Puccini’s Turandot was inspired by Schiller’s early-19th-century German adaptation of an 18th-century Italian comedy by Carlo Gozzi, who drew on a French retelling of a supposedly traditional Persian fairytale set in ancient China. Gozzi created a piece in the style of commedia dell’arte, a codified theatre form with set characters, story lines, and gestures.

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Turandot’s subject matter was a departure for Puccini, who had spent almost the entirety of his career writing operas rooted in realism — La Bohème, for example, is about penniless artists trying to make it in Paris; Tosca is a thriller about an opera singer caught in a game of cat-and-mouse during the French Revolutionary Wars. But with Turandot, Puccini took a decisive turn away from stories about real people in specific places and entered a realm of the fantastical.

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