Spectacular Orientalism: Finding the Human in Puccini’s Turandot

Giacomo Puccini's final opera, Turandot (1926), remained unfinished at his death, and is often read as a merely orientalist opera in the guise of his Madama Butterfly. I argue, however, that the unnerving search for the human element felt to be missing from the work, suggests a deeper reflection on the state of a devastated Italy in the aftermath of World War I. Turandot's fragmented self-foregrounds the performativity of gender and, ultimately, of the human itself. The libretto's concern with empty characters whose masks hide a terrifying nothingness, as well as the plot point that shows the character of Liù tortured gratuitously on stage, reinforce the idea that, faced with the rise of fascism, the spectacle presented by this opera reveals a disturbing fascination with the alienation of the human, which had dire implications for the value of humanity that would pave the way for another deadly world conflict.