DVD Review; Salzburger Festspiele 2002 Turandot

The debate of whether music should take precedence in an opera has been around for centuries: as the German musicologist Hanslick wrote in the 19th century, that if Mozart wrote an opera, it would be a good opera even if the libretto is really dull. Well, many modern stage directors proved, at least, that opera is not all about music. The newly released DVD of Puccini's Turandot, recorded at the Grosses Festpielhaus in Salzburg in 2002, directed by David Pountney, once again remind us the truth in this statement.

Turandot--an ancient Chinese story appeared in the well known Persian fairy tale collection "One thousand and one night" (a.k.a "The Arabian Nights"), tells the story of a prince who fell in love with the princess Turandot but had to solve her three riddles in order to survive and marry her. Set in the remote past, it reflects the kind of prototype Chinese story as it is imagined by the Westerners--which certainly loans itself to much different interpretations.

Pountney's direction highlights the queer and nightmarish atmosphere of the world where the story took place--an imagined world filled with ghost-like masks and giant robots in the form of a Chinese man controlled by the solders. Almost every one on stage is armed with terrible murder weapons, and the arms of the three ministers Ping, Pong and Pang are replaced by the instruments of torture. Turandot--the princess--always appears behind a giant mask and is standing in a height that is closer to heaven than to the earth.

The concept of this design, turns out, comes from an artistic perspective of the "fear of civilization" that Puccini took up in the 20s and 30s, namely, the fear that the fatal combination of rapid technological progress, which is gradually spinning out of control, and inhuman political systems pose a fundamental threat to all human values. In this context, the freedom and the existence of the individual appear to be constantly threatened by a soulless, robot-like administration. This conflict, in this particular production, however, is seen to be resolved in the last Act with a happy ending, when everyone returns to the normal human form.

In general, although the story is set in this kind of imagined world, Pountney did make reference to the Chineseness of the opera by occasionally setting stage backdrops in a Chinese painting and excessively using the color of red, which symbolizes the presence of China.

The music of this production by Vienna Philharmonic under the direction of Valery Gergiev is effective. While what happened on stage does need a little attention to comprehend, the music did not fade out as unimportant--rather, the two actually blended really well in a somehow bizarre way.