Turandot revision

Turandot, Overture and March

The Overture to Turandot - one of several items of incidental music compiled in 1809 for 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 rather than a masterpiece of its kind. 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 must have been 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.”

The same indefatigable tune is also the basis of the March and, indeed, of all the Turandot incidental music. Friedrich von Schiller, for whose German version of the play Weber’s mischievous little score was written, did not live to hear it. But he would surely have been amused by it. Certainly, it did not displease Paul Hindemith, who made a witty feature of the same Chinese tune in his Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber in 1943.