By removing the finale tinkered with after Puccini’s death, the Opéra Grand Avignon gives back to Turandot its dark and unfinished side. A way of comparing the composer’s final opera to his great love tragedies, from La Bohème to Tosca. To see this Sunday and Tuesday.
Turandot without a happy ending. In Avignon, Puccini’s final opera is presented bare, stripped of the conclusion cobbled together after the composer’s death. Exit the finale added by Franco Alfano, the Opéra Grand Avignon chooses to stop where Puccini was silent in 1924, leaving his work unfinished.
In Beijing, Princess Turandot condemns to death her suitors who are incapable of solving her riddles, until the arrival of Calaf, an obstinate prince, ready to risk his head for her. Adapting a Persian tale revisited by Carlo Gozzi, librettists Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni offer Puccini an opera of desire, cruelty and collective fascination with violence.
The ice princess refuses men because she identifies with her grandmother Lo-ou-Ling, a victim of rape, as she sings in the second act: “You who defied, inflexible and sure, the harsh domination, today you live again in me! HAS”
In Italian, of course.
Rouge sang
Director Paco Azorén takes Turandot away from a simple orientalist tale to make it a political fable about violence and mechanisms of domination. Its decor replaces traditional imperial splendor with a stylized China. In the center of the plateau, a blood-red promontory dominates a rice field of tall grass, like a scaffold suspended above the crowd. The geometric walkways and scarlet stairs create a space of cold and ritual power where the population is constantly monitored. The choirs are in peasant clothes wearing conical hats, an anonymous crowd caught in a collective mechanism of fear and submission.
When Turandot finally appears, draped in red and gold, she emerges magnificently surrounded by amazon-acrobats dressed in orange, one of whom, with bulging eyes, brandishes an ax and threatens throughout the show. The princess then no longer embodies just an inaccessible sovereign, but a real system of domination. Crawling, encircling and manipulating the bodies, the archers transform the imperial court into a war machine. Faced with this ritualized brutality, Lié becomes the only figure of silent resistance and true empathy.
Leitmotivs pentatoniques
Under the baton of Federico Santi, the Avignon-Provence National Orchestra finds a tense, lively and sharp balance. The pit allows the great lyrical impulses of the score to blossom, from the heartbreaking “Non piangere Liù”, at the end of the first act, to the extremely famous “Nessun dorma”, a tenor tune that has become a global hit without losing any of its fervor here. desperate.
Puccini constructs a largely fantasized China through music. Pentatonic motifs, gongs, drums, metallic percussion and themes inspired by traditional melodies give the opera its immediately identifiable color. The composer notably integrates the famous Chinese popular tune Mo Li Hua, which has become one of the leitmotifs of the work. More than a faithful reconstruction, Turandot thus composes a sublimated Orient, seen by Western opera at the start of the 20th century.
Claire Antoine dazzling
In the role of the bloodthirsty diva, soprano Catherine Hunold plays a Turandot under high dramatic tension. Opposite, the tenor Mickaël Spadaccini plays Calaf, while the dazzling Claire Antoine composes a Lié au visage taken out of a Botticelli painting, imposing with her ample and warm soprano the only human presence in this world of power and cruelty. Around them, a group of non-professional kids and the choir and the masters of the Grand Avignon Opera give this fantasized China its crowd surges, its ritual violence and its flashes of tragedy.
Where Franco Alfano closed the wound, AzorÃn chose to leave it open. And it is perhaps in this brutal interruption that Turandot becomes most profoundly Puccinian, faithful to those operas where love ends less in reconciliation than in death or despair, from La Bohème to Madame Butterfly, up to Tosca.
Next performances Sunday May 17, 2026 at 3:00 p.m. and Tuesday May 19, 2026 at 8:00 p.m.
Réservations ici
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Distribution
Direction musicale : Federico Santi
Direction and scenography : Paco Azorín
Costumes : Ulysses Mérida
Choreographies : Carlos Martos
Lumières et video : Pedro Chamizo
Chef de chœur : Alan Woodbridge
Head of Masters : Christophe Talmont
Turandot : Catherine Hunold
Fodder : Mickaël Spadaccini
Liù : Claire Antoine
Altoum : Victor Dahhani
Timur : Luciano Batinić
Ping : Matteo Loi / Vincenzo Nizzardo
Pang : Sébastien Droy
Pong : Carlos Natale
A mandarin : Jean-François Baron
The Prince of Persia : Vladyslav Romankov
Putin Pao : Catherine Pollini
Archères : Sarah Brunel, Maya Kawatake-Pinon, Julia Pal, Chloé Scalese
Pillar guides : Sébastien Martin Vian, Céleste Gaulier
Choir and Master of the Opéra Grand Avignon
Avignon-Provence National Orchestra
/2026/05/16/6a083d7c1fd70843430123.jpg "Jul brings together 100,000 spectators at the Stade de France, a new record")
