Most readers of Snob magazine are certainly familiar with Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot. And even if you do not know the story, you will remember the aria Nessun Dorma from the first notes, it is so popular. The opera Turandot was a turning point in the history of music for the variety of its technical and stylistic innovations and is considered to be the strongest of those that Puccini wrote, though he did not have time to finish it, and the premiere took place after his death on April 25th 1926.
However, it is almost unknown that the plot of the opera is based on the poem 'Seven Beauties', written in 1197 by the poet and philosopher Nizami Ganjevi (1141-1209), born in the city of Ganja, now the second-largest city of Azerbaijan. A Slavic princess with the non-Slavic name Nazrin-Nush, one of the seven wives of Bahram Shah, tells the story of the color red and a nameless princess, her compatriot.
In his work 'Haft-peykar' or 'Seven Beauties', Nizami describes the life of the Sasanian ruler Bahram V, who ruled the empire from 420 to 439 years AD. It is not always easy to understand the chronology and duration of the events in the poem. The stories of the wives of the ruler are central in the poem, there are seven of them. The stories are filled with symbolism and mysticism. Each of the seven beauties lives in a separate castle, choosing a day of the week, heavenly light and color as their talismans. Slavic Princess Nazrin-Nush lives in a red palace and dresses in red clothes, Bahram comes to her on Tuesdays – the day which is protected by the planet Mars, and in the old Iranian language 'Bahram' is the name of the red planet. A researcher of Nizami's art, Christine Van Ruymbeke of Cambridge University, considers this story as a teaching of the young ruler Bahram. Every successful ruler must attain enlightenment and have intelligence, which will help him to obtain and hold on to power. This teaching is given in the form of an allegorical parable: the Princess (represents the state) from the story, Nazrin-Nush, will belong only to a worthy man who can solve her puzzles, and while doing so, any error means death. Thus, power will go to the chosen one.
The poem itself is part of the so-called 'Pyateritsa' – a series of moralizing poems, which were written in mansavi verse couplets in Persian. Thanks to the Persian language, Nizami's poems quickly spread outside of Ganja, it is believed that the poet himself never left it. Due to the beautiful style, intertwining plots and finely chosen epithets, Nizami became a favorite and oft-quoted poet, not only in the court of the Persian shahs, but also passed into folklore: his poems and verses spread by merchants throughout the East, and sometimes it is difficult to determine whether the verse of Nizami has passed into a proverb, or whether the poet originally sourced the oral folk art.
I've collected bit by bit information on how the story of the color red became the basis for one of the greatest Italian operas. The common and replicated version of Puccini writing Turandot, which can be found in any book, tells about how the composer read a play by Friedrich Schiller 1801, which he wrote on the creation of Gozzi's Turandot in 1762. It was not clear for me where Gozzi took the story from, until I asked my friend, Italian composer and researcher of Puccini art, Lorenzo Ferrero. He pointed to the book 'One Thousand and One Days' (not to be confused with 'A Thousand and One Nights' by Wilhelm Hauff) by French writer Delacroix. It is Delacroix who brought Nizami's story to the West. According to Lorenzo, "we can be sure that Gozzi read Delacroix. [Delacroix] claimed that he had a lost "Persian book" from which he "translated" the story without mentioning the author [of the original work]. Perhaps Delacroix did not know that the stories he described in 'A Thousand and One Days' had authors. Already in the 18th century, this story [the fragment-tale of a Slavic princess] becomes part of universal heritage." In the Delacroix version, the nameless Slavic princess of Nizami acquires the name Turandot – 'Daughter of the lands of Turan".
It turns out that during the writing of the opera, it is possible that they did not know about Nizami, and now it is completely forgotten about him, and many musicologists are not even aware of the primary source of the Italian opera. In my direct question to the Director, responsible for all printed materials of Milan La Scala Opera House, Franco Pulcini, an explanation followed, that opera houses are more interested in the musical component, and the libretto and its history are secondary. The opra house itself has mentioned Nizami just once, and only recently.
At La Scala a book is produced for each new opera: a collection of articles and information about the history of its creation. Only in his article "Giunge da lontano, la principessa crudele ...", written for the 2010/2011 season of La Scala, does Turin University literature professor Maria Teresa Dzhiaveri make a comparative analysis of the Nizami poem and the libretto of Puccini. To our regret, the management of the opera house rejected her proposal to issue a separate book of Nizami and his image of the princess, who everyone knows as Turandot. With the advent of the new Director, Aleksandra Pereira, La Scala has changed its position on a number of issues and in a pamphlet of 2015 mention of Nizami and the Slavic princess, sadly, disappeared.
Writers become more popular when their works are used and retold in a creative way. We cannot say that Nizami was ignored: in Soviet times several academics and orientalists studied his work, and in Azerbaijan his work formed the basis of the first opera in the East 'Leili and Majnun' by Uzeyir Hajibeyov, Gara Garayev's ballet 'Seven Beauties', and as well as many ballads and songs. Countries that have historically been exposed to Persian culture are familiar with Nizami, and in Iran they think of Nizami as "their's", which Azerbaijanis don't like, for them Nizami is like Pushkin for Russians – "our everything and even more." In the West, on the other hand, only a narrow circle of specialist-orientalists know Nizami. For me, personally, the universal truth and wisdom that can be gleaned from the works of Nizami are important. His attitude towards women and many of his ideas were ahead of the time in which he lived.
