Ai Weiwei makes opera-directing debut with Turandot

ROME • Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei makes his directorial operatic debut in Rome on Tuesday with a new reading of Italian composer Giacomo Puccini's final, unfinished opera, Turandot.

And with a storyline steeped in bloodshed and despotism, a new geopolitical focus and Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv in the pit, the new production - originally to have premiered in 2020, but delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic - comes exactly on time.

From the ominous opening five notes, the audience is plunged into an uncertain, violent world and Ai never lets up the pressure.

The production, which opens at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, is a fitting project for an artist known for his installations, sculpture and photography that denounce authority and champion human rights and freedom of expression.

The presence of rising star Lyniv - who became the first woman to conduct at Germany's prestigious Bayreuth festival last year - further ramps up the immediacy of the production in the face of the outbreak of war in Europe.

"It's beyond the imagination that we are still in the middle of these (territorial) conflicts," Ai, 64, told reporters last week.

"We're experiencing the biggest human struggle in Europe. Over three million Ukrainian people have been pushed out because of war caused by Russia," he said, speaking in English. "We're in the middle of two crises."

Puccini's dark opera centres on cold, vengeful Princess Turandot, who kills her suitors if they fail to correctly answer three riddles for her hand in marriage.

Refugees, a sacrificial victim and a morally compromised chorus round out the cast - all fodder for Ai, who uses video images to intensify the sense of state-sponsored menace pervading the opera.

Behind a set resembling the ruins of a futuristic city, he projects distressing images from recent news events, whether hospital workers in protective gear, refugees fording rivers, riot police confronting Hong Kong protesters or migrants encircled by chain link fences.

Lyniv, 44, said Ai's strong visual symbolism perfectly fit the intentions of Puccini.

"From the first bars, you feel this apocalyptic character in the air, of what will happen," she said of the opera, which was left unfinished with Puccini's death in 1924.

Ai's version is performed without the ending added by Puccini's contemporary, Franco Alfano, increasing the opera's ambiguity.

The chorus is particularly relevant today, Lyniv said, as it is seen obeying, never questioning, the decisions of the bloodthirsty Turandot.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE