On 25 April 1926, Europe’s great and good gathered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan to mark a symbolic occasion: the first performance of Turandot, the final opera by Giacomo Puccini, who had died unexpectedly 17 months earlier. It had been completed by a younger composer, Franco Alfano, but the audience would not hear his ending that night. Instead, the conductor, Arturo Toscanini, halted the performance prematurely, announcing with a grand flourish that “the opera is finishing here because this is the point at which the maestro died”.
It was a night, then, for celebration and for mourning – at once a christening and a wake. Numerous eye-witness accounts testified to the reverent, funereal atmosphere, as Italy marked the passing of the nation’s last great opera composer, in a country where opera really mattered. The art form was intimately bound up with its national identity and pride, and had been used to voice aspirations for Italian independence from foreign rule and to bind together disparate regional communities once unification was achieved.
In the 1890s, Puccini had been lined up as the successor to the great Giuseppe Verdi, but in 1926 there was no heir apparent. As the opera historians William Ashbrook and Harold Powers wrote in 1991: “It is not often that one can put so definite a finis to so long-standing a cultural manifestation, saying that with one last Work and the death of its Creator all was effectively over.”
But did this moment, a century ago, also mark the death of opera more broadly – at least, opera capable of having mass appeal? Composers didn’t stop writing them, but it is difficult to think of any after Turandot that can match its global success and longevity. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites and John Adams’s Nixon in China are all works of artistic significance, but none of them gets anywhere near Turandot in terms of performance frequency or even international name recognition.
Today’s opera industry functions largely as a “museum culture”, constantly rolling out tried-and-tested favourites. Contemporary operas are bankrolled by endless reruns of La Bohème (1896), Carmen (1875) and La Traviata (1853). Turandot’s centenary means every single work that can realistically be said to feature in the international operatic performing canon is now more than a hundred years old.
Why did opera of the canonical type end with Turandot? Modernism, of course, forms part of the answer. There was a fundamental incompatibility between the tradition of tuneful Italian opera and the broader direction of travel in classical music by the 1920s. Puccini integrated some forward-looking elements into Turandot – the listener who thinks it’s all going to sound like “Nessun dorma” is in for a shock – but this was about as far as it was possible to go and still hold on to your audience. For most modernist composers, courting appeal was no longer the ambition, but it was fundamental to the tradition of Italian opera.
Then there was the rise of a rival: cinema. Early films plundered heavily from opera – for example, incorporating its melodramatic gestures and plotting – and then replaced the genre in the popular imagination. The arrival of talkies and the “super cinemas” of the 1930s confirmed this drift, and many former theatres found themselves being converted into film houses. And as operas were pushed out of the mainstream commercial entertainment world, so the willingness to invest in new ones fell away. Any composer writing opera today will have to limit themselves to a modestly sized orchestra and cast, and only the lucky few will get anything more than a short run in a studio theatre.
It’s not that opera no longer speaks to us. Even in an era in which the tradition is routinely (and unfairly) dismissed as “elitist” and “irrelevant”, operas such as Turandot endure. There have already been some loudly trumpeted productions to mark the centenary. Director Ann Yee’s bold, tech-focused interpretation for Opera Australia opened in Sydney in January. New productions arrive this month at La Scala – the opera’s first home – and, with perfect timing on 25 April, at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm.
Generally, though, Puccini operas don’t tend to need the excuse of a special anniversary to be revived. They are simply everywhere, all of the time. The Royal Ballet and Opera at Covent Garden just brought out its standard Turandot for a prolonged run between December and February. This production (originally directed by Andrei Şerban) was first performed in 1984, and has been revived 15 times since.
Turandot is not an unproblematic opera. It was controversial in 1926 for being too musically challenging and it is controversial in 2026 on grounds of cultural appropriation. (That said, its abstract, fairy-tale-like quality can help directors duck the sorts of sensitivities swirling around the purportedly realist Madama Butterfly.) Turandot, about a princess in ancient China who orders the beheading of suitors who fail to solve her cryptic riddles, is an opera troublingly steeped in brutality and sadism – a product of fascist times, even though Puccini did not live to see the worst excesses of the regime.
But there is also much to wonder at in this most unashamedly operatic of operas. Puccini spent the 1910s in experimental mode, trying his hand at operetta, comedy and the one-act format. But in writing Turandot, he turned to full-blooded tragic opera on the grandest of canvases. It’s a work that is truly epic in scale. Turandot requires a large chorus and an expanded orchestra featuring numerous unusual percussion instruments. It has been staged with the most sumptuous and ornate of sets and costumes and lends itself well to spectacular performances in amphitheatres, as well as in conventional opera houses. This is not a show that can be staged on the cheap.
Turandot is also surprisingly innovative and modern-sounding, containing passages of dissonance, even of atonality, and using driving ostinato rhythms that nod to Stravinsky. The choral writing in particular is savage and angular, vividly representing the frenzy of the mob. In Turandot herself, Puccini created a most unusual heroine – icy, mechanistic and reminiscent of the puppets, robots and masked figures that appeared repeatedly in contemporary modernist paintings and plays as emblems of the avant-garde.
There are passages of lush lyricism as well, many of them associated with the role of the faithful slave girl Liù, written into a pre-existing story by Puccini as a concession to an audience that wanted to be reminded of his earlier gentle heroines. But the composer plays with the audience’s expectations, withholding lyric melody for prolonged stretches and then deploying it strategically in order to create a deliberate contrast with the music surrounding it. The intention was to disconcert: we don’t know where we are in Turandot’s kingdom. So collage-like is the score, so eclectic, that sometimes we feel that it is not so much modern as postmodern. And then, if all this were not enough, Puccini throws in the triumphant “Nessun dorma”, the aria that even people who don’t know anything about opera know.
Over the past century, Puccini has never been able to shake off snobbery about his work. Critics in his own lifetime and after claimed that his operas were too commercial, too well-liked by the bourgeoisie and women – heaven forbid – and too preoccupied with everyday life to count as “art”. Yet he was an operatic titan, creating works of immense invention and internal complexity, demonstrating an ability to represent the workings of the human heart like no other composer could, and possessing the most glorious melodic gift. Turandot, his surprising late swerve into a darker, more dangerous milieu, showcases a composer at the top of his game, full of ideas and flexing his melodic muscles.
Puccini’s last opera was not intended to be his swansong. Of course he had no idea he was going to die from a heart attack when he paid a visit to a Brussels clinic for experimental treatment on a persistent sore throat. Who knows where his mind would have turned next if he had lived for as long as Verdi, who died at 87, rather than 65. But if opera with mass international appeal had to die, it is fitting that it should have gone out with such a bang. Long live Turandot.
[Further reading: The Wizard of the Kremlin has no magic]
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This article appears in the 22 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, All alone
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