The Teatro Real offers each season a series of activities parallel to its programming in collaboration with various institutions. Within this framework, Casa Asia organizes this conference on the Persian legend on which the Turandot libretto is based. 

Giacomo Puccini's last opera, Turandot, was composed between 1920 and 1924, but was left incomplete when the author died. Franco Alfano had to compose the last minutes of the work, using Puccini's drafts and the libretto that Simoni and Ricardi had written. But neither the protagonist of the story nor the drama narrated in the opera was born from the head of Puccini or the librettists. 

Turandot is a much older legend, dating back to a 12th century poem titled haft peykar, The seven beauties, work of the epic poet of Persian literature Nezamí Ganyaví.

The poem tells the story of the Sassanid Shah Bahrman V, who lived with seven princesses from seven kingdoms. Each of these maidens lived in a different pavilion of the palace and each pavilion was dedicated to a planet and a different color. The Shah visited one of the princesses every day of the week to eat, drink, enjoy and listen to the stories they told him.

One of these stories tells about a lady who, not finding any worthy man to marry, locks herself in a fortress, and announces that she will only give herself to the man who finds her and solves a series of enigmas; a plot that inspired Simoni and Ricardi, captivated Puccini and ended up unfolding in a Chinese imperial court in the composer's opera de Luca.  

In this conference we will talk about this poem and its author, 12th century Persian literature and the subsequent context in which the opera was written.

Presented by:
Menene Gras, director of Culture and Exhibitions of Casa Asia

Participates:
Tea Vardosanidze, president of the Spanish Society of Iranology since 2020, translator and interpreter of the Persian language. Postgraduate Diploma in Persian Language and Literature from the Ivane Javakhishvili University of Tbilisi.