Good music is written better than it can be played. –Anonymous
I’m on a Turandot kick right now. I’ve loved this Puccini opera for three decades after discovering how different it is from all the others, but without knowing why. No, I’m not a musician or a singer. Just a country boy who grew tired of all the music he knew and decided to check out classical and opera. That’s how I came to love the works of composers like Vivaldi, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky, and the operas of Giacomo Puccini.
I like to think of opera as “classical with words.” (Okay, they’re mostly Italian words, but still….)
I used to wonder why Turandot was not as well known as Puccini’s other more popular operas (La Boheme, Tosca, and Madame Butterfly). Why fewer people had even heard of it. And I found out why.