Word: turandote
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...treatment: the Piccolo Teatro di Milano presented a visionary version of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Italian, directed by Giorgio Strehler, while London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in its U.S. debut offered the premiere of Andrei Serban's wrongheaded setting of Puccini's Turandot...
...were eager to inherit his mantle: Italo Montemezzi, with L'Amore del Tre Re (1913); Ildebrando Pizzetti, with Fedra (1915); and Zandonai. But the attempt failed; although all three continued to compose into the midcentury, it was left to Puccini to write fine to traditional Italian opera with Turandot, which premiered posthumously...
...orchestrations. Puccini required singers capable of searing dramatic flights, coupled with limpid lyricism. And Richard Strauss, envisioning his ideal Salome, was only partly joking when he asked for a 16-year-old with the voice of Isolde. No wonder then that outstanding interpreters of such operatic peaks as Briinnhilde, Turandot and Elektra are in perennially short supply...
...Hungarian-born Marton, too, is electrifying audiences worldwide. Last month in the Opera Company of Boston's Turandot, she gave a regal account of Puccini's Chinese ice princess that could serve as an object lesson in how the role should be sung. Bringing the full weight of her massive voice to bear on the torturous part, Marton demolished its fearsome technical difficulties while touchingly developing the heroine from a frigid despot into a tender, vulnerable woman. This week at the Met she takes on another of opera's superwomen, Leonore in Beethoven's Fidelia...
...Weight of History. The last new opera to enter the standard repertory was Puccini's Turandot in 1926. Certain later operas have enjoyed a succès d'estime, and some (like Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes) are even produced fairly often; but in general, the repertory of the past half-century has been a closed shop. Thus the Met has the Sisyphean task of producing and reproducing the same roster of familiar works. When the Met was young, many of today's warhorses were new; but now opera is in danger of becoming a dead...