The Turandots

During the coming season at the Metropolitan Opera, I’ll be hearing four different sopranos in the role of Turandot. Of these, three will be new to me in the role: Christine Goerke, Jennifer Wilson, and Nina Stemme. The fourth will be Lise Lindstrom, who made a very fine vocal impression as Turandot here during the 2009-2010 season and who has the added appeal of being wonderfully suited to the role in terms of physique and stage savvy.

For opera lovers of my generation, the silver-trumpet voice of the great Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson is unforgettably linked to the music of Turandot; I had the good fortune of seeing Nilsson’s Turandot five times – each performance with a different soprano portraying Liu: Teresa Stratas, Anna Moffo, Mirella Freni, Montserrat Caballe, and Gabriella Tucci. Once you experienced the Nilsson sound in this role in the theatre, you felt you’d never find her equal. 

And yet, Nilsson was not my first Turandot: it was instead Mary Curtis-Verna who made a very strong impression on this young opera-lover in a performance at the Old Met with Jess Thomas (Calaf) and Lucine Amara (Liu) also in the cast. Curtis-Verna had the Italian style down pat, and she had no problems whatsoever leaping over the many vocal hurdles Puccini set in her path; her final high B-flat had a theatre-filling glow.

Nilsson (who we referred to as “The Big B” or “The Great White Goddess”) was at her vocal apex in 1966 when she sang a series of Turandots starting in the first week of the first season at the New Met. It’s impossible to describe the exhilarating build-up of anticipation as we waited for her to commence: “In questa reggia”. No recording of Nilsson in this opera, whether studio-made or live, has quite captured the frisson of her brilliant attack and the sheer thrust of the voice being deployed into the big space. Her partnership with Franco Corelli in this opera is legendary; and I was also there on a single night when the stars aligned and we had a Birgit Nilsson-James King-Montserrat Caballe TURANDOT which ended with one of the longest ovations I every experienced. 

Nilsson sang her last Met Turandot in 1970. When the opera returned to the Met repertory in 1974, Nilsson’s good friend, the Norwegian soprano Ingrid Bjoner was one of three sopranos cast in the title-role. Bjoner for me was the ‘next best thing’ to Nilsson, and to my mind it seemed that Bjoner’s characterization was more detailed and thoughtful than Birgit’s.

Since Bjoner, I have seen more than two dozen sopranos in the fearsome role of the Chinese princess, at The Met, New York City Opera, and Opera Company of Boston (where we saw Eva Marton take on the role for the first time with great success). Linda Kelm at New York City Opera and Dame Gwyneth Jones at The Met stand out in my memory as particularly thrilling, though I must admit in all honesty I never heard anyone give a less-than-respectable performance in the role – which is saying something, really, given the rigors of the composer’s demands and with the spirit of Nilsson hovering over the popolo di Pekino.

I have my notions as to how this season’s Turandots will fare, based on their recent performances; I look forward to being proved right…or wrong.