Puccini’s last opera is all about riddles. The Emperor of China rules over the Forbidden City of Peking. His unmarried daughter, the Princess Turandot, has refused her hand to all her princely suitors by putting them to a test. She sets them three riddles; if they do not answer them correctly, they will lose their heads. As unlucky suitors fail and fall, up steps Calaf, a prince of the Tatar people. Daniel Kramer’s new staging in Geneva transposes the old fairy tale to a futuristic world where Turandot’s magic holds sway. In a dystopian game show, reminiscent of Hunger Games, the Princess presides over a surveillance state in which men are culled and the reproduction of the human race is conducted in breeding labs.
It is the first time that the journey to Reims to Rome is represented and this happens on a particular date two days after the death of Philip Gossett, the great musicologist who succeeded in reconstructing this mysterious score in the eighties. The theater has dedicated to him the presentations in progress with a dutiful tribute. Approximately 50% of the music of the Journey to Reims will merge a few years later in Le Comte Oryand for the cases of the lot of the autograph material that was not reused, it was discovered by Gossett in Rome at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in a fund never analyzed before.
