Turandot (Gozzi)

Turandot (1762) is a commedia dell'arte play by Count Carlo Gozzi after a supposedly Persian story from the collection Les Mille et un jours (1710–1712) by François Pétis de la Croix (not to be confused with One Thousand and One Nights).

Gozzi's play has given rise to a number of subsequent artistic endeavours, including combinations of: versions/translations by Friedrich Schiller, Karl Vollmöller and Bertolt Brecht; theatrical productions by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Max Reinhardt and Yevgeny Vakhtangov; incidental music by Carl Maria von Weber, Ferruccio Busoni and Wilhelm Stenhammar; and operas by Busoni, Giacomo Puccini and Havergal Brian.

Turandot was written deliberately in the Commedia dell'arte style by Gozzi, as part of a campaign in his literary war against the bourgeois, realistic works of Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni.

[5] The poet and playwright Friedrich Werthes (Buttenhausen, 12 October 1748–Stuttgart, 5 December 1817) made a translation of Gozzi's complete plays, employing prose rather than verse for the characters' lines.

[8] Gozzi's play has a "light, sarcastic tone" whereas Schiller transforms it into a symbolic epic with an idealised moral attitude.

Born in the Lubomirski Palace, near Lublin, West Galicia, he grew up in Vienna and trained as a lawyer, rising to section director in the Austrian Foreign Ministry under Metternich.

Hoven' (after Ludwig van Beethoven) he composed over 300 songs and 8 operas, among which was Turandot, Princess of Shiraz, libretto after Schiller, first performed on 3 October 1838.

[11] Novello's adaptation is shorter and resuscitates, to a certain degree, the frivolous and decadent tone of Schiller's source; for example, Tartaglia is a source of comic relief, as he is in Gozzi's play, and at the end of the play the cast breaks out into a dance that is designed in part to provoke laughter from the audience, as opposed to enacting the solemn, dramatic denouement found in the original German text.

Karl Vollmoeller provided a German translation of Gozzi's play, dedicated to Busoni; the sets were by Ernst Stern.

The incidental music (probably the published Turandot Suite with the additional number) was played by a full symphony orchestra conducted by Oskar Fried.

The cast included Emily Stevens, Josephine Victor, Alice Martin, Margaret Greville, Frank Peters, Pedro de Cordova (José Luis Medrano), Edward Emery (see Florence Farr and John Emery), Lennox Pawle, Daniel Gilfeather, Anthony Andre and 20 others.

[12][13] According to a New York Times report, the Vollmoeller script arrived without scenes or acts being designated, and was tidied up by Huffmann; however, the play was not a success.

[14] In the wake of the failure of Vollmoeller's play at the Hyperion Theatre, Lee Shubert asked Percy MacKaye to revise Turandot for American audiences.

42 (1920) for flute, clarinet, bassoon and percussion (triangle, cymbals, bass drum and tamtam), as incidental music for a (Swedish?)

[18][19] Isaac Don Levine and Henry Alsberg translated and adapted Turandot to open the 1926 season at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York.