ABSTRACT
When the Three Tenors romp through ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Turandot in some football stadium it is probably safe to assume that neither they nor the majority of their audience are aware they are testifying to how intricately the commedia dell’arte has been embedded in modernist culture.1 But by way of Puccini through Carlo Gozzi, Busoni (who wrote an opera with the same title, and was Kurt Weill’s teacher), the director Yevgeni Vakhtanghov (whose famous ‘grotesque’ production of Gozzi’s Turandot was seen by Bertolt Brecht in Moscow in 1932), and Brecht himself, who finally finished a play of the same name in 1953 inspired by this ‘marionette-like’ production, that is exactly what they are doing.2 At the same time, they are also testifying to postmodernism by reprocessing high-cultural forms into the contexts of rock concerts, videos, and especially sports competitions like the World Cup. The rather unpleasant hero from the opera, Calaf,
is triangulated by them into a jolly three-man team, which shares the wild ride of the demanding music and engages in some vigorous macho competition: whose high B – sung on that ultimate sportsmanly word, ‘vincerò’, ‘I’ll win’ – will be the best? Depending on one’s point of view, this is either depressing (the Culture Industry at its most kitschy, vulgar, and crass), or exhilarating (élite forms opened up to a huge popular audience, a new public for opera in a carnivalesque situation). Either way, it encapsulates how the spirit of commedia has functioned as a strategy for producing the classics in the contemporary theatre.
