Busoni prepared his own libretto, in German, based on the play of the same name by Count Carlo Gozzi.

He was very fond of fantastical and magical tales: his immediately preceding work was the Piano Concerto, Op.

A production of Gozzi's play with Busoni's music was mounted by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911, and for the second and last time in London in 1913.

[5] After the outbreak of World War I, Busoni, as an Italian, found it increasingly difficult to stay in Berlin and eventually moved to neutral Zürich where he did not have to take sides.

Between late 1915 and August 1916 he was occupied with writing his one-act opera Arlecchino, but the Stadttheater (municipal theatre) in Zürich was unwilling to mount a production without a companion piece.

He swiftly wrote a libretto in German based on Gozzi's original and adapted his Turandot Suite into a short two-act opera with some spoken dialogue.

[6] Busoni wrote to Egon Petri on 9 November 1916: The important question as to which piece should be coupled with the hour-long Arlecchino so as to fill an evening, my resultant difficulties and the desire to establish such a programme in a durably valid form have led me to the hasty decision to form an opera in two acts out of the material and substance of Turandot.

[6] There are various oddities in Busoni's libretto which recall the play's Commedia dell'arte roots: characters with Italian names like Truffaldino and Pantalone; Allah is praised in China; and there are references to Venice, St. Mark's, and gondolas.

[8] In comparison to Puccini's opera on the same subject, Busoni retains the intimate, unreal atmosphere of Gozzi's play.

Re-using some of the material he had composed for the opera, Busoni again revised the orchestral Turandot Suite in 1917, replacing the Funeral March of the last movement with Altoum's Warning, BV 248b.

The American premiere was a concert performance on 10 October 1967 in New York's Philharmonic Hall, followed by a semi-staged version on 28 January 1980 at the First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, conducted by the 28-year-old Kent Nagano; a fully staged performance was given on 15 November 1986 by the Connecticut Grand Opera in Stamford with Gregory Stapp as Emperor Altoum, Juan Luque Carmona as Calaf, and Patricia Craig in the title role.

Scene 1: Kalaf comes upon the picture discarded by an earlier executed suitor, and determines to win Turandot.

Andrea Maffei (who also wrote the libretto for Verdi's I Masnadieri) had translated his friend Schiller's version of Gozzi's play back into Italian.

In addition they made reference to the libretto by Gazzoletti for a little-known opera Turanda by Antonio Bazzini, who had been one of Puccini's teachers at the Milan Conservatory.