(Credit: Raftermen photography)

Trigger warning: discussions of sexual assault.

The Atlanta Opera (TAO) has given us a new way to stage one of the 21st century’s most performed operas, Puccini’s “Turandot.” Premiering on 25 April 2026, the 100th anniversary of the work’s original premiere, the edits were light. The only significant changes were an excision of most of Franco Alfano’s completion of Act three, and moving Turandot’s monologue “In questa reggia” to follow Liù’s death. Before we discuss how this went, we should examine the whys.

“Turandot” enjoys a peculiar spot in the repertory. Arguably, given the difficulty of finding the title soprano and the tenor, it should be performed less often. In the last two decades, I have heard a higher quantity of trying broadcasts of “Turandot” on SiriusXM MetOpera Radio than enjoyable ones. There was once a time when “Turandot” was not attached to Puccini’s “La Bohème,” “Tosca,” and “Madama Butterfly” in a quartet of overperformed titles. But it rebounded in the 1960s, buoyed by otherworldly performances by Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli. At least since the one-two punch of Franco Zeffirelli’s kitschy but intensely beloved staging at the Met, and Luciano Pavarotti’s viral “Nessun dorma” at the 1990 World Cup, “Turandot” has ascended in popularity in North America. “Nessun dorma” may be the single most recognizable operatic track in the world for people who do not follow classical music (as well as those who do). Companies large and small program “Turandot,” even when they struggle to locate singers with instruments in suitable shape to handle “In questa reggia” or the riddle showdown, atop positively Wagnerian scoring. In Saint Louis, our third largest company, Winter Opera, which uses a 26-instrument orchestra pit in an 1,000-seat theater, has scheduled it for their 20th anniversary next season. In the 21st century, “Turandot” is inescapable.

For lovers of Puccini’s entire operatic oeuvre, this situation might not have seemed inevitable. Jessica M. MacMurray’s reference work “The Book of 101 Opera Librettos” (1996) omitted “Turandot,” lone among Puccini’s 10 mature operas. His big hits from 1896-1904 dominated the mid-century. “Turandot” lacks the true-to-life durability of “La Bohème,” the mythic wholeness of “Tosca,” and the inimitable ethical rectitude bestowed upon us by the heroine of “La Fanciulla del West.” Perhaps excepting Baron Scarpia in “Tosca,” its two protagonists are the most unlikable characters in Puccini — even Sherriff Jack Rance in “La Fanciulla del West” and Lieutenant Pinkerton in “Madama Butterfly” manage to display some sympathetic facets. The true heroine of “Turandot,” Liù, an invention of Puccini’s team — not Carlo Gozzi’s source material — performs a Christic sacrifice, only to be push-broomed off the stage for a supremely unconvincing love duet between the grotesque leads. On broadcasts, I usually shut off the radio after Liù dies — not out of disrespect for Alfano’s music, but because Calaf’s “win” in the Alfano ending remains nauseating. The princess is no-less objectionable than him, and her capitulation to him feels fake.

How do you solve a problem like Turandot?

The traditional ending by Alfano qualifies as only the work’s most prominent infelicity of several. Much ink has been devoted to the opera’s disturbing Orientalism, so let us take that as a given and examine other challenges. Alternate performing versions of “Turandot” that attempt to remediate the unfinished third act, such as Christopher Tin’s, have been variously received. Though the ending may prove unsolvable, other problems are evident long before Liù’s death.

The structure of “Turandot’s” first act is flawless, flowing with a “La Bohème”-like dramatic momentum and culminating in a triumph of form: Liù’s aria, followed by Calaf’s, followed by a banger of a concertato closing with that heavy-metal quintuple reiteration, a thundering cadence of B flat-major to E flat-minor. It is one of the best musical enactments of a man doing dumb things without thinking ever composed. In “Puccini Without Excuses” (2005), William Berger rightly called it “Puccini’s most ambitious act.” But the piece began to run aground long before Puccini succumbed to his illness and Alfano took on the job of concluding the opera. Act two’s trio, with our commedia dell’arte friends Ping, Pang, and Pong, charms, in places, but does not integrate into the rest of the opera as well as other slice-of-life moments in Puccini. These arrive with more density in “La Bohème” and “La Fanciulla del West,” and are most prevalent in “Tosca.” The trio’s observations about gender, ending the scene, rate among the most wincing in all the centuries of opera — an art form whose standard repertory is not exactly celebrated for its gender equity.

This is all before one gets to the theatrical oddity that is “In questa reggia,” which hijacks all the remaining dramatic momentum so carefully accrued in Act one (and already diminished thanks to Ping et alia). In theory, Turandot’s sermon about the perils of sexual violence and the suffering og her ancestor Lo-u-ling should sensibly lay out the character’s motivations. The opera predates Dr. Vivian Rakoff’s concept of epigenetic trauma, but if executed differently it could conceivably work as a mythic predecessor to those ideas, similar to Wagner’s eerie anticipation of some of Freud’s concepts. But in practice, Turandot simply comes off as an unhinged mass murderer capable of navigating an absurdly high tessitura. It is highly likely, sadly, that everyone on earth has a female ancestor who was sexually assaulted — yet few of us would decapitate 99 innocent people in revenge, offering a crime committed centuries ago as warranted justification.

The way Puccini, Adami, and Simoni adapted Gozzi’s play, drawing this voracious virago into a monster, invites accusations of misogyny absent or at least far less present in Puccini’s other works. In “First Intermissions” (1995), the usually equanimous Father Owen Lee went so far as to assert that the work’s sadism, its treatment of Liù, and parallels to treatment of other female characters in Puccini, in his estimation, disqualify Puccini from the ranks of the greatest opera composers. That may be excessive, but Lee’s assessment of the compositional cul-de-sac into which Puccini painted himself does make some sense: “for the first time, he was using myth for his material.” Puccini excelled when mythic scope and verismo collided, as in “Tosca.” When one criticizes “Turandot,” one inevitably hears defense of the piece citing fairytale — its alleged genre. “It makes sense in the internal logic of fairytale,” apologists will assure you. But Zeffirelli’s realization, which happens to be the opera’s most visible in North America, like nearly all his stagings, traffics in a gilded putative hyperrealism. It may not be even remotely realistic, but that is Zeffirelli’s ethos: “see how ‘real’ this palace is.” When we saw it on PBS in 1988, The Metropolitan Opera Presents host Joanne Woodward, standing on Zeffirelli’s expansive set, told viewers she was “coming to you from imperial Peking.” Not really, you understand, but pretend real, certainly. We have also developed a widespread discourse — intended to build new audiences, presumably — that consistently attempts to reassure today’s operagoers that the characters they see onstage are very like real people, that the magic of opera humanizes Norse and Greco-Roman gods and lovelorn European aristocrats such that they are like people you know in real life. While a healthy suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite to enjoying most operas, the structural and tonal difficulties with “Turandot” cannot simply be handwaved away by slapping a “fairytale” sticker onto it. You are expected to believe that these people behave like this. Humperdinck’s “Hansel und Gretel” is a fairytale. “Turandot” conducts itself somewhat like a verismo opera that happens to take place in a completely unreal setting — not a myth. For its musical virtues, “Turandot” wins fanatical audience devotion. Yet, I am hard-pressed to name another top 50 opera more deserving of a light re-write. Story matters.

E poi, Erhardo

Enter The Atlanta Opera, a company with an established record of trying new things. Its intendant, Tomer Zvulun, intones a mantra key to the company’s successes of the last decade: “lowering financial risk while increasing artistic risk.” People often talk about how “Rent” derives from “La Bohème” and leave it at that. But TAO produced an interlaced run of both works on the same stage, in conjunction with the Alliance Theatre in Pullman Yards (a hangar previously purposed for train cars). They take risks, and messing with the score of an opera presents a great deal of risk. Even people who will open-mindedly receive a setting change for “Rigoletto” from Mantua to Las Vegas will bristle at the very mention of altering a libretto or a score in performance. Indeed, much of the audience relates to the standard repertory, a canon of sorts, as though it were a series of divinely inspired sacred texts. The term “sacrilege” could be found on social media in the run-up to TAO’s “Turandot.”

This dynamic is not merely suffocating, but ahistorical. In the 18th and 19th century, composers fiddled with “completed” operas for years, and their followers continued after their deaths. In the mid-20th century, many of these works tolerated standard performing cuts. Companies routinely performed them translated into local vernaculars. Jussi Björling sang just about everything in Swedish, Italians sang Wagner in Italian, and the Met spent years at the end of the 19th century performing non-German operas in German. English National Opera and Opera Theatre of St. Louis still do it all in English. Cosima Wagner sued and lost when other companies set their paws upon “Parsifal.” Opera’s legacy repertoire is far less sacred than paleoconservative aficionados would believe, and far less petrified.

TAO’s new performing version makes just two alterations to the familiar “Turandot.” It moves “In questa reggia” from Act two, placing it after Liù’s death, for which Turandot is directly responsible. This situates the production in discourse about perpetrator trauma. As per Resmaa Menakem’s “My Grandmother’s Hands” (2017), perpetrators harm themselves as well as their victims. What Turandot has done to herself by ordering all these people murdered seems a more proximate trauma than an ancestor suffering centuries ago. TAO’s edition then dispenses with almost all of the Alfano ending, preserving only a few measures of the brief second scene of Act three, when Turandot proclaims “Padre Augusto, conosco il nome dello strainiero! Il suo nome è amor!”

Zvulun’s frequent collaborator, set designer Erhard Rom, first conceived of this fix for “Turandot” during college, noticing the strange disconnection of the Act two set piece from what precedes and follows it. Surely Turandot’s peroration about generational trauma makes more sense if she has been jolted into it by the shock of seeing Liù’s suicide, which she herself has caused? In its usual place, are we to believe that Turandot’s subjects listen to this same speech every single time some fool volunteers for the riddle contest? Rom communicated to me that he put a lot of effort into convincing Zvulun and TAO’s Principal Conductor, Ivan López Reynoso, to use the idea.

If the seed for the new performing edition came from Rom, Reynoso identified the musical glue. At TAO’s digital presser, Reynoso said, “It’s incredible how ‘In questa reggia’ now has a very different dramatic meaning with
this new position in the piece. Fortunately, the harmonies work perfectly together. So Liù’s death, the last chord, is an E flat-minor chord, which has the G flat note in it. And then ‘In questa reggia’ starts with a D-major chord, which also has the G flat, but sounding F sharp — but it is the same note. So that connects Liu’s Death to the beginning of ‘In questa reggia.’ And then… we’re only using five bars that Alfano wrote… It’s also very important to add that the very end of the ‘Turandot’ ending by Alfano uses all Puccini’s motifs. So the ‘Dieci mille anni al nostri imperatore’ is used by Alfano, and the ‘Nessun dorma’ main theme is used by Alfano at the end. So those are the bars that we’re going to play at the end of the piece, those final chords of ‘Nessun dorma’ being reorchestrated by Alfano, but it’s Puccini’s music at the end. So the main character of ‘Turandot’ remains Turandot, but also the main protagonist of the evening will be Giacomo Puccini.”

I am sure skeptics who treat “the composer’s intentions” as sacrosanct — intentions that have a funny way of correlating with their own taste — will find this explanation insufficient. But in performance in Atlanta, in conjunction with an impressive new staging, these changes worked well enough to make me want to see “Turandot” performed this way in the future.

Popolo di Pekino

Zvulun’s Spring of 2026 focused on authoritarian regimes, both in this staging, and that of “Götterdämmerung.” In pressers for both operas, he noted that “authoritarian regimes always have an expiration date.” A staging cliché of recent opera productions has been to make all the bad guys look like Fascists with 1920s or 1930s stylings, whether the opera is “Rigoletto,” “La Forza del Destino,” or John Adams’ new “Antony and Cleopatra.” Atlanta’s “Turandot” managed to rhyme with this idea without punching it squarely in the nose. In all three acts Rom employed sets that called on the primary-colored rectilinear aesthetic of Piet Mondrian’s work of the 1920s and 1930s. Among the goals expressed by Rom and the rest of the production team was avoiding Chinese stereotypes, and Mondrian is a long way from Orientalist kitsch. Mondrian and other Bauhaus visuals fit together like puzzle pieces. Temporally, these quadrangles recalled the decades of rising Fascist and Communist totalitarianism, and they seemed to encode enclosure, within which Puccini’s vulgus find themselves. Yet Mondrian also feels like a peculiar choice for the decoration of Turandot’s palace, given Mondrian’s utopian philosophy. This deliberate incongruence reminds one of authoritarian politicians who appropriate art without understanding it and who apply atrophied reading skills to it, such as right-wing politicians who use left-wing populist rock songs at rallies and then receive cease-and-desist letters from the musicians. Often the Mondrianesque quadrangles were lit by Robert Wierzel in un-Mondrianesque colors: midnight blue, purple in the first and third acts, and a washed-out gold in the second. Hot pink lighting accompanied the dancers, clad in chrysalis-like bodysuits every time Ping, Pang, and Pong plied Calaf with alternative women. A large full moon at the back of the stage appeared white most of the time, though bloody or sickly green when it ought. In general, the production made far less use of the LED wall than TAO’s “Ring Cycle.”

Another realm that looks sleek but feels claustrophobic is that of chess, with its six types of pieces and its rectilinear, monochromatic eight-by-eight playing surface. Ana Kuzmanić’s costumes took their cues from chess, but only on Turandot’s side of the cast. Kyle White’s Mandarin, the “Knight,” wore the costume of a white horse, and sang from inside his horse head — I had flashbacks to Bottom’s donkey costume in Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” two seasons ago. Ping the Grand Chancellor, Pang the General Purveyor, and Pong the Chief Cook, the “Bishops,” wore conical hats and gambesons in colors appropriate for late 1950s kitchen appliances — lime for Ping, tangerine for Pang, and seafoam for Pong. Turandot wore a regal gown not unlike the Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, blood red, of course, with an expansive skirt beneath a Basque waist. Her headdress is hard to describe: a kokoshnik rising to a pointy apex with three windows cut into it like a medieval altarpiece. Her father, Steven Cole’s Emperor Altoum, rocked a magnificent kingly purple gown with a solar headdress. The keepers of the riddles took the form of “Rooks,” their heads and shoulders covered by cuboid blocks. And the “Popolo di Pekino” commoners, played by the chorus, were “Pawns,” obviously. Within Turandot’s realm, these types seemed essentializing.

The chess metaphor ended with Turandot’s subjects — our friends from Tartary wore entirely different garments, marking their itinerant status. Jonathan Burton’s Calaf looked like he had wandered in from “La Fanciulla del West,” in a handsome pigskin vest, a white duster, and a tan cowboy hat — stage manager Aletha Saunders explained that an Indiana Jones aesthetic was the aim. Juliana Grigoryan’s Liù arrived bundled in a glacial blue parka and topped with a burnt orange boggan — garments to protect her from Turandot’s ice, eventually shedding those clothes to reveal a simple white dress for Act three. She ushered Peixin Chen’s Timur, clad in a brown cloak.

TAO involves dancers and other movement specialists more than most opera companies in North America. Live action director Ran Arthur Braun filled the stage with abundant humanity, and choristers, dancers, and stunt performers always had something to do. In attempting to avoid the aggravated Chinoiserie of Zeffirelli and other “traditional” — whatever that means — productions of “Turandot,” TAO landed on an interesting choice: break dancers. David “Lightning” Bae, David “Full Metal” Hector, Stefan Oprica, and Whondy Jose Mogollon Perez, clad in black bodysuits, moved in a percussive fashion, reflecting the violence of Turandot’s regime. Under Gwynn Root Wolford’s choreography, TAO regulars in dance, Julianna Ferracota, Bailey Jo Harbaugh, and Cammi Nevarez joined the break dancers and stunt performers John Palmeri and Antonio Valles to give the crowd scenes a dynamism interwoven with Lisa Hasson’s 50-something-strong chorus. Tanner Byle’s Pu-Tin-Pao was only the tallest and most imposing of many people wielding machetes.

Prima la musica

With a show like like “Turandot,” if the music does not come together, all you have is a rather sadistic story driven by a bizarre, exoticizing gaze. Reynoso ably commanded the forces required for the piece, especially in the frenetic parts of the first act. The chorus sounds better every season in Atlanta. Few operas require more skilled percussionists than this one, and Michael Cebulski, Jeff Kershner, Karen Hunt, Courtney MacDonald, and Todd Mueller stood out among the orchestra. Principal cellist Charae Krueger gave a heartbreaking lead-in to Liù’s “Tu che di gel sei cinta.” The singers in minor roles stood out in their brief spotlights: a suitably antique-sounding Steven Cole as Altoum, Kyle White’s authoritative Mandarin, and sopranos Blair Lipham and Nicole Lewis, promoted from the chorus to First Handmaid and Second Handmaid for the first act, with their eerie bit instructing Ping, Pang and Pong.

The shift to the chess metaphor, away from the allegedly-Chinese antics we have weathered in the Zeffirelli show these last four decades, gave Ping, Pang, and Pong a huge assist and focused concentration on the text they sung. They ranged from acting as a moral center for the show to expounding their cringe-worthy views on women. Sometimes Ping appears to be in charge of the trio, but baritone Eleomar Cuello wore Ping’s higher status lightly and sang with a lovely Italianate sound. Tenor Terrence Chin-Loy made Pong very lyrical as well — sometimes this trio can come off quite barky, but not here. Pang was played by tenor Wayd Odle, who is a second-year Studio Artist that has functioned as a bit of a Swiss Army Knife for TAO in recent seasons, with diverse repertory under his belt — Pang was decidedly the funniest of the three. They combined to make Act two, Scene one, far less tedious than it can be. Sometimes Timur is played by a late-career bass with barely enough fuel left in his tank, but Chen’s instrument sounded gorgeous. He is becoming one of my favorite basses to see rostered. Katie Gell’s makeup rendered him aged, but he sounded like a man in his absolute prime with a burnished basso cantante timbre. The second saddest moment in the whole score, after Liù’s death, is Timur’s short soliloquy about following her into death. Chen sounded almost as though he were singing a Schubert Lied, and held her hand as the dancers carried Grigoryan off the stage, aloft, with her arms out, cruciform.

Principessa di gelo

Even companies that cast as well as TAO struggle with hiring Turandot. And even in a season as stellar as their 2025-26, which included such delights as Mané Galoyan’s Violetta and Rihab Chaieb’s Cherubino, there will usually be a casting decision or two that provokes concern. Your reviewer had heard of the Rom edit to “Turandot,” and some casting information, more than a year in advance, when Angela Meade, the soprano tackling the titular role, had recently sung Turandot at Los Angeles Opera. At the time I had found her voice to lack focus, though suspected this was a case on unsuitable repertory. She had excelled in “Norma” at Los Angles Opera, and “Ernani” at the Met, both in 2015, and in “Un Ballo en Maschera” at the Met in 2023. I suspected that dramatic coloratura repertory suited her better than the leather-lunged Chinese princess. Not to mention, but Verdi gets the orchestra out of the singers far more reliably than Puccini.

Meade performed the role well here in Atlanta, assuaging my concerns. The voice sounded more secure than in the LA outing, and I daresay the Rom edit aided her quite a bit by rescheduling “In questa reggia” for when she was fully warmed up. That aria, traditionally “straight out of the gate,” is a ludicrous ask of any soprano. She began piano, a nice change from some Turandots who belt right from the top. Her voice was more secure in low and middle register than high, where it spread. Her Turandot looked more shaken than imperious in the riddle scene, which made one wonder whether something bad had happened to Turandot herself, rather than her ancestor. As hard as the role is to sing, it is just as difficult to act. Few sopranos can infuse the character with the dramatism the writing requires, and I believe opera would be better served by “Turandot” being a rarer offering, as it was in the mid-century. But Meade’s TAO characterisation was still a significant contribution, improving upon certain of the pitfalls that trip so many Turandots.

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose

Ping, Pang, and Pong tried their best to warn him, but Burton’s Calaf would not listen, even as avulsed heads on ropes descended about him during the culmination of the first act. Burton is one of the better spintos you are likely to hear in the United States, with secure vocal production. We cannot take this for granted where tenors are concerned. I heard him as a splendid Dick Johnson two seasons ago in Central City Opera. That is a tiny house that contains sound, but at Cobb Energy his voice still sounded 90 percent as large as it did within CCO’s petite confines. He played his role with little of the “date night predator” energy that Calafs of yore emanated without care. Burton seemed like a regular man who had wandered into a weird situation and “caught feelings” for a distant dame. His high A flat at the end of “Non piangere, Liù” rang into the house before he yanked an absurdly long bell pull. This rung the gong, prompting Turandot’s apparatchiks to mime executing him with blood-stained machetes before placing the black hood of the condemned over his head. In this version of Turandot’s kingdom, baseless capital punishment is a foregone conclusion, the riddle contest merely a procedural show until now.

The libretto and score compel Calaf to shout his motivations for everything, but Burton’s affect gave the impression that he was as attracted to the game of the riddle contest as he was to the imperious soprano. In the riddle scene, he won his vocal showdown with Meade’s Turandot, especially in pronouncing the third answer with the high B flat. She grabbed his collar and stared him down impotently; he kept the presence of mind to bow respectfully to the riddle-keepers after Holzhauering the whole room. Burton enjoyed having the stage to himself for “Nessun dorma,” descending a flight of stairs from nowhere. After a particularly pleasing “e il mio bacio,” he authored a nice build to the high B, right fist in the air, and the audience lost their minds. Burton’s affable demeanor made the character’s callousness towards Liù that the libretto demands even more perplexing. In a couple of places his face seemed to give “yeah, I have to say this line, work with us here.” One of the worst utterances in the libretto is Calaf’s “Tu noi sai
nulla, schiava,” which frustrated Burton’s attempt to comfort Liù immediately after. When someone is dying for you, it is poor form to remind her that she is a slave.

#justiceforLiù

What might actually honor ancestral victim Lo-u-ling, rather than killing people left and right, would be Turandot refraining from treating Liù like a disposable entertainment with an ostentatious torture scene. Since we cannot edit that out of the opera, Liù has to settle for opera’s shorthand for being the character in possession of the most integrity: receiving by far the most beautiful music. If the soprano singing Liù doesn’t steal the whole opera, something is amiss. Grigoryan is clearly at the start of a major international career and she is a whole-opera thief. Her voice is not that big, which I hope will fend off a later up-faching to Turandot — unfortunately a standard and destructive practice for Liùs nowadays. Her “Signore ascolta” was suffused with limpid legato throughout. She darkened certain notes, but did not overapply that, and her dynamic control was exquisite. After a to-die-for pianissimo on the high A flat of “Liù non regge più” with some rubato, she caressed the final high B flat as well. She received the first show-stopping applause of the evening. I had to catch my breath while everyone else applauded. Each of her utterances during other people’s showpieces, such as “Noi morrem sulla strada de’ l’esilo” during Calaf’s aria, and “è per l’amore” during the riddle scene, shocked the listener with their beauty, exposing the folly of becoming desensitized to the grotesquerie surrounding Calaf and Turandot’s ill-considered collision.

The stage direction made Liù ’s death scene strenuous in Act three: blindfolding her, slapping her around, and generally working her over. It was hard to watch. She eventually yanked the Chekhov’s pistol that had been riding on Burton’s hip for an hour and a half from its holster and shot herself in the sternum. This manner of death, rather than one of the guards’ swords, physicalizes implicating Calaf in Liu’s death as much as Turandot. Prior to her demise, Grigoryan made her sound a fountain of love rising for this tenor who does not deserve her. Addressing Turandot directly, she paired weightless float in “Tanto amore segreto,” falling to her knees at “speranza,” with repeated fine dynamic contrasts in “Tu che di gel sei cinta.” Every single note was beautiful. When Liù sings like this, her illogical love for Calaf makes more sense: a love like this does not conform to logic, it wells up out of a person because it cannot stay confined in there, just like the beautiful sound issuing from Grigoryan. We all know that takes focused effort, but when it goes perfectly, it looks effortless. It is clear why Grigoryan, 28, is already an in-demand Liù.

A questo punto, il maestro è morto

No one knows what this opera’s second century may hold. Just 35 years ago, it would have been baffling to contemplate certain developments involving opera’s standard repertory, such as Gounod’s “Faust” virtually disappearing in North America in favor of “Roméo et Juliette,” or Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” falling into the standard repertoire’s penumbra while “Rigoletto” and “La Traviata” hang tough. However, I suspect that the attributes of “Turandot” which I consider to be drawbacks will reinforce the place in opera’s top 20 that Nilsson, Corelli, and Pavarotti won it. Its cruelties seem almost quaint compared to those that we have become accustomed to in the last quarter-century of prestige television and may recommend it to audiences who desire more edginess in the theater. Puccini had a flair for the filmic. “La Bohemè” and “La Fanciulla del West” almost seem like live-action movies rather than operas in the 17th-19th-century sense. In “Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition” (1991), William Ashbrook and Harold Powers pointed out that opera’s “latter-day sociocultural role was absorbed by another medium” — film. “Turandot” is one of the most movie-esque operas, and we require intense visual engagement from it.

TAO’s production edit addresses the worst aspects of the story and attempts to smooth some of its illogic, “fairytale” or otherwise. It appropriately exposes Turandot’s regime as one in which the cruelty is the point, and it makes a college try of honoring Liù’s sacrifice by redirecting Turandot’s fear of strangers into a confession as to why she pushed Liù so far. The new ending does not work perfectly, because nothing could possibly inveigle Puccini out of the corner he wrote himself into. It is extremely difficult to care about what happens to the “protagonists” after Liù’s horrific end. But it improves mightily on the deeply unbelievable love duet we have been so accustomed to seeing tacked onto Liù’s funeral cortege, and it raises the ratio of Puccini to not-Puccini in the opera by pretty close to 100 percent. I do not need to see “Turandot” again for some time. But when the time comes, the Rom edit would be the best way to take in this deeply problematic work. May The Atlanta Opera live ten thousand years.