Opéra de Montréal's Turandot rewrites Puccini's unfinished ending with modern sensibility

Puccini left Turandot unfinished when he died of throat cancer—a chain-smoker who never completed the opera's climactic final duet. For nearly a century, Franco Alfano's completion, heavily revised by conductor Arturo Toscanini, has been the standard. Now, Opéra de Montréal is presenting a bold alternative.

The production, staged by Washington National Opera director Francesca Zambello, replaces Alfano-Toscanini's ending with a completely new finale written by screenwriter Susan Soon He Stanton and composer Christopher Tin. In the new version, Turandot voluntarily chooses Calaf rather than succumbing to a forced kiss, becoming—in the program's words—"an empathetic sovereign" who "overturns the archetype of the damsel in distress in favour of a true partnership based on reciprocity."

Musically, Tin's contribution is strongest when it stops trying to sound like Puccini or Wagner and embraces its own voice. Tin does invoke Wagner, with a citation of Tristan embedded in the score, and his use of dissonance creates an intentional tonal rupture. The new ending is more explicitly resolved than its predecessor, though the abundance of sentiment borders on saccharine.

The Alfano-Toscanini version has long been considered problematic on both musical and dramatic grounds. Alfano's orchestration lacks Puccini's lyrical sweep, and the drama strains credibility: Turandot abandons her formidable defenses in an instant after a single kiss, while Calaf swiftly forgets Liù's recent suicide. Puccini's unfinished work sits alongside other great incomplete works—Bach's Art of Fugue, Mozart's Requiem, Alban Berg's Lulu—but Turandot's stakes are higher because the opera's entire climax hangs on how that ending is resolved.

German soprano Maida Hundeling carries the title role with the vocal power the part demands. Hundeling brings both the vocal acuity and dramatic presence the role requires. Korean tenor Andrea Shin, making his Canadian debut after singing roles like Roméo at the Metropolitan Opera, has the vocal range for the demanding Calaf part.

Zambello's staging transports the action to a hypothetical socialist dictatorship somewhere in Asia. Set designer Wilson Chin's towering construction—three levels of metal stairs, interlacing pipes and ventilators—evokes the industrial-futurist utopianism of certain regimes. Ping, Pang, and Pong emerge as bureaucrats shuffling through an oppressive office, a stark reframing of the original comedic trio.