It deals basically with Puccini's "unfinished" ending to his last Opera, and the 
variety of endings composers have "surmised" Puccini had in mind.
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Caledar Cover Story
BEGINNING WITH THE END

Composer Luciano Berio's new finale of Puccini's famously unfinished 
"Turandot" is the first note in a key musical relationship with Los Angeles 
Opera.

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, May 26, 2002
By Jan Breslauer

ROME--....Luciano Berio, arguably Italy's most important living composer, 
...sits in his second-floor office at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa 
Cecilia.... 

Founded in 1585 and famed for its chorus and orchestra... Santa Cecilia, 
Rome's oldest musical institution, has never had a home to call its own. But 
on this weekend in late April, that's about to change. 

During the next two days, Berio, Santa Cecilia's president for the past two 
years, will unveil the academy's first permanent base, designed by architect 
Renzo Piano. 

"He built what we call the city of music: three immense, beautiful music 
halls, interconnected..." says Berio, his voice tinged with pride and 
anticipation. "The conception of this is so beautiful, so new." 

The opening is a red-letter day for Berio, but it's not the only important 
item on the composer's agenda. Although he achieved fame as an iconoclastic 
figure in the United States in the 1960s, he is best known in Europe. Now, 
Berio may be on the brink of gaining wider recognition in the U.S. 

He has three projects with Los Angeles Opera. First up is a new ending for 
Puccini's "Turandot," left unfinished at the composer's death in 1924.... 

The completion of "Turandot" that we've been hearing over the years has long 
been considered unsatisfactory. "The opera is full of contradictions," Berio 
says. Before he created his "quiet" version, he says, he "was very interested 
in reading everything about this, even [hearing] from people who knew Puccini 
and what he said. Once I met this man and he says to me, 'Listen, "Turandot" 
is ending pianissimo.' So I think [my] result is closer to what Puccini 
wanted." 

Berio is also working on a new orchestration of Monteverdi's "The Coronation 
of Poppea" for the 2002-03 season, and he is writing a new opera to star Los 
Angeles Opera artistic director Plácido Domingo for 2006. In addition, this 
Saturday, pianist Marino Formenti will play the West Coast premiere of 
Berio's "Sonata 2001" at the Ojai Music Festival. 

Berio's L.A. Opera commissions represent the institution's largest public 
commitment to a single composer since Domingo took over....

It's hoped that the Berio projects will help shape a new aesthetic identity 
for Los Angeles Opera--one in which successful premieres figure 
prominently....

When he's not at his country home in Radicondoli, near Siena, the 77-year-old 
Berio and his much younger third wife, Israeli musicologist Talia Pecker, 
spend much of their time in Rome....

The tenses of time coexist in a similar way in Berio's music. He has 
incorporated earlier compositions by other composers into his own pieces and 
written adaptations of other composers' scores. In "Rendering," for example, 
Berio took Schubert's unfinished 10th Symphony and filled in the composer's 
sketches with his distinct sound. "Sinfonia," written for orchestra and the 
Swingle Singers, "samples" a movement from a Mahler symphony, only to 
reinterpret it with an array of quotations from other sources. 

Part of an international cadre of avant-garde composers who came to the fore 
after World War II, Berio is a creative coeval of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz 
Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Luigi Nono. Yet unlike these other formidable 
Modernists, Berio has been known for a sense of harmony and lyricism--an 
Italianate quality--that makes him more accessible to the untrained ear. 
 
His tendency to provoke and charm is as evident in his persona as his music. 
A short man... plays the role of commander with ease,...His look is stylishly 
rumpled, a fleshy but still appealing face framed by a collarless gray shirt 
and plaid jacket. 

At moments, the maestro is almost puckish. More often, he's imperious and a 
bit cranky, not bothering to hide his impatience. When he feels he's said 
enough on one topic, even if it's only a few words, he orders, "Let's move." 
Then he flashes a big compensatory smile--the tactics of a man who's long 
gotten away with using charisma to balance impudence. 

That was the case in the 1960s, when.... Berio quickly established himself as 
an iconoclast and provocateur, challenging conventional notions of genre, 
orchestration and narrative. 

In the early 1970s,....he's known for pushing classical music into the realm 
of computers, tape recorders and other nontraditional tools long before they 
were commonplace. At the same time, Berio has long held an interest in 
traditional folk music...

Berio's works for the musical stage also rethink the relationship between 
sound and text.... 

Reviewing the 1996 La Scala premiere of "Outis," Times music critic Mark Swed 
wrote.... "a kind of ocean of voices and instruments with ever-changing focus 
in which one regularly gets lost and then finds oneself again. But it is the 
work of a master, and it can hold the listener easily enthralled for its two 
hours." 
 

Berio's latest project bridging past and present is the new completion of 
"Turandot,"...

"There's a tendency to a fetishistic attitude to Puccini, so you don't 
touch," Berio says. "Instead, if you go into the fabric of 'Turandot,' you 
realize how much Puccini suffered. Is that true that he couldn't finish 
because he died, poor man, or because he had problems to finish that opera 
with that libretto, which is really offensive, the quality of the libretto? 
The opera is full of contradictions, and so Puccini was tormented about it." 

In "Turandot," which is based on a play by 18th century Italian playwright 
Carlo Gozzi, a steely Peking princess sets about avenging a ravaged female 
ancestor by sending a gaggle of suitors to the gallows for failing to answer 
her three riddles. A prince named Calaf arrives with his father and their 
loyal slave Liu, who is secretly in love with Calaf. He correctly answers 
Turandot's riddles, but she still refuses him. Calaf then poses his own 
challenge, giving the princess a single day to learn his name; if she 
succeeds, he will go to his death. Liu is pressed to reveal Calaf's name but 
kills herself instead, and Calaf conquers Turandot with a kiss. Finally 
assenting to marriage, Turandot announces that the stranger's name is love. 

When Puccini died, the third act was still a sketch, in terms of plot as well 
as music. He had already deviated from Gozzi's story--the sympathetic 
character of the slave girl and her romantic death were his additions. But 
then what? His notes left it a cliffhanger: What would the future hold for 
Calaf and Turandot? 

Puccini's publisher, Riccordi, was not about to let a potential cash cow 
languish. So with conductor Arturo Toscanini, Riccordi commissioned composer 
Franco Alfano to write a finale. Unfortunately, nobody was particularly 
pleased with the grandiose, happily-ever-after results. Toscanini cut some 
109 measures out of Alfano's score before he would even premiere it. Still, 
that's the version that's been playing opera houses since. 

The major contradiction comes from the addition of the character Liu. "He 
needed to have a feminine presence that he could love," Berio says. 
"Musically it's beautiful, but dramaturgically, it doesn't make any sense. 
She's killed, and just 30 seconds after that, Calaf and Turandot are 
'interacting,' so to speak. 

"He doesn't know what to do with Liu," Berio continues. "But if you take Liu 
out, 'Turandot' is a very hard work, intense and very often aggressive. And 
then at the end, you see Liu dies and nobody cares about it. The story goes 
on, ignoring it completely. So you cannot present such a musically warm, 
intense character and then, pfffft!" 

Puccini left some 30 pages of sketches laying out possible approaches to the 
third act, most of which Alfano ignored. It was in these pages, however, that 
Berio found inspiration for his version. 

Berio also relied on germinal ideas in the score itself, including a 
reference to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" in the first act. "Wagner is 
always present," Berio says. "The first two measures contain the Wagnerian 
chords, the elements that he develops later." 

Berio has created an ambiguous ending. "What Alfano did was heavy-handed," 
Berio says. "I think it was Toscanini's fault too, that he was convinced it 
should have a glorious rhetorical ending. I'm convinced that Puccini wanted 
it to end quietly. All the premises of 'Turandot,' they don't go to a 
resolution, an ending, happy or unhappy. The sketches say a suspended ending, 
like a question mark." 

According to Nagano, "Berio's ending concludes as the final and ultimate 
enigma ... this being in stark contrast to Mr. Alfano's ending. The Berio 
finale is more organic. When asked recently whether the ending sounds more 
like Berio or more like Puccini, the most accurate answer I could think of 
was that the ending sounds more like 'Turandot.'" ...

Berio's second commission from L.A. Opera, "The Coronation of Poppea," also 
calls upon the composer to supply what's missing from the original. Written 
in 1643, Monteverdi's final opera tells the story of the emperor Nero, caught 
between his desire for the power-hungry Poppea and his wife, Ottavia, who is 
driven to lethal scheming by his infidelity.... 

Berio is expected to create something that will give a nod to Baroque 
tradition but will also be contemporary....
* * *
"Turandot," Los Angeles Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., 
L.A. Thursday, May 30, June 4, 6, 7, 9, 11 and 14, 7:30 p.m.; June 1 and 16, 
2 p.m. Ends June 16. Tickets: $30-$165. Call (213) 365-3500.