User talk:MinorProphet/Archive 3

This is a draft for Turandot Suite, previously archived as User talk:MinorProphet/Test Sandbox, re-archived as User talk:MinorProphet/Archive 3 MinorProphet (talk) 15:04, 10 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Hello MinorProphet:
 * I went ahead and made the new page and moved a lot of your edits to it. (Believing this would be OK with you. I thought your material was looking great.) You'll probably want to stop editing here and do new edits on the new page. But please double check that everything you want to move over has been, before you delete this. (Since you are going to be a way, a lot of changes may occur in the interim.) Look forward to your return. --Robert.Allen (talk) 01:39, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

The Turandot Suite BV 248 is an orchestral work by Ferruccio Busoni written in 1904-5, based on Carlo Gozzi's play Turandot. The music - in one form or another - occupied Busoni at various times between the years 1904-1917. Busoni used the Suite as incidental music to accompany a 1911 production of Gozzi's play. His 1917 opera Turandot also incorporates music from the Turandot Suite.

Performance History
The first performance of the Turandot Suite, BV 248 took place at the Beethoven-Saal, Berlin on 21 October 1905 with Busoni conducting.

Busoni also conducted the Suite in Berlin on 13th Jan 1921, at one of a series of concerts of his own music organised by the musical periodical Der Anbruch.

Add NY Times reviews here. I think it'll be OK to have several paragraphs here on performances.

Orchestration
Maybe? Should be included, but maybe later in the article? --Robert.Allen (talk) 20:36, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Gozzi's Turandot

 * Main article: Turandot (Gozzi)

Carlo Gozzi's play Turandot, which first appeared in 1762, is set in Peking. The main character is Turandot, a proud, cruel princess who refuses to marry any suitors unless they can answer three impossible riddles. When they fail, she has them executed. But Prince Calaf manages to woo her ("Turandot or death!"), answers the riddles, and wins her hand in marriage. The play was originally written to be performed in the small theatre of San Samuele in Venice, and was deliberately written in the commedia dell'arte style as a reaction to the more modern, realistic plays of his rival Goldoni.

Turandot as Orchestral Suite
Busoni was very fond of fantastical and magical tales: his immediately preceding work was the Piano Concerto Op. 39 BV 247, which included music from an unfinished adaptation of Oehlenschlager's Aladdin. In 1904 Busoni began sketching some incidental music for Gozzi's Chinese fable. There are 34 manuscript sheets of sketches and orchestrations for 13 numbers in the Busoni Archive, including music designed for melodramas, e.g. to accompany the riddle scene in Act 2. Some of the the music from the sketches is omitted from the published Suite.

Busoni, realising at some point that a production of the play with his music was going to be difficult and expensive to mount, went on to complete a concert version of the music, the Turandot Suite. In a letter to his mother dated 21 August 1905, a few days after completing the manuscript, Busoni describes it as "descriptive music for a spoken drama".

Before he had even finished composing the Turandot Suite, Busoni was trying to arrange a performance. I think the Petri letter would probably be better as a full quote, it's quite involved. In a letter to Egon Petri dated 10 July 1905 Busoni says that he had already arranged with Mengelberg for a concert performance of the suite in Amsterdam with Busoni as conductor.

In the event, the first performance of the completed Turandot Suite took place at the Beethoven-Saal, Berlin on 21 October 1905, with Busoni conducting. It was published in 1906 as the Turandot Suite, Op.41.

Berlin production
Busoni was still keen after the Suite's first performance to have the music performed along with Gozzi's play as he had originally conceived, and approached the actor-director Max Reinhardt about a production. Reinhardt accepted, and a performance was scheduled for 1907. The production encountered various delays and difficulties. Reinhardt's career had soared from 1905 onwards, and he was creating, lighting and acting in new productions in two theatres at an astounding rate. He was an incredibly busy man, and everything would have to be completely ready for a speedy production.

But there was also no suitable German version of Gozzi's play. The dynamic young writer Karl Vollmöller who was to do the translation was also extremely busy on other less literary projects. From February to April 1908 he was attached as a reporter to the Zust automobile race team in the 1908 New York-Paris Great Race. The route ran across the USA from New York to Alaska, through Siberia and Russia, Poland, Germany and France to Paris. The NY Times co-sponsored the race, and gave front-page coverage to Vollmöller's race reports of the event. [Possibly pic of Zunst car in 1908 New York-Paris race]

[Possibly pic of 1910 Vollmöller monoplane, now in museum, earliest surviving German aeroplane] Deutsches Museum Flugwerft Schleissheim

He had also been jointly developing an aeroplane with his brother Hans from late 1904 onwards, and in 1910 Vollmöller flew their No.4 prototype a record 150 km non-stop from Canstatt (nowStuttgart) to Lake Constance.

He eventually made an adapted translation of 'Turandot' in 1911, which he dedicated to Busoni.

The artist Emil Orlik who had been working with Reinhardt since 1905, was to design the sets and costumes. He had recently returned from a two-year journey to the Far East and was considered the leading German expert on chinoiserie. In the end Orlik didn't participate in the production, and the sets and costumes were done by Ernst Stern.

In addition to these obstacles, Busoni himself been undergoing a personal change. In 1906 he wrote no music, but concentrated on A new Aesthetic, published in 1907; and also from Sep-Dec 1907 he was composing the Elegies which marked a major turning-point in his musical development. Meanwhile, Busoni refused to make any changes to the score of Turandot, or reduce the size of the orchestra. However, at Reinhardt's request for additional music, in 1911 he composed Verzweiflung und Ergebung, BV 248a (Despair and Resignation) to be played between acts IV and V.

Vollmöller's Turandot with Busoni's music was finally first performed at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, on 27 October 1911, with a very expensive orchestra conducted by Oskar Fried. Add Beaumont ref re expense as well? Reinhardt was a hugely innovative director with the Deutsches Theater at his disposal, and Turandot was given a lot of publicity. An entire issue of his house magazine, (Blätter des Deutschen Theaters) was given over to the production. There were contributions from Busoni, Orlik, Stefan Zweig, etc etc.

Gertrud Eysoldt who played Turandot in 1911 Pic as Turandot here

Busoni wrote in his article that he had used only Gozzi's original play for reference, and that the music was based solely on authentic oriental motifs. The source for Busoni's melodies was a book by the distinguished music critic August Ambros, who with Hanslick had championed Busoni as a child prodigy. Beaumont shows how almost all the thematic material in the Turandot Suite is drawn from Volume I of Ambros' Geschichte der Musik; Busoni uses Indian, Turkish, and Persian melodies as well as the few authentic Chinese ones.

Theatrical reviews of the production were mixed, one (justifiable) criticism being that the music from a 60-piece orchestra did not so much highlight as paint over the action. The music was thought not to be in the service of the play, but at times in service of itself (like Beethoven's Egmont or Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream). But also quote positive reviews from Beaumont.

A brief second-hand account of Reinhardt's production appears in a letter from Puccini of 18 March 1920 to his librettist Simoni: "Yesterday I talked to a foreign lady who told me about a production of this work in Germany with a mise-en-scene by Max Reinhardt, executed in a very curious and novel way [...] In Reinhardt's production Turandot was a tiny woman, surrounded by tall men, specifically chosen for their height; huge chairs, huge furnishings, and this viper of a woman with the strange heart of an hysteric."

London production
Vollmöller and Reinhardt's next venture together was the hugely successful production of Vollmuller's religious mime play The Miracle. It had its premiere in London on Dezember 23, 1911 and the following year the play was made into a film with a script by Vollmuller and Reinhardt as second director. The Miracle was shown all over Europe.

The English theatre director Sir George Alexander was a man similar to Reinhardt. He was an equally active actor-manager who ran the St James' Theatre, London and played hundreds of roles in his career. Alexander was at the first performance of Turandot in Berlin, acquired the rights to Turandot and brought Reinhardt's entire production to London in 1913. Jethro Bithell made an authorised English translation of the Gozzi-Vollmöller play.

Turandot (with Stern's scenery and costumes, and Fried conducting) opened on January 8 1913 at the St James's Theatre, London. However, Busoni had not been to any rehearsals, and when he attended the first performance he was appalled. Johan Wijsman (the dedicatee of the Berceuse BV 252), had made an unauthorised reduced version of Busoni's score. The producer had inserted music by other composers alongside Busoni's own, and the orchestra was out of tune. Busoni left in a rage after the second act and went to listen to Saint-Saens' Le Rouet d'Omphale at another concert.

The critic Huntly Carter, who had also seen the Berlin production, commented that the inferior lighting arrangements in the St. James' Theatre particularly affected the production. But he was very complimentary about the music: "Busoni's music was cleverly adapted to tell the story. The prelude introduced us to the scene, and the principal characters were given their themes. The entrances were announced, the Emperor's by a fanfare, Turandot's being given out by the 'cellos and basses, and so on ; the music thus moving and acting throughout the play. Much of the music is indeed worthy of quotation as an example of its successful application to the needs of the drama."

After a fortnight Busoni had calmed down: in a letter to H.W. Draber, 21 Jan 1913, he wrote: St. Saëns (and Rimsky K.) also contributed to the Turandot music (because mine was insufficient) - which was played in Varieté style by a 20-piece orchestra. The success was great!! The newspapers are captivated. Fascinating! How should one defend oneself?

In a letter on the same day in 1913 to his wife Gerda, Busoni said he had considered going to court over the affair, but realised the season would have been over before the case was finished. He also wonders what Gerda thinks about an opera in Italian based on Gozzi's play.

Put full quote of letter here, it's quite funny.

Turandot as Opera

 * Main article: Turandot (Busoni)

Brief outline of how Busoni turned T-Suite into opera.