Lucia
Ronchetti

PRESENTATION
The dramaturgical strong absence of Turandot in the first part of Puccini's score and the forced absence given by the never-ended finale, give a special space to the protagonism of Liù, a character who emerges out of nothing, part of the human magma of the boundless city of Beijing. In the magnificent plural score, Puccini conjures in parallel the development of Liù as sacrificial victim with the constant presence of the human tide in movement and interaction, a sound world with crescendos of anger and decrescendos of resignation. The crowd-meta-character collect the many anonymous voices involved by Puccini in his work, which in the score, in the librettos progressive variations and in the letters by the composer gradually take on names like the voices of mysterious and distant women, the crowd, the executioner, the servants, the guards, the priests of the procession, the voices of the shadows, the inner voices, the boys, the voices of the aralds, the group of maidens, the ghosts, the wises, the henchmen: different and complex voices that scream, tremble, curse, implore. To these voices are added the voices of the killed princes and the people of Beijing as tutti exploding from the different choral groups. The choirs create a portrait of the city, a city soundscape in turmoil and rebellion that witnesses the ritual beheading of Turandot's pretenders.
In his letters Puccini often speaks of the "echoes" of the voices, echoes that merge and disperse in the sound of the great gong announcing the edicts and celebrating the recurrent deaths by decapitation that have become the daily theatre of Beijing's citizens. The echo of the voices is lost "in the distance", as if the reverberation of the gong fading away, would be absorbed by the belly of the gigantic city, where shadows appear from the nocturnal silences, figures confused in the darkness of the night, becoming more and more numerous, till they re-emerge as a mass.
Puccini's technique for bringing out from the choral magma the voice of Liù and the profound sorrows that animate her goes back to the Italian madrigal tradition, and especially to Gesualdo's IV Book of Madrigals, published in Ferrara in 1596, where in "Io Tacerò" he succeeds in expressing - in overlapping and continually interrupted melodies - the weeping, the doubt, the lamenting of one's fate, the panic of a voice condemned to silence. The different choruses anticipate the tragic life span of Liù and her offering herself as a victim, her extreme vow of silence, highlighting the continuity between Gesualdo's harmonic complexity and the emergence of the brief melodic incises that give sound to the silence, magistrally realized by Puccini. In Gesualdo as in Puccini, the word expressing panic is a sound event, pregnant with dissonances, modulating complexities and acoustic contractions, allowing the surfacing of melodic incises in form of a Lamento.
Gesualdo's exasperated cry ‘Io tacerò’ (I shall be silent) is like the gong explosion and its resonances detected by Puccini, dissolved into rivers of chromaticism that open up theatrical scenes and impressive contrasts such as in “ma se avverrà ch'io mora, griderà poi per me la morte ancora” (But if I should die, then shall death scream for me still).