One kiss and she falls for her abuser? How 'Turandot' survives the modern age

"No one shall sleep! O Princess, you too shall not sleep. In your cold room you shall gaze at the stars that tremble with love and hope." (From "Nessun dorma," "Turandot")

Everyone tried to stop him. His father, a king reduced to exile. A loyal servant who had followed him for years. Even the guards of an enemy kingdom. Yet the reckless young prince needed only a single glimpse of the "ice princess" Turandot to fall instantly in love.

On the night of April 25, 1926, La Scala in Milan fell silent. It was the world premiere of "Turandot," staged one year and five months after the death of its composer, Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924).

The famous "Nessun dorma" rang out, and the opera moved into the middle of Act III. There, the faithful servant girl Liù — carrying the prince's name locked in her heart — drew a dagger and took her own life. A mournful funeral procession bore her body offstage, and then the music stopped. The legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini lowered his baton and turned quietly to the audience.

"The maestro composed up to this point. At this point, the maestro put down his pen" ("Qui finisce l'opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto").

Toscanini refused to conduct the finale duet that Puccini's younger colleague Franco Alfano had completed from the composer's remaining sketches, and set down his baton.

Puccini died with Liù's death as his final scene. He never completed the reconciliation between the ice princess Turandot and Prince Calaf, never wrote their love story to its end. The last scene he put to paper was not a hero's glorious triumph but the wretched, self-inflicted death of an innocent and powerless woman.

A century ago, audiences took the work as a fairy tale celebrating the triumph of love. The prince and princess were the ultimate whirlwind-romance couple.

The young, handsome prince solves Turandot's riddles one by one, climbs what seems an impossibly steep staircase, and conquers both love and a kingdom. Yet the princess refuses him to the last — until Calaf forces a kiss on her lips, his eyes blazing, and takes her. Turandot then abruptly declares, "His name is Love," and her heart changes. That ending, written by Alfano, has been repeated on stages around the world for the past hundred years.

Today, however, "Turandot" is a contested work. What the 20th century read as a romantic love story now stands at the center of 21st-century debates over gender sensitivity, consent, power and orientalism.

"Turandot" was not, from the outset, a love story. Its roots reach back to a legend passed down orally across the Eurasian continent for centuries.

The name Turandot derives from "Turandokht," a Persian word meaning "daughter of Turan." Turan was a geographical and cultural term used by ancient Iranians to describe the lands to the northeast of the Persian Empire — the mysterious, pagan territories of Central Asia.

For this reason, soprano Eva Prwonka — who has performed the title role at major opera houses around the world and currently stars in the Seoul Arts Center's production of "Turandot" — traces the work's origins to the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami.

"Turandot is a figure with a Persian name — 'Turandokht,' meaning daughter of Turan — a land closer to present-day Iran," she said. "She is not a monstrous princess but a philosophical being who symbolizes the human self and transformation."

The historical figure most often cited as the inspiration for Turandot is Khutulun, a princess of the Mongol Empire. According to accounts by Marco Polo and the Persian historian Rashid al-Din, Khutulun — a niece of Kublai Khan — was a warrior of exceptional skill in horsemanship and wrestling.

She declared she would marry only a man who could defeat her in wrestling, and collected horses as prizes from every suitor she bested. The legend of a woman who never lost — amassing hundreds of horses — represented a symbol of female power that had no equivalent in medieval European society.

The Khutulun of legend was neither a man-hater nor a monster who rejected love. She was a self-determined woman who claimed the right to decide her own marriage — a strikingly modern idea, arrived at centuries ahead of its time.

As the story traveled to Europe, it was stripped of that meaning entirely. It entered Western literary culture through "The Story of Prince Calaf of Moscow and the Chinese Princess," included in "Les Mille et un jours" by the 18th-century French writers Alain-René Lesage and François Pétis de la Croix.

The Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi drew on that text to write his 1762 play "Turandot," setting the story in an "exotic" Chinese kingdom. The self-determined daughter of Turan became a cruel princess — a cold female ruler who posed riddles to her suitors and had them beheaded if they failed.

When Puccini adapted the play into an opera, he deepened the psychological complexity of the princess even further. In doing so, he embedded into the work the image of the "mysterious and dangerous Oriental woman" that the Western imagination had constructed — a vision far removed from the original legend.

It is precisely here that contemporary scholars have begun to reread "Turandot" through the lens of orientalism — the concept Edward W. Said introduced in his 1978 book "Orientalism." Said argued that the West did not seek to understand the East on its own terms but instead imagined and represented it as a mysterious, exotic and sometimes primitive space. Such images, he contended, were not cultural fantasy but the product of power relations.

The Beijing Puccini puts on stage is not the real China but the China of the Western imagination — golden palaces, bloody executions, a mysterious princess and a silent crowd, all projections of an "Oriental" fantasy. Scholars argue that Turandot herself is not an independent woman but a stereotype of the "dangerous and unknowable Asian woman" as imagined by Western men.

"Turandot" centers on three characters: the young and handsome Prince Calaf, the ice princess Turandot of China, and the faithful servant girl Liù.

Around these three, the opera builds a structure in which a so-called heroic male collides with two women cast at opposite extremes — each embodying a different worldview.

Calaf is a prince of a fallen kingdom. On the surface, he is the romantic hero who risks death to win love — written as something closer to a demigod than an ordinary man. He stakes his life on solving the riddles and ultimately melts the heart of the ice princess. Puccini wraps his every entrance in heroic melody, and in the Act III aria "Nessun dorma" drives the music to an explosive climax of male will and certainty of victory. The aria has become the defining piece for tenors — the one male singers most want to perform.

Calaf is, in truth, a difficult character to understand. He falls in love the instant he sees the princess's face — a man who loses his head at first sight. That every person around him repeatedly begs him to turn back makes one wonder whether Puccini himself had doubts about his hero's choices.

His blind father, Timur, pleads with him: "We have already lost everything — let us go back." Liù, concealing her own love for the prince, tries through tears to persuade him to leave. The ministers Ping, Pang and Pong recount the bloodstained history of suitors beheaded before him and warn him to flee Beijing. Even the crowd senses his coming death.

Calaf ignores every one of them. He sees the princess as nothing more than a prize to be won.

American musicologist Susan McClary has analyzed how male desire in Puccini's operas is fulfilled through the bodies and voices of women, while opera scholar Carolyn Abbate has noted how female voices, though musically powerful, are structurally subordinated to the male narrative. "Turandot" is among the works where these critiques apply most sharply.

Even after Calaf answers all three riddles correctly and the princess still refuses to yield, he proposes a sadistic wager: let her discover his name. Opera scholars read this as "a manifestation of patriarchal will to power — the need to have his dominance fully and unconditionally acknowledged."

In the struggle that follows, Turandot mobilizes her authority to find the name, while Liù endures brutal torture rather than reveal it, then takes her own life. Calaf then walks up to Turandot and forces a kiss on the princess who has refused him. For a hundred years, that scene was read as a beautiful moment of love — the kiss that melts the ice princess.

Prwonka sees it differently. "In the scene where Calaf and Turandot kiss, the music expresses something musically horrifying," she said. "If it means only one thing, you could call it rape."

The way Turandot and Liù are portrayed is equally conventional — a male-centric binary of monster and saint, compounded by a Western imperial gaze.

Turandot is drawn as a cold and cruel woman who kills men — an othered Asian woman smothered in negative archetypes like the "dragon lady" or "ice princess." Yet beneath her merciless riddles and executions lies a deep historical trauma that the opera barely acknowledges.

"The sad screams that once rang through the ancient palace… Though thousands of years have passed, that tragedy lives on in my heart. You foreign suitors — you must die for the sorrow of Princess Lou-Ling!"

The Act II aria "In questa reggia" is the opera's key piece of exposition for Turandot. In it, she describes how her ancestor Princess Lou-Ling was conquered, violated and killed by a foreign male invader thousands of years ago — a violence that Turandot carries in her very body.

Seen in that light, Turandot's killing of her suitors can be read as resistance against the patriarchal violence that treats women as instruments and trophies of male dominance — a desperate act to preserve her own sexual autonomy.

"The story of 'Turandot' was distorted by 17th-century Europeans — Italians — and turned into a misunderstood tale," Prwonka said. "But in fact it is a deeply philosophical and beautiful story. Many productions have turned this powerful woman who ruled the vast land of Turan into some kind of strange monster." It is little wonder, then, that a Turandot who suddenly surrenders to "love" after a single forced kiss leaves modern audiences bewildered.

Liù stands at the opposite pole — obedient, self-sacrificing, the archetypal "saint" of countless operas and literary works. She has devoted her entire life to Calaf on the strength of a single smile he once gave her.

Even under brutal torture by Turandot, Liù refuses to reveal Calaf's name. Instead she cries out, "That — his name — is Love," and takes her own life. Her death, too, is troubling — not only for what it is, but for what follows. It is reduced to a tool, a sacrifice made for Calaf's sake and nothing more.

Moreover, her death serves as the first crack in Turandot's frozen interior — the ethical rupture that begins to thaw the princess. Puccini had already traced this aesthetic of female sacrifice through Mimì in "La bohème," Tosca in "Tosca" and Cio-Cio-san in "Madama Butterfly." In "Turandot," he repeated the pattern through Liù.

Since the 1980s, however, a shift has been underway. A growing number of directors have begun approaching "Turandot" with entirely fresh eyes, staging new interpretations that push back against its outdated orientalism and its narrative of male conquest.

American director Robert Wilson approached Turandot as a symbol of the human interior, using stillness and a restrained mise-en-scène. Choosing distance and silence over emotional outburst, he deliberately blurred the romanticism of the final scene.

German director Claus Guth went further. He recast Turandot not as a cruel princess but as a woman carrying deep trauma. The death of Princess Lou-Ling becomes the memory of violence that has governed Turandot's entire life, and the encounter with Calaf becomes not a love story but a psychological drama about a wounded person's fear of human connection.

Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei turned his gaze toward society. His production of "Turandot" projected images of the modern world — pandemic, refugees, war, surveillance — onto the opera's canvas. The China in his staging is not Puccini's exotic Orient but a present-day space where power and violence operate. "Turandot is not simply a love story," he said. "It is a work that shows how power dominates human beings."

The production currently running at Seoul Arts Center offers yet another interpretation, bringing the war, violence, peace and coexistence hidden beneath the love story to the foreground. Director Jeong Seon-yeong calls the work "an end-of-war project." "On the surface it looks like a love story between a prince and a princess set in China," she said, "but within the music lies humanity's lamentation over war and its longing for peace."

The production's most distinctive choice is a contemporary reinterpretation of the opera's structural backbone — the three riddles. The first riddle, "Hope," is read as the ideal humanity pursues. The second is the passion and will to turn that hope into reality. The third — "the ice that sets you on fire" — expands into a message that transcends romantic love: overcome violence and domination, and move toward peace and coexistence.

Jeong refuses to read the final kiss between Turandot and Calaf as either victory or submission. She defines it as a love that wins by losing, and frames it as a search for peace and coexistence. "If you only try to win, war repeats itself," she said. "But the moment someone chooses to lose first, a path opens where everyone wins. That is peace."

Great works invite new questions with every passing era. "Turandot" — long read through a patriarchal and Eurocentric lens — has continued to absorb new perspectives and yield new meanings over time. "Because productions followed the fixed idea of a prince and a princess, 'Turandot' accumulated an unsolved problem," Jeong said. "What I feel with this production is not that we are remaking 'Turandot,' but that we are excavating its roots."

Prwonka agreed. "'Turandot' is a work that invites controversy, and from that controversy it draws a wealth of interpretations," she said. "Over the years I have performed many different versions and played out many different endings — Turandot's suicide, Calaf's arrest, the two ruling together, even an ending where they kill each other. The fact that it accommodates so many readings is precisely why it has survived."