Giacomo Puccini
TURANDOT
Listening notes · Leinsdorf, Roma 1959
Nilsson · Björling · Tebaldi · Tozzi
杜蘭
朵
Giacomo Puccini
Listening notes · Leinsdorf, Roma 1959
Nilsson · Björling · Tebaldi · Tozzi
杜蘭
朵
Each page is one phrase of the opera, a few seconds of music: the words in Italian with the English under them, and beneath, what is happening in the passage they belong to. Turn the page as each phrase is sung. The strip at the foot of the page gives the track and the time in it at which the phrase begins, so you can find your place from your player. Tap the strip for the whole note on the passage, which gives two measures and two remarks:
Now says what is happening and what the words mean. Listen for points to something you can hear in this performance.
If you would rather not turn the pages yourself, switch on the Timer in the bar below. The page cannot hear your music, so the timer is a clock of its own: start the album in your player and press play here at the same moment. The pages then turn by themselves. To get back in step, use − 5 s and + 5 s, choose the track, or turn to the phrase you hear and press Play from here.
Orchestra and Chorus of the Rome Opera, recorded by RCA in the Rome Opera House in July 1959 and issued in the Living Stereo series. These notes follow the edition in tracks, long: Act I , Act II , Act III .
It has been a reference recording ever since. Nilsson, at 41, sings the title role as almost no one has since, with a tone like bright steel and no sign of strain. Björling, at 48, had a little over a year to live; he never sang Calaf on stage, and this set is the whole of his Calaf. Tebaldi, a far larger voice than Liù requires, scales it down to the part. Leinsdorf keeps the huge score clear and moving, and lets the Rome chorus, which has as much to do here as any soloist, sound like a crowd.
Turandot is Puccini’s last opera, to a libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni after Carlo Gozzi’s play of 1762. He died in November 1924 with the final duet unwritten; Franco Alfano finished it from the sketches. The première was at La Scala on 25 April 1926 under Toscanini. On this recording, as in most performances, Alfano’s ending is given in its shortened form; the notes mark the bar where Puccini’s own music stops.
The times were measured on the recording, not taken from the score. The 37 track boundaries come from Apple Music’s own track lengths, checked by finding each track’s thirty-second preview inside a transfer of the original LPs; they are good to about half a second.
Within a track, the moment each group of lines begins was found by machine: speech recognition over the same transfer, matched against the libretto, and then the known words fitted to the sound passage by passage. Where one voice sings clearly, that is usually right to within two or three seconds. In choruses and ensembles the times can be off by ten seconds or more. Events without words (a curtain, the gong) are estimates.
You can put them right. In correction mode the timer stops advancing by itself: play the album, and tap Mark each time the next phrase, which the timer row names, begins. Your marks are kept in this browser and used from then on, and Export gives them as text, so that they can replace the measured times for everyone.