Overture: Turandot

The overture to Turandot - which was first performed in Weimar in 1809 as one of several items of incidental music to the Gozzi play which was to inspire operas by both Busoni and Puccini more than a hundred years later - is one of the amusing oddities. It is actually a reworking of an Overtura Chinesa which Weber had written in 1804, taking its one and only theme from an article on Chinese music in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de la Musique. Purely pentatonic apart from one curiously wrong note,the tune clearly fascinated Weber who was no doubt delighted to find such apt use for it in the Chinese setting of Gozzi’s play. “Drums and pipes introduce the strange, bizarre melody,” he wrote, “which is taken up by the orchestra and presented in various forms.” It also fascinated Hindemith, who made a specially witty feature of it in his Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber in 1943.