Puccini’s opera about the cruel Chinese princess, who beheads her suitors to avenge herself on men for killing an ancestor, is based on Carlo Gozzi’s play Turandotte (1762) but actually the legend of Turandot has nothing to do with China. It was originally Persian. The composer died before the opera was  first produced in 1926 , leaving unfinished fragments of music and libretti that had to be rewritten and reworked, (with the collaboration of the original conductor Toscanini) to capture the spirit of what  the Maestro might have created himself if he had lived.  Just to show that the genesis of this work is worthy of a Puccini opera itself.

The production by Opera Lyra currently  playing in Southam Hall at the National Arts Centre is a sumptuous and magnificent spectacle, where  the unidentified prince, known  as Calaf, longs to possess the divine beauty of the frigid princess whose  repressed sexuality (“No man will ever possess me!”)  explodes into murderous acts of blood and  torture  as the excited crowds  flow about her feet singing the emperor’s praises and waiting for the executioner’s axe to fall on the next unlucky suitor, proudly exhibited here as an almost Christ like Persian prince, a sacrificial victim in a white robe. In fact the whole  axe grinding  ritual in Act I with the  appearance of the tattooed and muscle bound executioner became a heightened  stage moment of  pain and pleasure   that  director Brian Deedrick seemed to relish immensely, as it signalled the beginning of a superb piece of stage  design that brought much of the  strength to this production.

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