Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, now being produced by Lyric Opera through January 27, is one of the most popular operas in the classical repertoire. Lyric has staged it five times in its 60-plus-year history, roughly once a decade; both the San Francisco Opera and the Met are also putting on runs this season; and “Nessun Dorma,” Calaf’s sung promise to win over the princess, is arguably the most famous tenor aria in opera (and the stuff of many a Pavarotti compilation).
Ask opera lovers why Turandot is still produced today and they’ll likely cite the power and beauty of the music.
“It is cold comfort to say it’s not really real, because it’s being treated as if it’s real,” says Naomi Andre, a University of Michigan scholar who studies race and gender in opera. “We get to have all of our negative associations of the West coming in and domesticating the East, of women learning the right way to be domesticated. That’s how that opera seems to live today.”
For this winter’s run, Lyric has purchased (for an undisclosed sum) a 1982 coproduction of Turandot originally created by Bliss Herbert and Allen Charles Klein for four opera companies in Texas, Florida, and California. In other words, Lyric is reusing most of the set design, costumes, and props from a production first staged when conversations about cultural appropriation were far less prominent.
Even toning down the staging or hiring an all-Asian cast wouldn’t solve the real problem with Turandot: its Orientalism is inextricable from the opera. It raises the question of whether it’s possible to responsibly engage in what one might call transracial fantasy fiction, or whether works like Turandot should just be put to bed.
Although she doesn’t advocate censorship, “if we have some voices of the culture representing itself in the dialogue,” Andre suggests, “maybe we won’t need Turandot any more.”
Through 1/27: Thu 12/14 and Sun 12/17, 2 PM Lyric Opera House 20 N. Wacker 312-827-5600lyricopera.org $36-278
