About the work
Tragicomic fairy-tale play ("fiaba teatrale") in five acts by Carlo Gozzi, first performed on 22 January 1762 at the Teatro San Samuele in Venice. Gozzi wrote the piece amid his rivalry with Carlo Goldoni, aiming to counter Goldoni's realistic character comedies with a deliberately artificial, fairy-tale alternative.
Plot
Prince Calaf falls in love with a portrait of the Chinese princess Turandot and accepts the deadly condition under which she offers her hand: whoever fails to solve her three riddles is executed. Calaf passes the test but, to even the odds, sets Turandot a counter-riddle of his own — if she can learn his name by the next day, he will accept death. Only after further intrigue does Turandot acknowledge her own love and agree to marry him.
Cultural significance
Friedrich Schiller's free adaptation "Turandot, Prinzessin von China" (1802) and, building on it, Karl Gustav Vollmoeller's 1911 version brought the material renewed fame and inspired Giacomo Puccini's opera of the same name, premiered in 1926.