We have just rescued culture. It took 4 (four) days, and then we decided that we would sooner sacrifice all else than let culture perish. […] We proceeded at once boldly and with caution. Our brother Henricus Mannus submitted his passionate oration in favour of free speech to the Süreté before delivering it. A slight incident attracted notice. Towards the end, brother Barbussius devoured brother Andreus Gideus whole on the open rostrum. The episode ended tragically, for I’m told that an onlooker committed suicide out of boredom.
(Letters, p.208)
The traces of these impressions of Heinrich Mann, Henri Barbusse and André Gide’s contributions to the Congress are still fresh in scene 5a of our text of Turandot.
The experience of exile in the United States, and above all the experience of the Hollywood film industry, did not help to progress the plans, although there are some sketches from 1944. In April 1942 Brecht noted in his Journal,
It is impossible to show up the sale of opinions here, where it is nakedly practised. The comedy of those who think they are leading but are in effect being led, the Don-Quixotry of a consciousness which labours under the illusion that it is determining social existence – all that only applies to Europe.
(Journals, p.222)
And it was not until the summer of 1953, when Brecht was back in Europe, living in Buckow, outside Berlin, that a full draft of the play was worked out. Taking up the plans and fragments from the 1930s, which had already situated the action in an economic crisis of overproduction, Brecht now added the revolutionary activity of Kai Ho to the mix of the plot. But the immediate context of the political and cultural laundering and fixing of the GDR (of which Brecht and Eisler had very direct experience, see Introduction) also forced its way into the play. As in the Buckow Elegies, it was the continuities between the Nazi past and the Communist present that most disturbed him. The following summer, after a brief experience of the play in rehearsal, Brecht returned to the project and thoroughly re-worked it once more, especially developing the role of A Sha Sen. It is on a typescript of August 1954 that our text is based.
As well as the Gozzi version of the story, it seems that Brecht also went back to the pseudo-Persian tale of Prince Kalaf and Princess Turandot, which may have been available to him in a German edition of The Thousand and One Days, based on selections from Les milles et un jours: contes persans, possibly by (or translated by) François Pétis de La Croix (Paris 1710-12), and to further later translations-cum-adaptations by Friedrich Schiller (from 1802) and by Waldfried Burggraf (1923), both of which are in Brecht’s library. The broad outlines of the plot of the traditional tale of Turandot will be familiar to many people from Puccini’s last opera of the same name (left unfinished at his death in 1924 and premiered at La Scala in 1926); there is, however, no evidence that Brecht was aware of this version, also based on Gozzi’s play. Unlike Schiller, the twentieth-century German and Russian versions Brecht used tend to downplay the heroism of Turandot and emphasise her capriciousness, but Brecht is the first to make her foolish, rather than frighteningly intelligent. From Gozzi onwards, all the dramatic workings of the story introduce the stock commedia dell’arte characters of Pantalone, Tartaglia, Brighella and Truffaldino, which Brecht rejects. Later versions tend to emphasise the comedic touches and characters. Burggraf’s ‘sages’, who interpret the suitors’ answers to the puzzles, are already satirical caricatures. And there are other motifs and turns of plot which Brecht has clearly borrowed from his many sources. The story of the old man and his son (A Sha Sen and Er Fei) seeking socially useful arguments from the philosophers’ academy seems to be borrowed from Aristophanes’ Clouds. Brecht’s play has, typically for him, wandered a long way from any of his many models.
The archive contains five main typescripts of Turandot and a bundle of other material, the function and place of which are not always clear. It is not possible to reconstruct an entirely coherent text, nor a clear process of revision which might make sense of all the fragments. Generally speaking, the plans and drafts from the 1930s and other earlier phases of the composition tend to emphasise the parody of the Hitler regime and the attitudes of the anti-Fascist exiles. For example, it is suggested that the Clothesless and the Clothesmakers will only make common cause in Gogher Gogh’s ‘re-education camps’. In early versions the Clothesless themselves are associated literally with nakedness, and there are several jokes about half-naked characters on stage.
Above all, the ending of the text seems unsatisfactory. One other version has the Emperor and Gogher Gogh making moves each to arrest the other, until they realise that the soldiers and bandits, who might carry out their orders, have all disappeared. At one early stage, it seems, there was to be an additional closing scene, ‘The Washerwomen Give Shelter to the Leader of the Clothesless’, in which Sen presents the Manchu cloak to Kai Ho. This was to be followed by the ‘Ballad of the branches and the trunk’ (Poems, pp.206-7), a song which dates back to the years of Round Heads and Pointed Heads. Yet another variant, under the heading ‘Emigration’, sees the Tuis as severed heads trying once more to discover the solution to the problem of the missing cotton.
A note on the names
Brecht followed all his predecessors and set the story of the wilful and beautiful princess in China, but the only name he borrowed from his sources was that of Turandot herself. For the rest, names like Gogher Gogh and Krukher Kru seem to go right back to the sorts of games Brecht was playing in the 1920s (e.g. Galy Gay in Man equals Man); others too (Pauder Mel and Munka Du) have nothing at all Chinese about them. Some may well be syllable-plays on the names of the objects of Brecht’s satire (as in the long prose text, Me-Ti), but if they are, no one has been able to decode them. A few seem to be simple careless chinois gestures: Yao, Su and Wang. It is just possible that a handful of the names are intended to allude to Chinese words and proper names, but it is not possible to discover any clear references. We have preserved a hotch-potch similar to Brecht’s, but have modified some of the names: to make them more easily recognisable or pronounceable in English, or to make them look more like appropriate transliterations from the Chinese. We have generally used transliterations more or less suitable to Brecht’s historical context, hence Peking, Po Chu-yi (not Beijing, Bo Ju yi), Hoang Ho (for the Yellow River) and Shigatse (rather than Xigazê).
These are the names which have been modified, or for which it seems possible to suggest some paths of association.
All other names are spelt as in Brecht’s text and have no obviously relevant associations.
1 Some of the most important of the Berliner Ensemble adaptations, all given out as the work of their original authors and not published in Brecht’s lifetime as ’his’, have been published separately in English: J.M.R. Lenz’s The Tutor, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Anna Seghers’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, Moliere’s Don Juan, and George Farquhar’s Trumpets and Drums.
1 In the Brecht-Handbuch, edited by Jan Knopf, vol.1 (Stuttgart/Weimar, 2001), p.557. This is a valuable reference work, which we have used alongside the standard, commentated German edition of Brecht’s works, the Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (abbreviated as BFA).
1 A dramatic plot will move before my eyes; an epic seems to stand still while I move round it. In my view this is a significant distinction. If a circumstance moves before my eyes, then I am bound strictly to what is present to the senses; my imagination loses all freedom; I feel a continual restlessness develop and persist in me; I have to stick to the subject; any reflection or looking back is forbidden me, for I am drawn by an outside force. But if I move round a circumstance which cannot get away from me, then my pace can be irregular; I can linger or hurry according to my own subjective needs, can take a step backwards or leap ahead, and so forth. (Goethe-Schiller correspondence, 26 December 1797)
1 Neher’s sketches served as the basis for the grouping and the masks, so that the inventors of the model were themselves already, as it were, working to pattern.
2 The first attempt t
o use models of epic theatre was made by R. Berlau in Copenhagen. For Dagmar Andreasen’s performances of The Mother and Señora Carrar’s Rifles she used photographs of previous productions. Andreasen’s Vlassova and Carrar were completely different from the figures created by Helene Weigel. Weigel’s could be imitated and also altered. But the performances were a credit to both actresses.
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First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2003 by Methuen Publishing Limited
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Copyright in the original play as follows:
The Antigone of Sophocles: Die Antigone des Sophokles
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben/Suhrkamp Verlag 1959
The Days of the Commune: Die Tage der Kommune
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben/Suhrkamp Verlag 1957
Turandot or The Whitewashers’ Congress: Turandot oder Der Kongreß der Weißwäscher
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Translation for all the plays and texts by Brecht © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben 1967
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eISBN-13: 978-1-4725-3856-7
Collected Plays, Volume 4 (Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry & Prose) 8 Page 29
