#2 Turandot: The Half-Blood Princess
UDC: 792.54.091
COBISS.SR-ID 139203593 CIP - 6
Received: Nov 26, 2023
Reviewed: Oct 03, 2023
Accepted: Oct 08, 2023
#2 Turandot: The Half-Blood Princess
Citation: Hu, Tianrui. 2024. "Turandot: The Half-Blood Princess." Accelerando: Belgrade Journal of Music and Dance 9:2
Abstract
Turandot has long been criticized as artificial, anti-feminist, and most notoriously, Orientalist. The goal of this paper is to show from a survey of its numerous adaptations and transformations worldwide, that it has been proven more productive to treat it as a case for the complexity of the discussion on authenticity of a piece of art in an ever-changing and global world, instead of simply dismissing it as an attestation of Puccini’s inability to produce an authentic montage of a place no different than “a galaxy far, far away” for a Nineteenth century Italian. The paper concludes that over the course of the last two decades, Turandot has transformed from a piece used by the West to appropriate Chinese, to a self-appropriating piece that helped mainly China to assert its “cultural soft power,” and eventually to a vehicle for Chinese domestic audience to understand more about both themselves and the West, and the common thread uniting both cultures: humanity and love.
puccini opera, orientalism, coloniality, culture, performance, western productions, chinese productions
Introduction
Turandot encompasses all quintessential themes of a Puccini opera: love, cruelty and death, against an exotic backdrop. From its setting, costumes, to the famed Molihua (Jasmine Flower) melody, Turandot’s inextricable link to Orientalism has caused stirs in both Puccini’s continent and its faraway proposed homeland. It has long been one of the most popular operas in the Western world since its conception. Since the 1960s, numerous Chinese directors have also attempted to bring the princess of China back to its home country. In the words of famed director Zhang Yimou, Turandot is a “contrived story of China fabricated by a Western artist” (Wang 2013, 172). Yet, Zhang’s statement did not stop him from staging one of the most commercially successful productions of Turandot on the Forbidden Palace site in Beijing in 1998. Numerous other adaptations, such as a Sichuan opera version, a Beijing opera version, and even one with a modern setting, have since met audiences domestic and abroad to mostly positive reviews in China.
Despite Turandot’s reputation in the Western world as an Orientalist opera, its adaptation and evolution in China has made it a microcosm of China’s changing classical music culture in the last century, prompting constantly renewed discussions on the meaning of authenticity.
Artistic view of Turandot and the problem of authenticity
The ambiguity in Turandot
Numerous scholars, Eastern and Western, have criticized Puccini’s original Turandot and subsequent productions for being culturally insensitive and “impolitic or simply unpalatable to stage” (Stenberg 2016, 151). Chinese music critic Liu Xuefeng summarizes that Western productions tend to “vilify” China, while Chinese productions tend to be lacking in philosophical depth and over-emphasizing the visual aspects (Liu 2008, 64-65). Liu expresses that:
his enjoyment of Western-staged Turandots does not extend past their musical aspects, for all productions so far have been unbearable—even the most famous 1987 Zeffrelli production with the Metropolitan Opera. While the Zeffrelli rendition boasts ostentatious staging, it also displays problems commonly found in other Western productions: historically inaccurate costumes and make-up, or artless and plainly terrifying costumes that further exacerbate the over-simplification of characters already present in Puccini’s origina. (Ibidem.)
American Asian diaspora scholar Sheng-Mei Ma shares the same sentiment as his Chinese counterparts, though he is harsher in his criticism, which confronts not only artistic directors, but “Pater Puccini” himself. In his Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet, he first expresses his disdain for Puccini’s non-sensical naming of the peripheral characters, such as the comical ministers “Pong,” “Ping,” “Pang” or the executioner “Pu-Tin-Pao” (Ma 2017, 62). He adds that, along with the uncharacteristic cruelty of the Chinese princess, one-dimensional and blood-thirsty roles such as the executioner and the onlookers of Peking further contribute to perpetuating the “putrid, facile stereotypes” of the East as a place of both exotic beauty and ghastly bestiality (Ibidem.)
Turandot has also received repeated criticism for its portrayal of Chinese women. As Dr. Josh Stenberg, senior lecturer of Chinese studies at the University of Sydney, in his book Returning to Where She Didn’t Come From, explains, “Equally objectionable to a Chinese audience is the story’s liability to be read as an allegory of Western (male) subjugation of the dangerous and inscrutable (female) East” (Stenberg 2016, 154). Puccini himself admitted discomfort in staging an Oriental story, stating:
If I had found the sort of subject I was looking for…I would have staged it by now. But this Chinese world! (....) I don’t feel comfortable in China. (Ibid., 151)
As a result, Turandot falls into the trap of portraying Chinese women as one of only two things, incredibly servile (Liu) or cartoonishly cruel (Turandot). In order to digest such a story, there must be a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. Although the idea of authenticity remains an elusive one, it is left unaltered to the average Chinese viewer. Puccini’s Turandot is nothing short of an Orientalist fantasy: a satirization of Chinese culture, and thus cannot be enjoyed by a Chinese audience unless alterations are made.
Since the 1990s, Chinese cinematographers and directors set in motion numerous attempts to rescue Turandot from being held hostage in foreign lands. The performances of Wei Minglun and Zhang Yimou’s respective adaptations can be thought of as the end of the sensitivity and perhaps even the hostility towards Turandot, marking the beginning of a slow progression as Turandot becomes more and more accepted, as more than just an unrealistic, problematic, Orientalist fantasy, but an accepted classical opera in China (Melvin and Cai 2010, 489).
Although there are many differences between the artistic visions of Wei Minglun and Zhang Yimou, despite Wei Minglun’s iteration being more known (and beloved) in Chinese circles, and Zhang Yimou’s popularity among audiences abroad (and conversely infamy among Chinese audiences), there is a symbiotic relationship between the two works. Dr. Josh Stenberg postulates that it is the direct juxtaposition between Zhang’s adaptation with Wei’s that helped garner more attention for Wei’s Chinese Princess Turandot (Stenberg op. cit., 152). Conversely, Wei’s Turandot may have played a part in increasing familiarity among Chinese opera-goers.
Xu Xiaozhong, director of the 1995 performance in Beijing near the China Central Opera House, echoed the same sentiment. Since 1949, it was the first time that any Western opera had been performed completely in its original language - under the People’s Republic, all opera had to be translated into Chinese, in order for it to be understood by “The People” (Melvin and Cai op. cit, 487). Xu believed that the Chinese audience is perfectly capable of enjoying an opera performed completely in a language they do not understand.
However, he did not believe that any Chinese person would be capable of accepting the plot of Turandot. In an interview, he claims:
A Chinese audience simply would not enjoy the story because it was too obviously not Chinese. No Chinese princess would ever behave as coldly and cruelly as Turandot. Neither would she be so unfilial as to refuse to marry. Nor, for that matter, would her father ever let her choose her own husband through a series of riddles. (Ibidem.)
In order to get around this issue, Xu institutes a change to the setting of the story. By having the story take place in an unnamed location in Central Asia, he avoids injuring the sensibilities of his target audience, including the Chinese Ministry of Culture (Ibid, 488). Numerous examples of Turandot’s assimilation into Chinese culture have surfaced since then. In 2000, Turandot was referenced in the popular play Che Guevara by Zhang Guangtian.
All are ears just the same! (...) There’s the Sichuan Opera Turandot, the opera Turandot, the imperial Ancestral Temple’s Turandot, the Venetian Turandot, the light opera Turandot, and the musical Turandot. These Turandot’s are each unique in a different way! (Ibid., 489)
There is also the 2001 Guangzhou Ballet (Ibidem.), as well as the 2003rd Figure Skating Duo arrangement from Turandot at the World Figure Skating Championships. And then just that same year, the China National Peking Opera company staged their own version of the work, costing upwards of $120,000! (Ibidem.) Despite the mythical search for the authentic Chinese princess, Turandot has over the years been more and more appropriated into Chinese culture.
One would expect a story about China retold by a Chinese artist to be authentic, surely. However, according to Sheng-Mei Ma, this was still not the case, even with Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige’s productions (Ma 2017, 64). Ma criticizes Zhang and Chen for following the paths of their Western counterparts of using chinoiserie, even if more elaborately, merely as cultural symbols decorating a Western tale, instead of telling an integrated and convincing story that is universally resonant yet unmistakably Chinese in ethos (Ibidem.) Zhang’s casting of all foreign main role singers, insistence that props and massive groups of background actors be as authentic as possible, while neglecting the main singer’s performance, and a lack of control over artistic direction, due to clashes with his Italian colleagues, which all substantiated Ma’s claim (Ibid, 65).
Chen’s production, on the other hand, “over-authenticates” by focusing too much on correcting details, contributing to the erroneous stereotypes, and not enough on the story itself (Ibid., 66). Ma also notes the delicate dynamic of Zhang and Chen as internationally acclaimed Chinese directors who are often pinned against each other in rivalry. He suggests that part of Chen’s motives in remaking Turandot seems to be to “one-up” his former classmate from the Beijing Film Academy, in a Western-audience-filled arena, and this is evident in Chen’s even more hyper-detailed approach to historical aesthetic accuracy compared to Zhang.
Over-authenticated or not, when juxtaposed against Western productions of Turandot, Chinese productions provide clues to what Chinese directors consider authentically Chinese, or at least what they expect their projected audience to appreciate as authentic. Zhang and Chen seemed conflicted about who their target audience is, for most of their efforts serve to realize a Western audience’s fantasy of experiencing a truly Oriental, visual fairy-tale, while simultaneously fulfilling their needs to justify their own authenticity and authority as Chinese artists by correcting Western directors’ artistic mistakes. However, restoring authenticity is much more complicated than crafting the finest replica of a Ming-dynasty sword or matching the costume robes to the exact shade of royal gold. Ma calls Zhang and Chen “self-Orientalists” for this reason (Ibid., 61).
Asian scholar Alexander Chih-Yuan Mai quotes Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism as:
the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient — dealing with it by making statements about it, ruling over it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (Mai 2020, 36)
Chinese opera actor-turned-playwright Wei Minglun’s chuanju (Sichuan Opera) version of Turandot, has a plot that deviates so far from the original, yet it is considered the most authentic adaptation according to both Western and Eastern scholars, perhaps for the precise reason that Wei does not merely echo or settle for the Western “authorized views” of the East, but instead reclaims the narrative altogether.
Taiwanese researcher Ying-Wei Tiffany Sung also attributes Wei’s success among Chinese audiences to his rewriting of the plot almost in its entirety. She synthesizes two distinct schools of thought in the re-making of Turandot: one that seeks to alter it to be more authentically Chinese, and another that retains the Western elements in the plot, as it is in essence a Western story. Wei’s chuanju version belong in the first camp, and Zhang’s the second (Ibid., 53) Wei’s version of the Chinese Princess is more remorseful over Liu’s death and does not actually kill those who fail to solve her riddles. He also adds reincarnation to the story, a staple element of Chinese folklore. In addition, Wei reduced the amount of spoken dialogue, and translated the libretto not only in Chinese, but in an archaic vernacular typical of chuanju to make it more intelligible to a Chinese audience.
However, comparison of Wei and Zhang’s productions leads Sung to express a sense of futility in the pursuit of authenticity in reference to a story containing “multiple identities.” (Sung 2010, 68). After all, Turandot’s story is Persian in origin, translated into German, taken up by an Italian composer, presented as Italian opera with both Impressionist and commedia dell’arte elements, and finally, reimagined in China.
There are bound to be discrepancies when playing such a game of operatic “telephone”. In this sense, Turandot is perhaps incapable of authentically portraying China due to its heavy westernization. Sung explains that Wei’s production, though much more Chinese in essence, strays from the original source material more than any of the other versions. If authenticity is determined by how accurately one portrays the original Persian tale, then Wei’s would be the least authentic, because paradoxically, the more authentic a Chinese princess Wei creates, the more inauthentic Turandot becomes (Ibid., 67-68). Even though Zhang’s production further “exaggerated fantasies of the Chinese other,” it increased hybridity between the East and the West and sums up the complex dilemma of authenticity in staging an inter-cultural work like Turandot – one involving:
Italians interpreting Chinese, then Chinese interpreting Italians interpreting Chinese. (Ibid., 67-69)
Therefore, the problem of authenticity persists.
Director Chen Xinyi is one of the few Chinese directors “interpreting Italians” and not one “interpreting Italians interpreting Chinese.” She approaches her 2008 Chinese National Center for the Performing Arts production by portraying Turandot as a Puccini princess, coming-of-age from dark Feudalism (operating on dogma and hatred) to Renaissance humanism, instead of a Chinese princess. She still points out the vast historical flaws in Puccini’s original, of course, such as the erroneous statement that the royals have resided in the Forbidden Palace for thousands of years (it was built less than 600 years ago), and the sheer impossibility of China not having provoked a world war after killing thirty-some princes from neighboring countries (Chen 2008, 60-61). To her understanding, Renaissance humanism is the “spiritual fulcrum” of the story. The ideal humanist is one possessing both immense passion and precise logical reasoning. Liu is the “spiritual fulcrum” of Turandot’s transformation, and Calaf is the quintessential humanist hero (Ibid., 61-62). Chen Xinyi added the characters of “feathered man,” or the Chinese mythology equivalent of an angel, and the ancestral princess Lou Ling. The pure and peaceful “feathered man” replaces the dark and resentful Lou Ling in the background as the transformation of Turandot takes place, signaling love and trumping hate (Ibid., 63). Unlike Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige’s productions a decade ago, Chen Xinyi’s principal aim is not to showcase a true Orient to a Western audience, but to tell a stylized but sincere Puccini story of love that transcends historical periods and geographic borders.
In this regard, Turandot could perhaps be best understood not as a portrayal of a singular culture, but as a masterclass in hybridity. From the idea of a Chinese princess possessing both “feminine appearance and ‘masculine’ power,” to Puccini’s incorporation of Chinese melodies from J. A van Aalst’s Chinese Music, along with the inclusion of the Chinese gong in an Italian opera, or even the concept of staging an Italian opera in a Chinese palace, all these techniques create a sense of hybridity, or more specifically, duality (Sung op. cit., 69). Wei Minglun’s readaptation Chinese Princess Turandot was so bold that it almost completely changed Puccini’s plot. Furthermore, it also brought Western opera repertoire to a Chinese audience who would normally not attend a Western Opera. Zhang Yimou’s painstaking efforts to re-authenticate Turandot were disconcerted by a cast so diverse and international that translators were needed to communicate between the conductor and director — instead of viewing these phenomena as shortcomings of their adaptations, they could be viewed as evidence of Turandot as a vehicle for hybridization.
Sung is not the only scholar who has recognized the complexities of authenticating a culturally diasporic product. He Chengzhou, a distinguished professor of English and Drama at Nanjing University, zooms in on the often-overlooked other aspect of making Turandot authentic – instead of debating which production of Turandot is the most authentically Chinese – one needs to understand first what exactly “Chineseness” is. He expounds the complex history associated with the term “Chineseness” and the problems that arise with simply judging an adaptation as Chinese or un-Chinese based on whether the people (and especially the government) of current mainland China resonate with it. He argues that such a simplistic criterion of judgment commits the mistake of viewing “Chineseness” as a singular and static concept, when in reality, it is quite the opposite. “Chineseness” is more than “a monolithic given bound ultimately to mainland China” (He 2012, 548).
To confine a culture to a single location and a specific time in the past, or to subscribe to an ideology called “cultural nativism”, is to undermine the constant involvement in cultural ideology and to ignore the experience of the Chinese diaspora overseas (Ibid., 548-550). Because of China’s past with Western colonizers, domestic Chinese scholars nowadays fall into a cultural nativist framework of thinking, deeming all Western ideas as inferior, counterproductively positioning Chinese culture as something directly in opposition to Western culture, and overlooking the similarities shared by both cultures (Ibid., 548). In the case of evaluating Turandot, this “sinocentrism” has rigidly dichotomized or even hegemonized the discussion on authenticity, and risks the danger of losing sight of the real theme of the opera shared by both the most “Chinese” and the most Western versions: that of love trumping hate.
Conclusion
Turandot has long been criticized as being artificial, anti-feminist, and most notoriously, Orientalist. Yet, from a survey of its numerous adaptations and transformations worldwide, it has been proven more productive to treat it as a case for the complexity of the discussion on authenticity of a piece of art in an ever-changing and global world, instead of simply dismissing it as an attestation of Puccini’s inability to produce an authentic montage of a place no different than “a galaxy far, far away” for a Nineteenth century Italian. Over the course of the last two decades, Turandot has transformed from a piece used by the West to appropriate Chinese, to a self-appropriating piece that helped mainly China to assert its “cultural soft power,” and eventually to a vehicle for Chinese domestic audience to understand more about both themselves and the West, and the common thread uniting both cultures: humanity and love.
References
- Anonymous. 1998. “Moreover: One Country, Two Turandots.” The Economist, Vol. 348, Iss. 8086 (September 19, 1998): 101-102.
- Cao, Li, and Kai Yang. 2011. “The Material Origins of the Libretto of the Opera Turandot.” Yinyue Shikong, no.11 (2011): 55.
- Chen, Xinyi. 2008. “A Great Opera with ‘Flaws’: Explained by the Director of the Opera Turandot at the National Centre for the Performing Arts.” Geju/Opera, no. 3 (March 2008): 60–63.
- He, Chengzhou. 2012. “The Ambiguities of Chineseness and the Dispute over the ‘Homecoming’ of Turandot.” Comparative Literature Studies 49(4): 547–564.
- Liao, Ping-hui. 1990. “‘Of Writing Words for Music Which is Already Made’: ‘Madama Butterfly, Turandot’, and Orientalism.” Cultural Critique, (16): 31–59.
- Liu, Xuefeng. 2008. “A Chinese Turandot: What Type of Production is Authentic?” Geju/Opera, no.3 (March): 64–65.
- Ma, Sheng-Mei. 2017. Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet, 57–68. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
- Mai, Alexander Chih-Yuan. 2020. “A Contrasting Image of China in Opera Libretti: An Analytical Reading of Turandot and Nixon in China.” In Chinese Culture in the 21st Century and Its Global Dimensions: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 33–43. Edited by Kelly Kar Yue Chan and Chi Sum Garfield Lau. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
- Melvin, Sheila, and Jindong Cai. 2010.“Turandot in China: Rejected, Reinterpreted, Reclaimed.” In The Opera Quarterly 26, (2–3): 486-492.
- Ng, Maria. 2016. A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of Madame Butterfly, 170-180. Edited by Jonathan Wisenthal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- Stenberg, Josh. 2016. “Returning to Where She Didn’t Come from: Turandot on the Chinese Stage.” In Opera in a Multicultural World: Coloniality, Culture, Performance by Mary I. Ingraham, Joseph K. So, and Roy Moodley, 151-166. New York: Routledge.
- Sung, Ying-Wei Tiffany. 2010. Turandot’s Homecoming: Seeking the Authentic Princess of China in a New Contest of Riddles. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press.
- Wang, Ning. 2013. “On the artistic value of Turandot at the Forbidden City.” Yinyue Shikong, (9): 172.
- Zhang, Wei. 2020. Chinese Adaptations of Brecht, 125-44. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
