Since, however, some modern productions have recently been made in Germany, England and America, under the title of “Turandot,” it is fitting to make clear the relation which my play bears to those and to the older productions of Gozzi and Schiller.
In January, 1762, “Turandotte” by Carlo Gozzi was first acted by the Sacchi company of players at Venice. It was one of a number of “improvised comedies”—or Commedie dell’ Arte Improvisata—composed by Gozzi in his single-handed artistic war against the more naturalistic works of Goldoni, his contemporary.
The plots of these comedies, or Fiabe, were derived from nursery or folk-tales. They were acted by masked, or semi-masked players. Their technique was based on the old Italian form of scenari. This form is described by John Addington Symonds, in the Preface to his “Memories of Count Carlo Gozzi,” as follows:
“Comparative study of these scenari shows that the whole comedy was planned out, divided into acts and scenes, the parts of the several personages described in prose, their entrances and exits indicated, and what they had to do laid down in detail. The execution was left to the actors; and it is difficult to form a correct conception of the acted play from the dry bones of its ossatura. ‘Only one thing afflicts me,’ said our Marston in the Preface to his Malcontent: ‘to think that scenes invented merely to be spoken, should be inforcively published to be read.’ And again in his Preface to the Fawne: ‘Comedies are writ to be spoken, not read; remember the life of these things consists in action.’ If that was true of pieces composed in dialogue by an English playwright of the Elizabethan age, how far more true is it of the skeletons of comedies, which avowedly owed their force and spirit to extemporaneous talent! Reading them, we feel that we are viewing the machine of stakes and irons which a sculptor sets up before he begins to mould the figure of an athlete or a goddess in plastic clay.
“The scenario, like the plat described for us by Malone and Collier, was hung up behind the stage. Every actor referred to it while the play went forward, refreshing his memory with what he had to represent, and attending to his entrances.”
Written as scenari Gozzi’s acted Fiabe were eminently successful in their day, and established his works as models of a dramatic taste which, toward the last of the eighteenth century, it became the desire of cultivated Germans to introduce into their own country.
With this object in view, Goethe and Schiller selected “Turandotte” as a foreign comedy worthy to be translated and adapted for production at the Weimar Theatre. Accordingly Schiller recast in poetic form a German version of Gozzi’s play, made by Werthes, and produced it at Weimar, in honor of the birthday of the Grand Duchess, wife of Karl August, on January 30, 1804. In details of this recasting he was assisted by Goethe.
The attempt, however, thus to “elevate the taste of the German public” was not successful.
More than one hundred years later, Dr. Max Reinhardt produced in Berlin a play based on Schiller’s “Turandot” made by Karl Voellmueller. In 1912 an English translation of this version by Jethro Bithell was produced in America by the Shubert Theatrical Company, and after a brief run on the road was withdrawn from the stage. In January, 1913, it was also produced for a short run in London by Sir George Alexander.
Considering the version as it stood to be in need of changes for their purposes, the owners of the American rights requested me to suggest and make the changes. To this I replied that to make alterations or adaptations of the version did not appeal to me, but if the owners would like to give me entire freedom to write a new and original play on the theme of the Persian folk-tale used by Gozzi suitable to the scenic settings of Reinhardt’s production, I should be glad to do so. This freedom was courteously given, and the present play was written in the late spring and early summer of this year, and placed in rehearsal in October.