Wistful and charming...this is all Chinoiserie, patched together by European librettists. The one genuine Chinese element in the opera, according to Stanley Sadie of Grove's, is Puccini's appropriation of a folksong, "Moo-Lee-Vha"," apparently supplied to him by the music publishers, Ricordi. In Act I of the opera, it becomes "Là, sui monti dell'Est," sung by a group of boys -- all about Nature's rebirth in Spring, it is an allegory of the need for Turandot to get off her high horse...and into bed.
Equine segue irresistible, let's now look at another Imperial betrothal gone awry: Auber's 1835 Le Cheval de Bronze. In this fairytale opera, Tchin-Kao wants his daughter, Peki, to become the fifth wife of a 70-year-old mandarin, Tsing-Sing. Peki is in love with a poor young farmer, Yanko. First Yanko and then Tsing-Sing take a magical bronze horse for a spin, but have been forbidden to discuss their journeys. When they blab anyway, each man is turned into a grotesque nodding wooden statue. It takes the disguising of Peki as a young man; the intervention of a young Imperial Prince; schemings by Tsing-Sing's jealous fourth wife, Tao-Jin; and the sheer egotism of Stella, the Princess of Venus (hey, I'm just the messenger...), to set things aright. Rather like Rimsky-Korsakov's reliance upon Russian folk legend, Scribe's libretto for this fantastical opera is rife with what we would call magical realism...but, again, it's still Chinoiserie --imaginatively concocted by Europeans.
Indeed, foreign concepts of China seem to have produced some of the strangest stories in all of opera. Take Offenbach's 1855 Ba-Ta-Clan. Musically a satire of bel canto opera and the grand operas of Meyerbeer; its lyrics a mishmosh of French, Italian, and mock-Chinese; it concerns a ruler, Fe-ni-han, whose unfair execution of five worthy men sparks a conspiracy to dethrone him. But he doesn't even speak Chinese...little wonder, as he is happy to discover that he is actually a displaced Parisian! Fe-ni-han willingly abdicates and leaves for France, in the company of two other fake-Chinese characters, Ke-ki-ka-ko and Fe-an-nich-ton, who also turn out to be Parisians. But wait -- even the chief conspirator, Ko-ko-ri-ko, is revealed to be Parisian too...! Yikes! Had some ancestor of Turandot polished off the entire native Chinese population?
Giuseppe Scarlatti's 1757 L'Isola disabitata hardly makes more sense...and, somehow not surprisingly, features yet another bullying father. In this opera buffa, a Chinese girl, Gianghera, is exiled to an island for refusing to wed the man her father's chosen for her. A Dutch ship arrives, and its two tenor officers woo her, while their respective fiancées fume. The centerpiece of the work is a scene in which, pretending to have been sent by her father, both suitors, their girlfriends, plus a Dutch servant, all pretend to be Chinese, singing in doubletalk. Gianghera, no fool she, prefers a Dutch passenger who doesn't engage in all this literal nonsense. When her Asian intended approaches the island, armed with no less the Chinese navy, to claim her hand, the Europeans defeat him. Unlike Turandot, Gianghera is quite contented to toss away her heritage for the foreigner she loves.
