The orchestra is like the sky above and the ocean below, hurling clouds and surging waves, ever changing, ear-catching in colors and surprising in harmonies that don’t predictably resolve, keeping you off guard just often enough. What makes “Turandot” a true Chinese opera is not that it sounds Chinese but it follows the Tao. Puccini does adopt traditional modal Chinese tunes as well as make up his own. She is but one woman and, undressed, like any other. Take the loot, the women and promise of ruling other lands. They warn the prince, Calaf, that rather than try to change the implacably frozen heart of Turandot, who murders her suitors when they inevitably fail to solve her three riddles, he is better off to just go with the flow. For all Puccini’s seeming stereotyping of Ping, Pang and Pong - which becomes egregious in productions that mistake them as comic figures out of Gilbert and Sullivan - it is they who, in comparing Turandot to the Tao, offer the philosophical key to the opera. Google Puccini and Lao Tzu, a contemporary of Confucius and the founder of Taoism, and you won’t come up with much other than a single reference to the Tao by the three seemingly inexplicable commedia dell’arte comic characters. Thanks to the Three Tenors, politicians, pop stars and soccer clubs do with “Nessun Dorma” what they will, while the opera world just as readily does what it pleases with “Turandot.” And that is part of its greatness. In the end, no one actually owns Turandot, and no one seems particularly intent upon looking after it for the next generation. When finally performed in Beijing in 1995, it was set in a mythical kingdom in Central Asia. China banned the opera for decades because of its portrayal of the Chinese as barbarians.

Then again, there is China’s own complicated relationship to “Turandot.” The work’s origin was a Venetian 1752 commedia dell’arte play inspired by collection of Persian stories that Carlo Gozzi transferred to an imaginary China of seven centuries ago. The Taipei production reimagines Puccini’s cruel opera about a princess fixated on avenging the rape and murder of a distant ancestor as the nightmares of a modern Chinese woman against a backdrop of the 2014 student protests in Hong Kong against Chinese rule. Taiwan, of course, has its own escalating issues with mainland China, tensions having the reached the point that the small island nation is undergoing military exercises in fear of an invasion. Fully staged with more than 250 performers and - just like on the White House lawn the night before - a large audience of nearly 2,000 sat close together in defiance of the coronavirus. The opera served as a celebratory symbol of the reopening of the Taipei’s National Koahsiung Center for the Arts. The next morning, I set my alarm for 6 so I could catch the last act of “Turandot” being streamed live from Taiwan.

Puccini opera nessun dorma