Two Faces of Turandot

"All the music I have written up to now," said Giacomo Puccini, "seems a jest in comparison." He was speaking of his last and most ambitious opera, Turandot, which he left unfinished at his death in 1924. Completed by his friend Franco Alfano, Turandot is rarely performed despite the exotic splendors of its score. Chief reasons for its neglect: a certain harshness that sets it apart from the big Puccini favorites (Tosca, Boheme, Butterfly), some devilishly difficult vocal parts, and a need for sumptuous staging.

Last week two of the world's leading opera houses--East Berlin's Komische Oper and Milan's La Scala--were performing brilliant and strikingly different productions of Turandot. According to the libretto, Chinese Princess Turandot is a creature of "ice which gives fire," and the productions mirrored the icily realistic and warmly romantic visions of two master directors of opera: East Berlin's Walter Felsenstein, Vienna's Margherita Wallmann.

Pie-in-the-Sky. To Felsenstein, opera is a highly seasoned slice of life; to Wallmann, it is musical pie-in-the-sky. East Berlin's Turandot, staged by Felsenstein Protege Joachim Herz but supervised by the boss himself, stressed naturalistic stage effects, an infinite concern for dramatic detail, and acting of startling realism. The curtain rose on an iron grille stretched across the proscenium, representing the palace gate separating the chorus of rag-clad Chinese from the palace courtyard, where one of Turandot's unsuccessful suitors was about to be executed. The mob faced the audience in silence for several seconds, hissed in hypnotic fascination at their gruesome vision. Only then did the music begin. Throughout, the stage blazed with barbaric lights and colors, reflecting the influence of the Peking opera troupe's Berlin visit two years ago. Time and again the action jolted the audience to attention, most notably during the Marx Brothers-styled high jinks of the three ministers--Ping, Pang and Pong--and in the final act when the hero, Calaf, took Princess Turandot in his arms and arched her backward in one of the most torrid embraces ever seen on an opera stage.

While East Berlin's Turandot emphasized the oriental barbarity of the libretto, La Scala's version brought out its fairytale quality and its atmosphere of Eastern mystery. The sets were high and airy, often lighted with foggy uncertainty to give the illusion of immensely stretching space. The cast moved with the highly stylized, mincing grace of the traditional Chinese theater. The opera's few moments of pure horror, as when the executioner carries in the head of the Prince of Persia in Act I, were so skillfully blended into the fabric of stage movement that they were almost unnoticed.

Fire & Ice. Neither Wallmann nor Felsenstein, both born in Vienna, began their careers in the world of opera. Felsenstein started out to be an actor, drifted into opera directing in the 1920s. He took over the Komische Oper in 1947, speedily built it into the operatic showcase of a city that also boasts the East Berlin State Opera and the vigorously competing West Berlin Municipal Opera. In a kind of operatic cold war, Felsenstein's now classic productions of Carmen, Tales of Hoffmann, The Bartered Bride attract as many operagoers from West Berlin (where Fetsenstein lives for maximum comfort) as from the Eastern sector.

Director Wallmann started out as a ballet dancer, had to abandon her career when she fell through a trap door on the Vienna opera stage and broke her hip. She turned to choreography, gradually took on opera-directing chores, is now one of the most sought-after directors in Europe. She is an ardent admirer but not a disciple of Felsenstein, believes that his coldly analytical visions have no place in Milan's mistily sentimental house. Between them, Directors Felsenstein and Wallmann have done much to restore Puccini's fire-and-ice masterpiece to the fame it deserves.

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