Can you say a little more about Puccinis modernism, what is modern about Turandot?
RB: There is much more dissonance, just plain old dissonance it’s rhapsodic and beautiful, but when you sit down and look at it, there’s more chromatic dissonance in Turandot, than in any of his earlier operas. People think of this as Asian, he uses the pentatonic scale, he meshes it with dissonance, the combination of those two things I think people dismiss a little too easily, “Oh those are Asian harmonies”. There not really Asian harmonies, there is a pentatonic scale in there, but underlying that is chromatic dissonance. I think in all of the music in Act III where they talk about torturing Liú, Puccini uses much more dissonance and odd chromaticism, for choir and orchestra. You go past it in the opera house, it goes by quickly, but when you sit down and look at the score, it’s striking. As I listen to Turandot, there are two things that strike me right away that are not “Italian” in this piece, the influence of Strauss, the dissonance of Salome and Electra, and also the impression
