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Turandot: When Puccini’s Fairy Tale Became a Political Allegory Montreal
Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, Place des Arts
09/26/2026 - & September 29, October 1, 4, 2026
Giacomo Puccini: Turandot
Andrea Shin (Calaf), Maida Hundeling (Turandot), Kirsten MacKinnon (Liù), Raymond Aceto (Timur), Nathan Keoughan (Ping), Rocco Rupolo (Pang), Angelo Moretti (Pong), Richard Margison (Emperor Altoum), Colin Mackey (A Mandarin), Thomas MacLeay (The Prince of Persia)
Chœur de l’Opéra de Montréal, Voix boréales, Claude Webster (chorus master), Orchestre Métropolitain, Paolo Arrivabeni (conductor)
Francesca Zambello (stage director), Wilson Chin (sets), Linda Cho (costumes), Amith Chandrashaker (lighting), Jessica Lang & Kanji Segawa (choreography)
M. Hundeling, K. MacKinnon (© Vivien Gaumand)
Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot occupied an anomalous place in his œuvre. It was the culmination of the composer’s theatrical genius and, at the same time, the work in which he most radically abandoned the intimate verismo-inflected lyricism of La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. Its gigantic orchestral apparatus, harmonic audacity and fascination with colour announced a composer already looking toward the musical language of the twentieth century. Yet Turandot was also, irreducibly, a fairy tale. Its ancestry was literary rather than historical: Carlo Gozzi’s eighteenth-century adaptation of François Pétis de La Croix’s Les Mille et Un Jours (1712). Puccini’s imaginary China was therefore never intended as ethnography. Its imperial court, riddles, executions, moonlit crowds and ice princess belonged to the realm of theatrical fantasy. The exoticism was extravagant, occasionally grotesque and certainly susceptible to contemporary criticism, but it was also part of the work’s dramatic DNA.
Francesca Zambello’s production, presented by the Opéra de Montréal as part of its Washington-Dallas-Montréal co‑production, approached the work from almost the opposite direction. Gone was the fabulous imperial court; in its place stood an austere totalitarian state. Wilson Chin’s metallic scaffolding, industrial platforms and elevated passageways created a world of surveillance and political violence, while Linda Cho’s costumes and Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting completed the picture of a dystopian society that seemed to belong somewhere between Stalinism, revolutionary China and a generalized twentieth-century authoritarian nightmare.
The production’s intellectual premise was clear enough: if Turandot could no longer be presented comfortably as picturesque oriental fantasy, it could instead be understood as a drama about authoritarianism, exclusion and the abuse of power. The difficulty was that the fairy tale had not merely been updated; it had been displaced. The substitution was especially conspicuous in the crowd scenes. The inhabitants of Puccini’s imaginary Peking appeared as migrants from Central Asia, while the military and police were almost exclusively women. The familiar Ping, Pang and Pong were renamed according to bureaucratic functions. The staging consequently accumulated political references that were sometimes more distracting than illuminating.
The visual austerity also deprived the opera of much of its necessary sense of wonder. Turandot could certainly accommodate brutality, but Puccini’s brutality had always existed alongside theatrical splendour. The guillotine, the moon, the chorus, the riddles, the executions and the imperial court were all components of an extravagant dream. Once the dream was replaced by a bleak industrial landscape, the production had to supply a different theatrical vocabulary to fill the vacuum. That vocabulary consisted largely of choreographed military movement and images of collective oppression. At times it was striking; at others it appeared determined to explain what Puccini had deliberately left mysterious.
The most consequential intervention, however, occurred not in the scenery but in the score itself. Puccini died in 1924 before completing Turandot. At the première in 1926, Toscanini famously stopped after Liù’s death, declaring that this was where the Maestro had laid down his pen. Franco Alfano subsequently supplied the ending, and although Alfano’s completion has been criticized for generations, it at least remained an attempt to continue Puccini’s musical language. Montreal’s production abandoned it. Susan Soon He Stanton’s new text and Christopher Tin’s newly composed music supplied an alternative ending of approximately eighteen minutes. The premise was to address the opera’s most obvious dramaturgical difficulty: the transformation of a woman who had ordered numerous executions into a loving bride after a kiss from Calaf.
The new version attempted to make the transformation psychologically and morally intelligible. Turandot was presented as a survivor of sexual violence whose subsequent cruelty represented a pathological attempt to protect herself through absolute power. Her final renunciation of violence consequently became a conscious decision to break the cycle that had governed her life. There was a certain logic to the idea. Yet the new ending exchanged the ambiguity of fairy tale for the explicitness of contemporary moral discourse. Turandot ceased to be merely an inscrutable princess and became an authoritarian ruler who discovered liberalism. Calaf became the catalyst for political reconciliation. The death of Altoum transferred the imperial succession to Turandot, who then welcomed the displaced population. The opera’s final transformation thus became not simply romantic but geopolitical.
The result was difficult to reconcile with Puccini’s preceding two and a half acts. More problematic still was Christopher Tin’s music. It was not an attempt to counterfeit Puccini, and perhaps it should not have been. Nevertheless, the stylistic gulf was enormous. Where Puccini’s score possessed an extraordinary combination of harmonic sophistication, orchestral translucency and theatrical instinct, Tin’s music frequently sounded like an amalgam of contemporary verismo and Broadway writing. The contrast became almost surreal when the Orchestre Métropolitain played it with the same refinement it had lavished on Puccini. The orchestra made the newly written passages sound polished; it could not make them sound less banal. The absence of the reprise of “Nessun dorma” from the new conclusion was particularly revealing. The familiar Alfano finale culminated in one of the most instantly recognizable moments in twentieth-century opera. Tin instead provided an entirely new choral conclusion. This was consequently not merely an alternative completion but a declaration that the opera’s final musical statement itself required revision.
Fortunately, the performance that preceded this controversial conclusion was of a very high order. Maida Hundeling gave the evening its vocal centre of gravity. Her Turandot was magnificent: a gleaming dramatic soprano with ample amplitude, a firm upper register and the dark tonal substance necessary to prevent the character from becoming merely shrill. She possessed the vocal authority to dominate Puccini’s immense orchestral canvas without ever appearing to force the instrument. More importantly, Hundeling suggested vulnerability beneath the princess’s apparent implacability. Her transformation in the new ending was therefore at least supported by an actress who had established a recognizable human being beneath the political symbolism.
Andrea Shin’s Calaf was more problematic. His lyric tenor was attractive, elegant and carefully produced, but the voice lacked the heroic amplitude one normally expected from the role. Against Hundeling’s imposing Turandot, the disparity was particularly evident. Yet Shin compensated through musical intelligence. His “Nessun dorma” was beautifully shaped and culminated in high notes of genuine excitement without the customary temptation toward vocal grandstanding.
Kirsten MacKinnon gave the performance’s most deeply affecting portrayal. Her Liù had a warmth and sensuality that had been less evident when she sang the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro in Montreal several years earlier. “Signore, ascolta” was sensitively phrased, but “Tu che sei del gel sei cinta” was exceptional. Her luminous lyric soprano and generous musical line gave the aria an almost unbearable simplicity. MacKinnon was equally impressive as an actress. Her final exchanges with Turandot were among the evening’s most convincing theatrical moments, particularly the subtle shift of her gaze toward Calaf. In a production that frequently explained its ideas too insistently, MacKinnon required no explanation. She simply inhabited Liù.
Raymond Aceto brought weight and dignity to Timur, while Nathan Keoughan, Rocco Rupolo and Angelo Moretti gave the three ministers welcome individuality and musical warmth. Their nostalgic reminiscences remained one of the score’s few moments of repose amid the surrounding violence, even though the staging’s bureaucratic reconception of the trio obscured some of their traditional identity.
Richard Margison’s appearance as Altoum was another pleasure. His veteran tenor brought a touching dignity to the aged emperor. Colin Mackey supplied an appropriately authoritarian Mandarin, although a darker vocal colour would have given the character greater menace.
The orchestra was conducted by Paolo Arrivabeni, who approached Turandot as considerably more than an exercise in grand operatic spectacle. His reading brought out the work’s extraordinary modernity. Puccini’s harmonic tensions, unusual instrumental combinations and shimmering orchestral colours emerged with unusual clarity. The climaxes were immense without becoming crude, and the quieter passages possessed flexibility and delicacy. Arrivabeni’s pacing was particularly effective. The score’s huge architecture remained coherent, and the Orchestre Métropolitain responded with playing of considerable refinement. Claude Webster’s chorus matched it with formidable precision, weight and dynamic control. The great crowd scenes acquired an almost Expressionist violence without sacrificing textual clarity.
The irony was that the musical performance repeatedly demonstrated what the staging seemed intent on suppressing: Turandot did not need ideological modernization to sound startlingly modern. The production’s ambitions were undoubtedly serious. It sought to remove the opera from picturesque Orientalism, interrogate authoritarian power and repair the problematic psychology of its heroine. Its new ending attempted to transform a romantic conquest into a choice made by an autonomous woman and to turn violence into reconciliation. But great works rarely become more convincing when every ambiguity is supplied with an explanation. Puccini’s Turandot remained powerful precisely because it occupied the unstable territory between fairy tale and nightmare, brutality and tenderness, exotic fantasy and modernist musical violence. Zambello’s production converted that ambiguity into political allegory, while Tin and Stanton converted the opera’s unresolved conclusion into a contemporary morality tale.
The evening nonetheless demonstrated why Turandot remained one of Puccini’s supreme achievements. Hundeling, MacKinnon, Shin, Arrivabeni, the Orchestre Métropolitain and the chorus gave the score performances of considerable distinction. What remained less convincing was the conviction that Puccini’s fairy tale needed to be liberated from itself.
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