THE TURANDOT MUSIC

Written in Berlin, October 1911, for the Blätter den Deutschen Theaters.

Traduzione di Rosamond Ley. Il curatore di questo sito, avendo acquistato a Londra l'intero Archivio di Rosamond Ley, detiene il Copyright su tutto quel che l'allieva di Busoni ha scritto sul suo Maestro.


WITHOUT losing my way in the - to me - unfamiliar domain of literary criticism on the history of literature, I should like to make a few introductory remarks which apply solely to my music to Gozzi Turandot, and how I regard the task I undertook.

In German musical literature there is a small number of classical models of music to the spoken drama. Egmont by Beethoven, Manfred by Schumann, A Midsummer Night's Dream by Mendelssohn, besides the exquisite half-opera Oberon by Weber.

In the literature of Italian music, on the other hand, nothing of this kind is known to me - and I may consider my music to Gozzi Turandot as the first attempt to illustrate an Italian play with music.

Gozzi himself called for a great deal of music, and the occasion for it is offered not only by the rhythms of marches and dances which demand it but still more by the fabulous character of the subject.

In fact a "fairy drama" without music is hardly thinkable and especially in Turandot where no magic is mixed up with it, and the grateful and needful rôle of representing what is supernatural and out-of-the-ordinary falls to the lot of the music. I have employed exclusively original oriental motives and forms and believe I have avoided the conventional theatre exoticism.

I had the original Italian text at hand, of course, as I composed my Turandot, without taking into consideration Schiller's adaptation: for I regard Schiller's work as an adaptation and not as a translation, and had I used it I should have had the feeling of alienating myself from the spirit of Gozzi. For me, the essential thing in the original text was the feeling - even in the scenes bordering on the tragic - of always being concerned with a matter of fantasy. Schiller throughout fails to convey this. The masked figures, familiar to Italians, contribute to this effect excellently, for they throw a bridge from the Venetian public into the fictitious Orient of the stage and in this way destroy the illusion that what is going on is real life.

This rôle of bridge-maker falls to the lot of the Pantaloon especially, for he is the personification of Venetian wit and continually recalls the actual place by the allusions he makes to his native town and by using turns of speech belonging to the dialect of that district. It was this continuous gaily-coloured change of passion and make-believe, of reality and unreality, of the commonplace and the fantastically exotic, which charmed me most in Gozzi Chinese Fairy Tale for the Theatre.