality, ...


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

nina foresti said:


> True -- but does this line sound like a positive statement to you?
> 
> "...and for all that "Nessun dorma" seems to have become the "We Shall Overcome" of the popera mentality, ...


I think it's quite a clever line. There's the similarity in the words that Woodduck has mentioned, which is quite different from the joke that they have become so ubiquitous they have lost their original sense. (I'm guessing the point as it relates to "We shall overcome" as I am not familiar enough with its use in the US.) When it comes to Nessun Dorma, I don't think that it has become without meaning in its original context of the opera. Puccini manages to write an opera that is as through composed as it is a number opera thus taking forward the transition started by Verdi without resorting to imitating Wagner badly, which is where many of the Verismo composers ended up with many of their works.

N.


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## ScottK (Dec 23, 2021)

nina foresti said:


> True -- but does this line sound like a positive statement to you?
> 
> "...and for all that "Nessun dorma" seems to have become the "We Shall Overcome" of the popera mentality, ...


As much as I like the idea of "vincero" possibly being part of what Osborne was intending, when I re-read it seems that he was talking about the sheer quality of the aria maintaining its stature despite its numbing over-use.


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## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> A possible parallel lies in the idea of overcoming adversity and winning. Calaf repeats "Vincero! Vincero!" - "I will win! I will win!"


Interestingly, even that line shows the selfish side of Calaf as he speaks of "*his*" win, whereby the same idea is suggested by Cavaradossi saying, "Vittoria, Vittoria!" -- not for himself but rather for the better good.


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## DeGustibus (Aug 7, 2020)

Woodduck said:


> _De gustibus_ - "of taste." Me, I have a taste for knowledge, experience, expertise, eloquence, and wit - all of which Osborne exhibits in exceptional measure. His prose can be a little denser than suits the modern taste, and perhaps a small percentage of the imagery that darts from his fertile mind misses fire, although most of it is right on target.


_De gustibus non est disputandum_: there's no use arguing about tastes, so I won't argue. I have those tastes, too, and believe they can be accomplished without being pedantic or risk having your main points lost amidst a sea of verbiage. Compare to the adjacent article on modern opera, which I found equally informative but much more pleasurable to read. But, for the third time, Osborne is smart and I learn from him, as I do from Woodduck and others here.

As to the "We Shall Overcome" reference, I am genuinely surprised. Some of you must hear that a lot, lot more than I do. I am of that generation and still work on a college campus and almost never hear the song or encounter the phrase. In fact, someone tried to start it during an MLK commemoration last year and almost none of the students knew it. (Actually probably more would have known Nessun Dorma, given the presence of a strong music dept.  )

Happy New year to all.


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## ScottK (Dec 23, 2021)

DeGustibus said:


> _De gustibus non est disputandum_: there's no use arguing about tastes, so I won't argue. I have those tastes, too, and believe they can be accomplished without being pedantic or risk having your main points lost amidst a sea of verbiage. Compare to the adjacent article on modern opera, which I found equally informative but much more pleasurable to read. But, for the third time, Osborne is smart and I learn from him, as I do from Woodduck and others here.
> 
> As to the "We Shall Overcome" reference, I am genuinely surprised. Some of you must hear that a lot, lot more than I do. I am of that generation and still work on a college campus and almost never hear the song or encounter the phrase. In fact, someone tried to start it during an MLK commemoration last year and almost none of the students knew it. (Actually probably more would have known Nessun Dorma, given the presence of a strong music dept.  )
> 
> Happy New year to all.


"Pedantic" I don't see and "Impenetrable" I don't believe! I can't picture you having any trouble reading that piece even if it's not to your tastes.

Happy New Year!


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## ThaNotoriousNIC (Jun 29, 2020)

Interesting read, especially after watching the same production of Turandot from 2018 last week. The comparisons that he makes of Turandot to Brunhilde in Siegfried was an interesting take that I never thought about before. Both Siegfried and Calaf have to get through a ring of fire to get through to her and obtain her love (whether that is literal or figurative). It definitely gives a more Wagnerian spin on Turandot which relates a bit to the influence Wagner had on Puccini that I often see called out in discussions of Puccini's operas.

The biggest point of contention I have when it comes to Turandot that Osborne points out to me is the decision to kill off Liu. Perhaps it would have been a stronger display of honor for Calaf in the eyes of Turandot if he indeed risks his life to save her by saying his name. With all the killing that Turandot already supports, would Liu's sacrifice really shock Turandot? In the production, Liu's death and the subsequent mourning from Timur cause Turandot to look away, which I found to be off. The subsequent confrontation between Calaf and Turandot and the forceful kiss he gives Turandot are equally problematic as well, which I think is partially the result of the decision to have Liu die and needing to have the characters force their way to reconciliation.


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