Turandot

Notes

Puccini died in November 1924 with the final duet and the closing scene unwritten, leaving sketches rather than a finished draft, and it is unlikely a continuous draft of the ending ever existed. Franco Alfano was chosen to complete the opera in the summer of 1925 and worked from twenty-two leaves of those sketches. Arturo Toscanini conducted the first performance and stopped it after the funeral chorus for Liù, where Puccini's own music ends, so the opera was first given without any completion at all. He conducted the second and third performances as well, and those had Alfano's ending. That is the only reason a conductor is named on this record. Which Alfano ending is a question in itself. Toscanini thought the first one disregarded Puccini's intentions, and Ricordi made Alfano cut it by more than a hundred bars, over a quarter of its length, while he was away on tour. The shortened form is what La Scala played and what has been played since. The longer one was printed all the same, went to the libraries and to the German productions of 1926, and Ricordi still supplies it for performances that want it. Luciano Berio wrote a wholly separate ending in 2001, which Ricordi distributes as its own thing.